• 11 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much “open source projects” in terms of UI/UX and it is still “missing” so many features.

    For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:

    1. Maybe 80% of the time, I can cache an episode or a movie locally on my tablet when I am going on travel. This is great if I am doing a rewatch of something or don’t super care about The Experience and just want to watch the next few episodes of a show in the evening. With Plex, this is trivial. With SOME of the third party jellyfin apps, this can be sort of worked around but then becomes a hassle to sync watch statistics (which episodes were watched or even where I left off because a buddy wanted to go out for drinks).
    2. Remote watching is similarly a mess. Plex has pretty okay-good systems to treat my home server as a “cloud” resource with a single forwarded port. While even that is very questionable security wise, Jellyfin is still “figure it out yourself”. Which can be done with setting up a vpn or using Tailscale but adds additional complexities.
    3. Plenty of other “quirks” along similar lines

    My personal opinion? For something that only “tech savvy” people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that “just works”? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being “just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC”… why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).


    To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But… Jellyfin ain’t it.




  • This isn’t piracy since you are legitimately-ish getting stuff but:

    If you are actually in the US, check out your local community colleges. Depending on the college (and state), that may range from free to “you only need to sell a kidney once every four years”.

    A scumbag cousin of mine has been doing that for probably coming on 20 years now. He signs up for a course every other year, never attends it, and then drops it. Keeps his dot edu email active for “free” software and I think he also flips laptops and the like.


    That said, also consider actually attending the course. One night a week to learn a new skill or just keep the (questionable science of) neuroplasticity going.




  • The “funny” thing is that trump/musk/doge could have had SO many “easy wins”. Because… the US government is ridiculously bloated and inefficient. Even just “Development of Military Weapon X has been terminated due to being over budget and no longer fulfilling the requirements of the contract. Boeing or whatever the fuck has been instructed to terminate all R&D into Weapon X and to instead focus on continued maintenance and optimization of Weapon Y for the next N fiscal years”

    Same with government oversight. SO many policies are basically built around covering their asses ten times over (cough cough Challenger cough). And while there are very good reasons to do that (again, see the fucking Challenger), there is also a lot of room to reevaluate that and make things kind of worse but a lot cheaper in a way that most of the actual employees would love.

    Instead? It was just “let’s immediately gut everything while we decide if we want to just become a full president for life dictatorship”.


  • Its not even that.

    It is throwing away your jacket because you don’t want to go out for lunch in the middle of the day. And then realizing you still need that jacket to get to and from work and having to buy a new one. And THEN buying lunch anyway because you are hungry.

    A few articles have done a great job of documenting it but it boils down to the problem being the fundamental argument of WHY they are doing this. Officially their stance is to move fast, break things, and then repair what they actually needed. Except those repairs cost a LOT of time and money.

    And… to add on to the brutally beaten metaphor: It also costs money to get rid ofy our old jacket because you can’t just throw it in the trash. You have to drive down to a good will to drop it off. Because government employees have PTO that needs to be paid out and so forth.



  • So… you blame that on “scholars”?

    Because you seem to think that people weren’t talking about exactly that for close to 50 years. You just weren’t paying attention. And now are apparently criticizing people for continuing to talk about it.

    Again, THAT is what the legacy of reagan et al is. We all grew up on media that makes us immediately want to complain that “Scientists said eggs were good for us then bad for us then good for us” and all the other crap that encourages people to just get angry when they hear “common sense” and actively ignore anything that isn’t.

    Language matters. And understanding that language is how you understand what biases have been ingrained into you.


  • Just trying to function under capitalism while providing for their family? Often both immediate and extended since many of our scholars and scientists are immigrants who came here for a higher wage to send money back home to their parents.

    And mostly being increasingly annoyed at how almost all media attacks intellectuals and paints us as “out of touch” and “having no common sense”. All while acknowledging that the entire world is shifting authoritarian but not expecting the US to speedrun a decade or two of erosion of civil rights.

    But hey, good on you for continuing to demonstrate just how ingrained anti-intellectualism is into the cultural zeitgeist. Because this shit has been going on for a lot longer than 24 years. Most people attribute it to reagan. But the end result is that basically everyone grew up on (national equivalents of) nickelodean sitcoms where the protagonist kid proves they are smarter than their teachers because they understood a pun or knew one tidbit of trivia.






  • How does one judge what is false hope in a struggle that never ends?

    When people are celebrating an action that will accomplish absolutely nothing so that they can continue to “get on with their lives”?

    And that applies to the rest of your rant. If an action doesn’t move the needle in the slightest and just highlights how little hope there is then it is pointless. Unless you somehow believe that enough court orders will pile up that the guy who engaged in a little violent insurrection last time is going to say “You know what? I get that I am not wanted. I’ll abdicate power peacefully”. Especially when he only failed last time because he acted “too soon” and has been speed running making sure that he controls every gun in the government for this time.

    We literally did exactly this last week. People were terrified of what would happen with the tariffs. trump “backed down” and… still bumped up the percentage against basically every country and is still doing everything he can to make xi jinping notice him. But people have “false hope” and are now happy and going back to their days.


  • Pessimism is indeed a cancer.

    But so is false hope. Because countless people will just say “See, there is push back. It isn’t that bad”. We saw exactly that happen last week (and the week before (and the week before (…))) with the tariffs. trump did something stupid to destroy the economy and livelihood of the country, he backed off a bit, and everyone praised him while ignoring that he still made things worse.

    And same here. Yes, it is great that any judges are willing to throw their careers away and make themselves a target of the fascists. But nothing will change if those rulings aren’t enforced and all signs are that they won’t be.

    But it still gives people a way to just keep ignoring it because “I am valuing my mental health”



    1. Because, even in a world where you can buy assault rifles at the mall, it is generally only the upper middle class who are able to afford to arm themselves
    2. The idea of “Everywhere I go it is high noon at the o-k corral and I need to be ready to quickdraw on a toddler at a moment’s notice” is a decidedly White American mentality
    3. People are generally either getting rounded up at border control (where you can’t have a gun because other countries are sane), at work during a raid, or getting head bagged off the street. None of which are situations where pulling your EDC glock with one in the chamber is going to do much because they have body armor and assault rifles