I’ve been “collecting” content for many years now. I learned most of what I needed to know about ripping and transcoding over the years, such that each time I need to deal with a new video format, or a new application, it’s not too hard, because I’m building on everything I’ve already learned.

And each time I was learning new things, it’s not like there was a risk that all my previous content might suddenly become unusable or inaccessible.

Meanwhile, a couple years ago I was finally able to build myself a proper NAS. While I know my way around Linux somewhat, I never kept a Linux-based daily driver because most of the apps I use regularly are on Windows, and I’m not confident about running them stably in Linux, nor am I confident about equivalent native Linux apps. And I’m not confident about setting up and administering my own server. My past experiences have shown me that whenever you need to do anything complex and specific, it involves a lot of work.

So at a coworker’s suggestion, I got a Synology NAS that turned out to be a breeze to setup. And then I figured out how to get Plex server on there (not available in the Synology package manager, but the “manual” process turned out to be simple enough)

And it just WORKS! it’s not perfect, but it’s mostly painless to use. I was happy paying for the lifetime Plex pass at the beginning, because it handles all the routing and discovery that needs to happen to allow me to stream to my phone, or to my parents’ TV when I’m visiting them.

My next NAS might not be by Synology due to their recent announcement about supported hard drives, but I’ll probably be looking for something that “just works” because I can’t be bothered to learn how to be a sysadmin, and risk losing my stuff because I’m making the kinds of mistakes one makes as they’re learning.

Just like, if I owned a car, I wouldn’t be digging under the hood to “tweak the timing” or replacing brake discs. I’d be happy paying someone I trust to do that work, leaving me with a car that “just works”.

No, that was precisely my thought process.

Alien vs. Predator: whoever wins, we lose

Start a registry for people suffering from erectile dysfunction.

I’ve just been hoping that every meeting Trump has with other heads of state, they bring him a gift of a dozen eggs from their country, while saying something like: “I heard these are hard to come by here, so I thought I’d bring you a treat!”

But like, each one of them does it, at every new meeting, just to irritate and humiliate him.

I’m still hoping something will happen on Mar 10.

Kakistocracy. You’re gonna hear this word more and more over the next 4 years.

“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate… leads to suffering!”

Kinda simplistic, but, boy does it help explain MAGA!

Why else do you think Trump wants Greenland and Canada?

From other articles I’ve read, some parts are sourced outside the US, some from within. I think the implication was that they’re assembled in the US, but I haven’t seen anything to completely confirm it.

AP also showed some states red or blue with no vote tallies. Notably, at 11pm EST, California turned solid blue immediately on the AP map, surprising no one.

I don’t like the idea of restricting the model’s corpus further. Rather, I think it would be good if it used a bigger corpus, but added the date of origin for each element as further context.

Separately, I think it could be good to train another LLM to recognize biases in various content, and then use that to add further context for the main LLM when it ingests that content. I’m not sure how to avoid bias in that second LLM, though. Maybe complete lack of bias is an unattainable ideal that you can only approach without ever reaching it.

Why doesn’t someone just fork it and change the name?

Like, I dunno, “Super Human Image Treatment” or “Consistently Lovely Image Treatment Oriented for Real Imaging Stars”

My headcannon for this is that spaceships in that universe are to those people what cars are to us. If you know the basics of driving a car, you can drive most cars, though the bigger ships might get more complicated (I’ve never seen one of our heroes try to back up a star destroyer into a starbase to help with their buddy’s move.)

Yeah, but no one can escape the gravitational field of your mom.

(Sorry, couldn’t resist, as I half expected your comment to end with a “your mom” joke)

All those comments, and only you knew what was really up? People really do treasure their ignorance…

Are the bikes just left parked around the city? Here in Montréal, we have Bixi, with docks for the bikes every few blocks, and bikes have to be returned to a dock when you’re done (or you’ll get docked for the price of the bike, pun intended) so we don’t hear about discarded bikes much.

The program is also a resounding success here!

https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=0bTNdugjosLnu9-r

It’s not density, it’s mass. A mass of 1kg compressed to the density of the Sun’s core would pull the Earth with just as much force as a 1kg ball of styrofoam.

You can do that today. Just ask Chat-GPT to write you a bash script for something non-obvious, and then debug what it gives you.