Uh, what? The Ayn Rand garbage philosophy? I’ve never heard that and don’t see how that jibes with a free, crowd sourced encyclopedia…

Damn right.

I’m a couple years younger than you, but a lot of this resonated for me. Custom installers were some of my early inspirations for making apps that didn’t have the traditional gray box aesthetic.

However, I will say that Kenshin was a thing in the US. Samurai X was only the name of the OG movies where he was still lethal AFAIK.

I’m with you on rejecting AI being sane, but the idea that gaming wikis should be integrated into wikipedia is kinda nuts. If I search “Iron” on wikipedia I’m looking for facts, not a thousand item long disambiguation cluttered with every game that has iron as a resource. Conversely, on a game wiki my search for “Iron” has an entirely different context and I’m looking for different info.

Not to mention game wikis have way lower editorial standards, their own tone (e.g. making jokes), versioning concerns, their own new user friendly homepages etc.

Wikipedia could tuck this all into a separate namespace, sure, but that’s effectively a separate wiki anyway and then it raises questions like “why is wikipedia hosting a mechanical guide for this porn game?” or “How long do we need to host the content for this game that peaked in 2012 and is now abandonware?” that are conveniently sidestepped by those communities supporting themselves.

I burned a Blu-ray a few years back just to supplement some of our encrypted Google Drive backups with copies that would be more accessible in case of my demise, or physically grabbable in case of disaster. I know they won’t last forever, but if Drive shut down on the same day my local copies failed at least I have an option.

Otherwise, I haven’t used physical media in years. I got the 4K LOTR set when it came out and tried to use it, but it ended up being easier to just pirate the rips like anything else.

Agreed. It’s one thing if it’s climate change or something where we at least need to put a plan out there even if there’s zero chance of it happening, but for basic common sense stuff like this don’t bother. If we ever get back to trying to make average American lives better with the government, this is low hanging fruit.

It’s more of an issue with torrent seeding. You need to be able to accept incoming connections to seed, so you need a VPN/router to allow incoming traffic to a certain port to reach your torrent client.

So, not a problem for leeching, but if you are trying to meet ratio requirements, could be a big problem.

Sports gambling is just terrible for everyone except the bloodsuckers that run it. Sports teams don’t want it because it incentivizes cheating / rigging games. Personal bankruptcy and domestic abuse skyrocket when people lose money they can’t afford to lose. Now the apps feed an unstable addiction literally all day long.

Thanks to the Supreme Court for pulling a bullshit ruling out of their collective asses in 2018 that makes everything worse for average Americans.

Shit, I don’t even gamble and I’m just sick of their logos and ads all over every thing when I watch a game. Used to be they had “Gambling Prohibited” up around the stadium, now they may as well own the teams.

Pace makers keep you from dying so they’re sort of on a different level of need. Also, if corps did planned obsolescence on one, you’re probably not around to buy another.

If they were invented today, they would definitely have a predatory subscription model for “monitoring” your heart, or require occasional maintenance at cost to the end user.

The prequels were redeemed? That’s news to me.

I’m with you on 1 and 2, but “reduced lingual skills” I think is a bit of a stretch. Becoming fluent in another language takes a lot of effort and people only do it if they have a good long term reason.

I think it’s more likely this would cover the vacation / short term business case that is already covered by human interpreters (or apps already) instead.

Certain ones, like music trackers, can still be interviewed into. Once you get into an initial tracker and establish yourself, it becomes easier to find / get into new ones via forum invites. It’s a long road but barring a time machine it’s the easiest way.

I dunno, maybe I just had crappy indexers but usenet was always more miss than hit for me. Maybe it’s superior to public torrents but private trackers are the gold standard.

So it’s not fully self hosted then? I can’t see how it would do that without registering you with their own service as a middle man. Seems like that kinda defeats the purpose.

Sorry, why would Jellyfin be different from Plex for exposing to the Internet? Dynamic DNS service / static IP and router port forwarding just like any other self hosted thing. It requires a user/pass to login as usual. VPN is nice but not required.

I’ve only used Jellyfin, what does Plex do better for the non-expert user?

I mean, fuck Elon and Tesla but if you’re spending money on a car you’re giving it to a bastard one way or another. The CEOs of Ford, BMW, et. al. might not be making asses of themselves on the global stage, but I’m sure they’re still horrible. Even used cars run on gas 99% of the time.

They don’t, but they define the socket the processor slots into and probably did this to market the newer chips as more advanced than they are (by bundling a minor chip upgrade with an additional chipset upgrade that may have more uplift).

I see no other reason to kneecap upgrades like this when upgrading entails the consumer buying more of your product.

For music I’m just sick of the apps streaming super compressed crap. It sounds like 192kbps MP3 sometimes and you can definitely tell the difference. Setup Airsonic and never looked back, although still have YT music for the fam and finding new music. It is a bit of hassle, but it’s worth it and a FLAC collection feels way smaller than it did 10-20 years ago (both in terms of disk and home streaming bandwidth).

I read “The Idea Factory” about Bell Labs, focused mostly on inventing the transistor, but it included their consolidation into this lab and just how state of the art it was. The book implied that it was the first corporate “campus” designed more like a university than a factory or office.

The book really made me understand that AT&T / Bell Labs was the hot tech firm of the early 20th century, long before getting to computing advances (C, UNIX) I was more familiar with.