Prove_your_argument

♫♫ Where Is My Mind? ♫♫ plays

In the background, explosions rip through buildings and they start to collapse.

I have an old Pi floating around that I should probably look at using for stuff like this.

Are they going to be around once Google removes sideloading from unauthorized devs?

I’m never, ever buying digital licenses to video or audio content. My limit is games because avoiding it is kind of impossible.

Too many platforms close down. I’ve lost licenses from the Impulse acquisition and subsequent shutdown, plus one or two others. Any day these guys can just put up a 30 day notice and rip everything out of your library. Usually this happens after an acquisition… looks like bandcamp was sold in 2023 and the buyers shitcanned half the staff too.

Disks are cheap and piracy works until they enforce digital IDs for all connectivity on the internet. At that point we’d be back to swapping thumb drives.

Agreed wholeheartedly.

I built out bluefin as a panacea to issues I had with subtitles on a set of media on my plex server and it couldn’t even give me subtitles.

I hear a lot of rave reviews for Kodi, but that’s serverless so now I need to open up storage or setup a vpn server and isolate a vlan… and how in the everliving fuck am I going to explain configuring this? Oh, and that needs sideloading too and if I go with a vlan now they need to figure out how to connect their device to a VPN. That’s a nightmare.

Sure, I can setup Kodi at home on my TV device and leave plex as is but i’m no closer to a server based transcoding solution. That sucks.

Not far off. Most of what i’ve setup originates from a plex lifetime sub. Maintenance is completely trivial.

Every time I hear about the next thing I think about modernizing which then requires standing up something new. New shit requires a new virtual host and completely new setups of many things. Then training my wife and others on how to utilize the new tech, and then praying it doesn’t just break tomorrow from The Establishment in some way.

Plex is one of the very few solutions that works with minimal sideloading and fuckery. My instructions for someone to start using it are “download the app, check your email for an account link, and enjoy.” I would not recommend any newcomers to go with Plex though, because it’s definitely not a modern solution.

I’ve tried jellyfin, I put substantial time into trying to get it to work but it had substantial issues with subtitles which are mandatory for us unfortunately. I figure any new solution is going to also have substantial challenges in some way as there is no standardized or simple deployment of absolutely anything.

I’d cancel it in a heartbeat but my wife would murder me.

I’ve been paying for a VPN for over a decade and I am up to about 20TB of used disks. Make of that what you will.

I’m doing my part!

My renewal was literally tomorrow too. As these streaming services get worse, I keep on cancelling. Been two years for Prime (literally smashed cancel the day ads were announced) and all i’ve got left at this point is netflix and spotify.

Netflix pricing almost has me there.

I was so confused.

The only reason why the MBAs and Execs have jobs are because the shareholders want more money.

Customers don’t decide company leadership unless it interferes with shareholder or exec goals.

The system of ownership determining everything for everyone is the problem but good luck getting those in power to give up that ownership complex.

Microsoft is maximizing subscription revenue this year. It’s all about increasing that y/y revenue while burning cash on AI that will explode in their face revenue wise, unless the subscription price hikes land.

People are so stupid in this country. Do what the EU did and make it law that they have to offer sideloading and other app stores and payment methods.

It should be the law to begin with. This walled garden shit is really just another word for controlling what the user does with the device they purchased and not allowing them to do business with anybody else exclusively to add software without apple’s approval and protection racket fee.

My boss showed me the article yesterday, but apparently it’s the old news from earlier this year. It went from 70 to 100 back in Feb.

That’s still a giant increase from whatever you would have paid last year.

They’re also upping the sub price for some home user office plans. Apparently it’s milk the customer time at microsoft.

Relies on proper leadership that isn’t following current MBA principals.

It’s too easy to go for a cash grab. Broadcom is a great example.

Capitalism doesn’t really see building a well treated highly compensated team of exceptional high skill workers as consistently generating more money for them.

For this to work you need a few people at the helm who actually give a shit about long term results. Capital wants bigger numbers with each earnings report which doesn’t always happen with gaming.

I for one have no comprehension as to how blizzard has maintained it’s following, but it’s a great example for how even the best companies can turn to shit by shareholder/board member directions. The money got too big with WoW.

Stuff like that puts me off. By default it’s basically illegal, so we have no idea when the developers will need to retain legal counsel that explicitly tells them to delete everything and cease discussing it.

Support and maintenance are a nightmare, and based on the other folks here talking about it, it’s certainly something to have to tinker with heavily.

If i’m going to have to tinker, i’m going to go with FOSS stuff if I can. I’d rather learn something that will be useful for a while.

no actual path to profitablity

You don’t think reddit can make money from advertising?

AFMF is terrible though compared to a properly implemented frame gen solution. There’s only so much you can do with driver based implementations.

The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for… so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.

They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn’t to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.

They have their public ‘sponsored’ content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you’re an angel doing god’s work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.