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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Honestly, I get it. If you have a relatively small stash of media, say a couple TB worth, you can pretty easily say "well I watched this movie, so I’ll delete it and make room for the next. When you get into the 10’s of TB range, the mindset has switched from it being a dynamic, temporary library to a repository. And it becomes easier just to plug in another 10-20TB drive occasionally, rather than trying to curate thousands of movies and shows.

    I can see both sides though. There’s certainly something to be said for being deliberate about the media you consume–and therefore only needing enough storage for your immediate viewing plans. I’m not quite into the 100TB range with my library, but I definitely have moments where I feel like having so many options makes any given option seem less appealing.


  • Problem is, by the time they’ve failed the test, the opportunity for them to learn the content is largely passed.

    The purpose of school is to educate and teach thinking skills. Tests are just a way to assess how effectively you and your students are achieving that goal. If something (in this case easy access to AI tools in the classroom) is disrupting that teaching/learning process, sure it’s useful to detect that through testing, but I’d doesn’t do anything really to solve the problem. Some fraction of kids are disciplined enough to recognize that skating by on classwork will lead to poor test results and possibly retaking classes, but generally those aren’t the kids you need to worry about anyway.


  • I also thought I’d miss Hulu and Netflix a lot more than I do. What used to irk me so badly was how utterly shit Netflix is when you just want to sit down and find something new to watch. Their front page would be list after list of things like “Hot New Comedies” “Best Independent Films of 2025”, “Classic Action Flicks” and somehow it always felt like the same 30 or 40 movies randomly shuffled together. So I’d spend 15 minutes scrolling through the same slop in different orders, get frustrated and search for a movie that I remembered wanting to watch, only to find that it was on none of the services I was subscribed to, and cost $8.99 for a single watch of a 20 year old movie.

    We had been Netflix subscribers since the very start when they delivered discs through the mail. Kinda sad how they went from having virtually anything you could think of to watch (and having a halfway decent recommendation algorithm to boot!) to where they are today.



  • You will actually get some hardcore libertarians unironically making the argument that regulations are completely unnecessary as long as you have a strong court system to award damages in the event that harm is actually done to an individual.

    Which, sure, in a frictionless, spherical universe full of perfectly rational actors that exists only in a textbook, maybe that argument has some merit.

    In the real world it means arguing that disfiguring people or giving them horrific terminal cancer should just be a line item on your ledger, next to rent and breakroom coffee.


  • If people don’t want these things in their air, why don’t they just vote with their wallets and NOT BUY products that create these byproducts, or move to a place that better suits their snowflake-lungs?

    Worst case, if you develop cancer after 5 years of exposure, you can exercise your right to sue the company for damages and be made whole again.

    We don’t need government hamstringing industry when the free market can sort these things out!

    /s (because who the fuck knows these days)



  • Honestly, as long as it’s easily DIY upgradable (accessible speaker mounting locations, standard DIN panels, etc) I am all for this. Most OEM audio systems are stupidly overpriced and suck complete donkey balls compared to what you can get for a few hundred bucks at Crutchfield and install in an afternoon.

    For the last 20 years or so, most factory audio systems are so integrated into the rest of the electronics that they can be an absolute nightmare to upgrade unless you are a pro, which means you get the worst of both worlds: garbage audio, AND a steep upgrade path.


  • Just speaking for myself here, but as someone with only basic literacy in networking and almost zero prior experience with Linux or Docker, I found Unraid extremely straightforward to spin up–especially with the numerous guides floating around on Youtube. I started out with a used SFF PC that cost about $120 and a few drives I had lying around, and was up and running with basic NAS functionality in an afternoon.

    I’ve mucked up a few things trying to do something more advanced without fully reading up, but I haven’t had a single hiccup with Unraid itself.

    1.5 years later, and I’ve got ~80TB worth of refurb enterprise drives and hosting several media and other storage services, and I don’t see myself outgrowing it anytime soon.







  • Not to knock on you, because everyone’s got different priorities, but I think calling it a “huge expense that’s no longer relevant” is a pretty loaded framing. A decent 75-ish inch TV can be had for about the same price as a middle-road flagship phone.

    Sure, I can certainly watch a movie or play a game on my little 6" phone screen, but it’s an entirely different experience–in the same way that eating a protein bar and eating your favorite meal will both technically nourish you.

    Granted, I’ve spent quite a bit in excess of the cost of a decent TV on the audio system to go with it, but pretty much anything other than watching rando youtube videos or playing idle phone games, I would rather do in front of a large screen with immersive sound–gaming, shows, movies etc., even if it’s just me alone.