I would only stream if it’s something you will enjoy doing regardless of success. I have some friends who have treated streaming like a job for years and their viewercounts are still pretty low (~20-50). Something like a youtube channel would be a helpful addition/alternative as well, so at least your content doesn’t continuously disappear into the void.

I’m he/him, otherwise I usually try to refer to people as they/them because you never know, and I don’t want to have to research people before I refer to them. Down with gendered pronouns IMO - what a nuisance.

I’m curious which of their stuff you don’t like; Drew is one of the few people I subscribe to on youtube. They’re fairly funny, they don’t upload that often, and they seem to be genuine in terms of only making content when they think they’ve got something entertaining, interesting, or important. Even in the sillier videos, the deeper messaging is usually something related to exposing dark patterns.

It looks like it might be; I just know someone that has a site using it and they use a different mascot, so I thought it would have been trivial. I kind of wonder why it wouldn’t be possible to just docker bind mount a couple images into the right path, but I’m guessing maybe they obfuscate/archive the file they’re reading from or something?

You can customize the images if you want: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper#customizing-images

I’m implying that most normal people would not give their consent to it, or would be coerced by the app into giving consent when they don’t understand what it means (e.g. Windows Delivery Optimization).

I think that the idea of an app “stealing” bandwidth from its users because they want to save money on their own servers is a pretty bad look. Our current world is still not that great w/r/t internet quality, price, and availability, and it was surely worse in the past. It could definitely be more of a thing in the future, but maybe only for stuff used by techy people who could understand it and give proper consent.

I’m not like a sponge connoisseur, but I’ve been using “O-Cedar Scrunge” sponges for about a year and they’re pretty rugged. I have two sponges in rotation, and every time I do a dishwasher load I alternate them through it. They’ve never really fallen apart on me, but I think the green scratchy side gets a little less scratchy over time, and I just replace both of them every 2-3 months for good measure. I’m assuming that there’s a scientific paper somewhere that says using sponges for that long will kill me or something, but I’m still alive so far so fingers crossed.

I’m curious to see how the price will be affected as consumer PCs get stronger every year. Will they update the Steam Machine every couple of years, or will they decrease the price? I have to assume they are targeting a neutral price because their primary goal is to assemble a linux box with as little margin as possible and put it in front of you for an actual fair price, but “fair price” is a moving target.

Personally, I’m all for getting what I pay for. People who sell to you at a loss are up to something.

I don’t entirely mean to throw rocks, but there’s something funny about them dragging their feet so long on supporting a linux version (8+ years) that by the time their personal breaking point with windows came, they discovered themselves on the other side of the issue with no one to blame but themselves. Maybe a parable.

Absolutely not trusting this. Uninstalling until we know more, and ideally just getting a different solution entirely. A new account tried to impersonate Catfriend1 directly at first, and then they switched to researchxxl when someone called it out (both are new accounts). Meanwhile the original Catfriend1 has provided no information about this, and we only have the new person’s word as to what’s going on. There’s way too many red flags here.

It’s not only that 10% is wrong, it’s knowing which 10% is wrong, which is more important than it seems at first glance. I feel strongly that AI is contributing to people’s inability to really perceive reality. If you direct all your learning through a machine that lies 10% of the time, soon enough your entire world-view will be on shaky ground. How are you going to have a debate with someone when you don’t know which parts of your knowledge are true? Will you automatically concede your knowledge to others, who may be more convincing and less careful about repeating what they’ve learned through AI?

I think all that AI really needs to do is translate natural language requests (“What factors led to WW2?”) into normal destinations for further learning. Letting AI try to summarize those destinations seems like a bad idea (at least with where the technology is right now)

I just want to note that Jellyfin MPV Shim exists and can do most of this MPV stuff while still getting the benefits of Jellyfin. You’re putting a lot of emphasis on Plex-specific limitations (which Jellyfin doesn’t have obviously) and transcoding (which is a FEATURE to stopgap an improper media player setup, not a limitation of Jellyfin).

Pretty much every single “Pro” is not exclusive to pure MPV vs. Jellyfin MPV Shim, which mainly leaves you with the cons. Also as another commenter said, I set my Jellyfin up so that my friends and family can use it, and that’s its primary value to me. I feel like a lot of this post should be re-oriented towards MPV as a great media player, not against Jellyfin as a media platform.

The price of the eco-friendly detergent they’re advertising is way too high to justify (17x the cost of my store brand). It’s cool to know that a more powerful powder is possible, though.

I can launch it fine:
GE-Proton10-21
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="wsock32=n,b" %command% -skip_intro -steamMM -NewCPU

Doing your own encodes is also really cool. I’m not too sure what the AV1 compatibility of your friends’ players would be, but yes AV1 encodes are a very efficient way to microsize. If you happen to be on PTP, there’s a giant AV1 research thread with people testing stuff out. It looks like they prefer SVT-AV1-PSYEX as of the latest posts, though I don’t know enough to understand which encoding settings are the most impactful.

E-Fund, yes, for sure put that in an HYSA so that you can access it when needed. However, if a person is keeping non-E-fund money out of the market for fear of volatility, they’re actually technically undertaking a larger risk than being in the market because their money will never outpace inflation, whereas investing in a low-cost broad index fund has an extremely high chance to outpace inflation over a 5-10+ year horizon. Not to mention that when an investor undertakes market risk they’re also getting a positive risk-adjusted return in exchange for doing so.

Also, keep in mind that HYSAs don’t always offer such high rates every year, whereas inflation will always be present. And despite the “official” inflation numbers being around 3%, my actual expenses say otherwise, so I’d still be eyeing 3-4% as treading water at best.

If at all possible, get the snowball rolling on compound interest and let gravity do the rest; your future self will thank you to bits. Head over to one of the finance communities and they should set you straight. Personal finance is effectively a solved math problem; there’s really only one good answer that people will give you as long as they’re not trying to reach into your pockets for a cut, and the skill required to invest is zero. All you need is any amount of extra cash every month to pack onto the snowball. Time is by far the most valuable part of investing, so the earlier you start, the less of your cash you need to invest to get the same outcome: a reasonable retirement age with a body that isn’t burnt-out.

I’d definitely start considering inflation. If your money is stagnant and not earning interest, it is shedding value. Like it or not, we’re all inherently playing the game; it’s in everyone’s best interest to learn the rules.

If you’re only at 10mbps upload you’ll have to be very careful about selecting microsized 1080p (~4-9mbps) or quality 720p (~6-9mbps) encodes, and even then I really wouldn’t bother. If you’re not able to get any more upload speed from your plan then you’ll either have to cancel the idea or host everything from a VPS.

You can go with a VPS and maybe make people chip in for the storage space, but in that case I’d still lean towards either microsized 1080p encodes or 1080p WEB-DL (which are inherently efficient for the size) if you want to have a big content base without breaking the bank. E.g, these prices look pretty doable if you’ve got people that can chip in: https://hostingby.design/app-hosting/. I’m not very familiar with what VPS options are available or reputable so you’ll have to shop around. Anything with a big harddrive should pretty much work, though I’d probably recommend at least a few gigs of RAM just for Jellyfin (my long-running local instance is taking 1.3GB at the moment; no idea what the usual range might be). Also, you likely won’t be able to transcode video, so you’ll have to be a little careful about what everyone’s playback devices support.

Edit: Also, if you’re not familiar with microsized encodes, look for groups like BHDStudio, NAN0, hallowed, TAoE, QxR, HONE, PxHD, and such. I know at least BHDStudio, NAN0, and hallowed are well-regarded, but intentionally microsizing for streaming is a relatively new concept, and it’s hard to sleuth out who’s doing a good job and who’s just crushing the hell out of the source and making a mess - especially because a lot of these groups don’t even post source<->encode comparisons (I can guess why). You can find a lot of them on TL, ATH, and HUNO, if those acronyms mean anything to you. Otherwise, a lot of these groups post completely publicly as well, since most private trackers do not allow microsizing.

SuccessfulCrab only does WEB-DLs so “subjective quality” isn’t as much of an issue as it would be with the encoding groups, but yeah I agree that scene is usually best avoided if you have access to reliable P2P sources. Quality > speed for me any day.