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Cake day: January 21st, 2025

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  • Reply to another comment regarding phones not actually being “off” when off. iphones at least since the 11 are not off when off and keep the secure enclave powered to transmit phone location

    This is 100% true on newer iphones and they explicitly tell you as much every time you power the phone off. It can be disabled, but only temporarily.

    This brings up that as long as the battery is sealed in the phone you’re relying on trust in the software/hardware vendors to ensure the phone is actually “off” in the traditional sense and not “off” in one of these modern “standby mode” senses where it can boot faster or something (and therefore run some process that can do something else nefarious, though tbf probably not much)


  • This is 100% true on newer iphones and they explicitly tell you as much every time you power the phone off. It can be disabled, but only temporarily.

    This brings up that as long as the battery is sealed in the phone you’re relying on trust in the software/hardware vendors to ensure the phone is actually “off” in the traditional sense and not “off” in one of these modern “standby mode” senses where it can boot faster or something (and therefore run some process that can do something else nefarious, though tbf probably not much)


  • Or they’ll do what plex did. Reminder that plex started life as a fork of xbmc/kodi for macos. When their fork showed some popularity they shifted development to various names (plex home theater). While this still contained a lot of GPL code they then spent a good deal of dev time rewriting said code to be fully closed source.

    This is less discussed but also why plex is one of the most insidious and disgusting pieces of unethical software one can use. The writing is on the wall and the company is led by scumbags, sure, but people don’t talk as much about how they forked xbmc, built a huge product based on everything learned from it, and then closed everything off once they did the minimum required cover your ass moves.

    What they did is legal but is it ethical? If they did it to a company like apple or Microsoft they’d get sued, that’s for damn sure. And ethically speaking I would say it’s really fucked to take all this stuff from the community: architecture, ideas, ui/ux, approaches to plugin design, data modeling, etc and build a whole company off of it, then basically give nothing back. They closed it off so they could get their bag, fuck the community that taught them so much and helped build their MVP.

    What you describe is similar to the creation of jellyfin from emby though; where embys dev team suddenly decided to close source the GPL server code (a violation) and add monetization. the community rejected this, and forked the last version prior to the nonsense into what is now jellyfin.




  • Plex took a significant degree of other people’s money, to the tune of over 40 million dollars. The people who gave said money were not kickstarter funders, donators, subscribers, etc but investors, who have an expectation that plex will move the company in a direction that makes them profitable enough to not only repay the 40+ million investment, but to then earn profits for a lengthy period (possibly in perpetuity) as they are stakeholders. This is the same thing that happened to Reddit (though Reddits scale and timeline was FAR more vast), openai, Google, literally every company ever basically. Plex now has an obligation to not just continue development but to continue it in a way that maximizes growth and revenue, even if that is anti consumer.

    Jellyfin on the other hand has language on their contributions page that almost discourages financial support. This is because the only financial support they accept is donations, which are clearly explained are to support the free software and give no ownership stake. The software does not generate profit and donation does not equate to any kind of investment, other than supporting continued development. Expecting any kind of return on your part (again, other than the project continuing to move forward) is foolish. Lemmy is similar, as are many other FOSS projects. Jellyfin can remain ideologically stable to its goals, and because it is free if its users feel the lead developers are straying from this they can fork it and make “new ideologically pure jellyfin” (see xmbc to plex to emby to jellyfin, or lemmys 938 forks, many of which are tweaks and some of which are because people got beef with the main devs)


  • One is easy and one is hard, duh. If you want this nerd to stop recording you you smash his dumb facebook glasses. If you want the us government to stop surveillance of you through shit like whatever Pegasus has evolved into, Cambridge analytica, and palantir, you do what exactly? Install Adblock? Do linux? Tor? News flash: you’re still getting profiled, just not as well. Move into a Unabomber style shack and eschew technology all together? Sounds expensive. Violent uprising against the most powerful military in the world? Good luck with that.



  • Reddit was the playground for ai slop long before commercial LLMs existed. Subredditsimulator was like 2014 or 2015 and people were fucking with markov chains and other shit that dated back to like the 90s or even 70s but that also had some people experimenting with rudimentary neural networks, though obviously none with the computing power of shit like chatgpt or gemini. And obviously that whole experiment was inspired in part by the fact that botted comments were becoming increasingly common and obvious on reddit in the years leading to it, so why not make a subreddit where everyone participating is a bot?

    There’s no proof but openai researchers may have been fucking around on that sub. There was a fairly drastic increase in quality of posts in that sub around the time openai would’ve been making gpt1 (2018ish) and then they began aggressively scraping the entirety of reddit, quora, etc for content. Could just be a coincidence though and they’ll never confirm it even if it’s true bc redditors will flip shit




  • His donations are a tax dodge. Besides this billionaire philanthropy is a way to say that the people should not dictate how funds are allocated to things like medical and scientific research, international aid, etc. it’s saying that we instead are okay with our wealth being extracted to pseudokings and allowing them to make these decisions on our behalf. Should we research aids? Space? Should we give food aid to foreign nations experiencing famine? We don’t get to decide, let’s hope one of the oligarchs shines their light on these plights.

    Meanwhile it buys great PR to rehab an image. Bill gates is “the nice billionaire” who sends people 10k of Microsoft shit he didn’t even pay for through reddit secret Santa (eg an ad buy). No one then cares that was instrumental in making computers full of proprietary bullshit, destroying interoperability, eliminating competition and killing open source efforts (look up embrace, extend, extinguish if you want to get angry about 90s and early 2000s Microsoft), or even that he probably raped kids on epsteins island





  • 3dtvs would’ve only had a chance if they were basically gigantic 3ds top screens

    The glassesless 3d effect would be the only way. But then you have the issue of the display is then compromised in other ways (rainbowing, contrast issues, softer definition, etc), is more expensive because it’s basically 2 panels laminated together, and is a lot of compromise for something that ultimately had very little content, which was the other issue.

    I remember people dragging me to 3d movies and hating it because I’m blind in one eye and having to make the choice between wearing 2 pairs of glasses (other eye isn’t great) or basically sitting through a blurry mess because watching without the glasses was a nightmare (though it varied, sometimes it was 2 small copies of the movie side by side)


  • Yeah, like I said, you have to do some work with FOSS.

    Check logs, reach out to support forums, etc.

    Alternatively have something that is more likely to “just work” at the cost of data collection and profiling and increasingly restrictive software licensing designed to drive you towards service delivery license models (eg monthly payments), at a minimum

    is plex more mature? Yes of course, it has had injections of over 40 million dollars of devil money plus whatever they’ve raised from you. Jellyfin would likely catch up significantly with such funding, but remember that such funding always comes with obligations that compromise the product and fuck over the community that actually cares about usability and core features (see: Reddit, MySpace, Facebook, amazon, Google and every Google product, Netflix, etc etc etc etc etc)


  • Fuuuuuck plex

    For the past like 5-7 years I’ve said consistently that the second plex took VC money the writing was on the wall and that they would eventually and consistently take actions hostile towards their consumers and doing what they can to both move to SaaS and alienate lifetime pass users as well as distance themselves from their core purpose of sharing collections of pirated media hidden behind the thinly veneered “for tobacco use only” bullshit of “actually you can just rip your own physical media”

    Every time I post, whether it’s banning the ability to serve on hetzner, putting ads all over the app and starting to collect data, increasing monetization, etc and talk about how it’s inherently going to continue getting worse plex users inevitably come out of the woodwork to be like “well this is overblown, plex is so good it’s worth getting fucked, jellyfin is slightly harder since it’s not backed by 40 million dollars of devil money that demands endless growth until the product is ruined”

    As long as those people who are willing to get walked all over exist, that demand a slightly easier existence over one that serves them, every product and service will continue to get worse and worse while a small group of people get fat off of endless subscriptions