Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.

I think you’re referring to FlareSolverr. If so, I’m not aware of a direct replacement.

Main issue is it’s heavy on resources (I have an rpi4b)

FlareSolverr does add some memory overhead, but otherwise it’s fairly lightweight. On my system FlareSolverr has been up for 8 days and is using ~300MB:

NAME           CPU %     MEM USAGE
flaresolverr   0.01%     310.3MiB

Note that any CPU usage introduced by FlareSolverr is unavoidable because that’s how CloudFlare protection works. CloudFlare creates a workload in the client browser that should be trivial if you’re making a single request, but brings your system to a crawl if you’re trying to send many requests, e.g. DDOSing or scraping. You need to execute that browser-based work somewhere to get past those CloudFlare checks.

If hosting the FlareSolverr container on your rpi4b would put it under memory or CPU pressure, you could run the docker container on a different system. When setting up Flaresolverr in Prowlarr you create an indexer proxy with a tag. Any indexer with that tag sends their requests through the proxy instead of sending them directly to the tracker site. When Flaresolverr is running in a local Docker container the address for the proxy is localhost, e.g.:

If you run Flaresolverr’s Docker container on another system that’s accessible to your rpi4b, you could create an indexer proxy whose Host is “http://<other_system_IP>:8191”. Keep security in mind when doing this, if you’ve got a VPN connection on your rpi4b with split tunneling enabled (i.e. connections to local network resources are allowed when the tunnel is up) then this setup would allow requests to these indexers to escape the VPN tunnel.

On a side note, I’d strongly recommend trying out a Docker-based setup. Aside from Flaresolverr, I ran my servarr setup without containers for years and that was fine, but moving over to Docker made the configuration a lot easier. Before Docker I had a complex set of firewall rules to allow traffic to my local network and my VPN server, but drop any other traffic that wasn’t using the VPN tunnel. All the firewall complexity has now been replaced with a gluetun container, which is much easier to manage and probably more secure. You don’t have to switch to Docker-based all in go, you can run hybrid if need be.

If you really don’t want to use Docker then you could attempt to install from source on the rpi4b. Be advised that you’re absolutely going offroad if you do this as it’s not officially supported by the FlareSolverr devs. It requires install an ARM-based Chromium browser, then setting some environment variables so that FlareSolverr uses that browser instead of trying to download its own. Exact steps are documented in this GitHub comment. I haven’t tested these steps, so YMMV. Honestly, I think this is a bad idea because the full browser will almost certainly require more memory. The browser included in the FlareSolverr container is stripped down to the bare minimum required to pass the CloudFlare checks.

If you’re just strongly opposed to Docker for whatever reason then I think your best bet would be to combine the two approaches above. Host the FlareSolverr proxy on an x86-based system so you can install from source using the officially supported steps.

They smell like plastic, metal, complex hydrocarbons, and death.

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.

Oh for sure, those are a communal resource.

Hey, leave Laura Palmer out of this, she’s been through enough already.

“Pungent bouquet, with an earthy flavour.”

Good for cheese, depending on your tastes. Almost certainly bad in other contexts.

People here seem partial to Jellyfin

I recently switched to Jellyfin and I’ve been pretty impressed with it. Previously I was using some DLNA server software (not Plex) with my TV’s built-in DLNA client. That worked well for several years but I started having problems with new media items not appearing on the TV, so I decided to try some alternatives. Jellyfin was the first one I tried, and it’s working so well that I haven’t felt compelled to search any further.

the internet seems to feel it doesn’t work smoothly with xbox (buggy app/integration).

Why not try it and see how it works for you? Jellyfin is free and open source, so all it would cost you is a little time.

I have a TCL tv with (with google smart TV software)

Can you install apps from Google Play on this TV? If so, there’s a Jellyfin app for Google TVs. I can’t say how well the Google TV Jellyfin app works as I have an LG TV myself, so currently I’m using the Jellyfin LG TV app.

If you can’t install apps on that TV, does it have a DLNA client built in? Many TVs do, and that’s how I streamed media to my TV for years. On my LG TV the DLNA server shows up as another source when I press the button to bring up the list of inputs. The custom app is definitely a lot more feature-rich, but a DLNA client can be quite functional and Jellyfin can be configured to work as a DLNA server.

You can do this with custom formats. You’d want to create a custom format that gives a score if the file is below a certain size threshold (say 1.5GB per hour), then add minimum custom scores to the release profiles you use (e.g. Bluray 1080p). You can also add custom filters for release groups that prioritise file size. YTS for example keeps their releases as small as possible.

I’m not convinced that Valve will go down the tubes when Gabe shuffles off this moral coil (praise gaben may he live a thousand years). It would require a strong company culture that believes as he does that piracy is a service issue and is thus willing to adhere to his vision in his absence, but that can happen in a privately held company if there’s a strong succession plan in place.

Now, if Gabe dies and Valve goes public, then it’s pretty much over. Platform monetization, proft-taking and short-term thinking would enshittify Steam in short order.

Commerce conducted in a capitalist economy is inherently capitalist. Being publicly traded is not strictly required, though it might be the most common form of corporate structure under capitalism. Individuals, partnerships, privately-held and publicly-traded companies can all own capital. Valve’s assets are not owned by a government, its business decisions are made privately and it operates in a free market. Those three factors are pretty much the definition of capitalism.

I briefly experimented with it ages ago. And I mean ages ago, like 20+ years ago. Maybe it’s changed somewhat since then, but my understanding is that Gentoo doesn’t provide binary packages. Everything gets compiled from source using exactly the options you want and compiled exactly for your hardware. That’s great and all but it has two big downsides:

• Most users don’t need or even want to specify every compile option. The number of compile options to wade through for some packages (e.g. the kernel) is incredibly long, and many won’t be applicable to your particular setup.
• The benefits of compiling specifically for your system are likely questionable, and the amount of time it takes to compile can be long depending on your hardware. Bear in mind I was compiling on a Pentium 2 at the time, so this may be a lot less relevant to modern systems. I think it took me something like 12 hours to do the first-time compile when I installed Gentoo, and then some mistake I made in the configuration made me want to reinstall and I just wasn’t willing to sit through that again.

I don’t think it’s inevitable with large groups. Take charities for example. There are very large charities that do very good work, and don’t exhibit the kind of fuckery we see in the corporate world. There are certainly bad charities too, but I’d argue those are fraudulent charities run by unethical people.

So what’s the difference between a large reputable charity, and a corporation at a similar scale in terms of number of people involved, and amount of money involved? One is nonprofit, the other is for profit. So it’s large group plus profit motive that causes the drift toward amorality.

Remember there are actual people who are making these decisions.

Sure, but what I want to know is why they feel comfortable making immoral decisions. Are they all psychopaths? Psychopathy is known to be more common in the C-suite, by some estimates 3.5% of executives are psychopaths. Businesses reward those who deliver good business outcomes, and psychopaths might tend do better at that with no pesky moral compass to get in the way. But the rest are just average people, probably no different than the general populace when it comes to measures of morality. So if 95%+ of oil company executives are not inherently less moral than the rest of us, why the hell would they be willing to make decisions that literally destroy the fucking planet?? I mean, the oil companies knew climate change was a big fucking problem decades ago, and they still did what they did. How the fuck does that even happen??

My thesis here is that the corporate structure itself is sufficient to compel otherwise moral people to make choices that are absolutely heinous when viewed objectively. When you’re faced with an option that makes your corporate targets and nets you a bonus but irreparably harms some distant other, the average person will tend to make the immoral choice. They’ll rationalize it, they’ll minimize it, but ultimately they will happily fuck over someone in another country, another generation, or hell, just in another office, so they can make a buck.

Corporations are always happy to pander to morality when it’s to their benefit, but I believe corporations are inherently amoral. They might make decisions that are moral, but that’s just a happy coincidence that occurs when the decision that’s in their interest also happens to be the moral choice. Corporations are equally happy to make choices that most would consider immoral, if it meets their goals.

I have no source for this, but my theory is that when the workforce of a corporation grow past Dunbar’s number it will inherently bend toward amorality. Making moral choices requires knowing the people affected by your choices, and having empathy for them. Once it becomes impossible for one worker at a company to have a personal relationship with every other member of the staff, it’s all too easy for groups to form within the company that will make choices that drive the company’s goals (growth, revenue, profit) at the expense of anything and everything else (the environment, the community, their customers, even their own workers).

The technical issues could probably be tackled, but realistically I doubt we’ll ever return to the screener copy glory days. By now everyone who receives a screener copy knows about the watermarking software, and release teams would have a hell of a time convincing them that the watermark can 100% for sure be removed. The person in possession of the screener copy has every incentive not to share it, since the costs of getting caught are so high (fired and/or sued and/or blacklisted in the industry).

I don’t have any source for this, but screener copy leaks were so prevalent at one point that I have to imagine that money was changing hands. Release teams behind paid sites were probably bribing recipients of screener copies so their site could have the pirate copy first, and later it would spread to free sites. Given the number of people that receive screener copies, studios realistically had no way to figure out who was leaking them so it was essentially free money for the leaker. The price paid to the leaker was probably not all that high since the risks were so low.

As soon as the watermarks were in, the risks for the leaker went up dramatically and so would their price. Watermarking was actually a very clever solution to the problem. Rather than adding DRM, which would bog down their workflows and piss off their customers, studios added watermarks that made it uneconomical for the leaks to continue.

That sounds like a workprint. The linked wiki page has notable examples of workprints that made their way onto Internet, sometimes before the movie was even in theaters. I don’t think this is typically a sought-after version for pirate groups, their existence is likely more of a convenience situation. Someone got their hands on the workprint, uploaded it online, and it spread from there.

The holy grail for pirate groups used to be screener copies, finished versions of films that are sent to reviewers, promoters, etc. before release. I remember a (relatively brief) time when finished copies of movies were routinely popping up online even before they were in theaters. Such leaks have largely been stopped by difficult-to-remove watermarking of screener copies and workprints. Every such copy that goes to an editor, VFX house or film reviewer gets its own unique watermark trace embedded in the copy. If the studio finds that your copy was leaked online they can fire / sue / blacklist you. It’s massively curtailed such leaks.

To be honest, I didn’t either but I wanted to know where all these names come from. So I did some Googling and that’s what I found. Apologies if I’ve mangled anything, but I think I got the broad strokes right. Etymology (the study of the origin and evolution of words) is neat!

Essex comes from Old English Eastseaxan, literally “East Saxons”. In other words, this is the part of England that was invaded/settled by the Saxons and they divided their lands into east, south and west regions, plus a middle region (middle Saxons, modern-day Middlesex).

There’s no Norsex because at that time the lands to north of Saxon territory were held by the Angles. They also divided themselves into East Angles, South Angles, etc., but those names don’t seem to have survived into the modern day. Interestingly though, the Kingdom of East Anglia was divided into “North Folk” and “South Folk”, which is the origin of the modern-day names for Norfolk and Suffolk.

If you’ve heard of the Anglo-Saxons, yeah, that’s these guys, the Angles and the Saxons. The Angles came from parts of modern-day Denmark, the Saxons from parts of modern-day northern Germany. They shared a lot of common Germanic culture but were also rivals.