Do you interact with people outside of audiophile circles? I’m not in any, and I haven’t heard anyone in person complain about a missing headphone jack in many years, not after a few years of airpods being available. Hell, I don’t know anyone who uses wired headphones anymore. I have heard people mention that my phone is too heavy, and I’m using a pixel 9 pro. Before this phone I was using a pixel 5, and I had people telling me my phone was too small/plastic-y. I don’t think you have an understanding of “normal people” They aren’t tech enthusiasts, they aren’t audiophiles, and they are genuinely shocked when I tell them about how egregiously most tech companies are violating their privacy, but are quick to say that they don’t care/don’t want to give up creature comforts to prevent it.

Fellow Thunder user?

It’s not perfect, but I use grayjay. They have an android app and a desktop client, and are usually pretty quick to make updates that will sidestep Google’s anti-adblocking measures (within 1-2 days.) Again, not perfect, but I don’t mind a slightly worse experience to avoid having to see an ad. Plus it has sponsor block support built right in

I don’t doubt it, but how do you know? Can you share a contradictory source?

Why do you say this so authoritatively when you didn’t actually know or look into it at all?

I joined Plex after I already needed to have a login to plex.tv to be able to stream. I understand that that already was problematic, but Plex was leagues ahead of its competition in terms of ease of adding users, as well as polish. You must be forgetting how awful Jellyfin was in comparison, even just 5 years ago. I’ve been keeping up on Jellyfin and it’s amazing how far they’ve come. Now Jellyfin has great theme options, a simple-to-install skip intro/outro plugin, an app option with built-in jellyseerr integration, decent collections support (still needs some work here on feature parity with Plex, but it’s on the way) and with Wizarr, onboarding new users is as easy as sending an invite link, just like Plex. All this came in the last 5 years, and were pretty much requirements for my use cases.

Sure you can say that I’m picky, but Plex really was the best option until like, this year. I started to accept the need to switch when they added the social media aspect to it. They completely ignored what their users actually wanted. Since then, they’ve been making worse and worse decisions, which is crazy because now more than ever their competition has reached their level. Hell, by pushing all their users away, Plex is only going to accelerate the development on Jellyfin.

Vast majority? Eh, maybe. I watch a crazy amount of anime, and I’ve only had a few of the shows I’m interested in pull that, and typically I just don’t continue watching. The one trope that I really dislike that gets shoehorned into almost any anime is the over-infatuation of a sibling. I’m not talking incest or anything, but for some reason there’s almost always a character who is obsessed with their sister/brother, and it weirds me out. Not enough to stop watching if the anime is otherwise good, but definitely enough to stop watching if the anime is just soso.

Now, oversexualization of adult characters? That’s almost unavoidable. I tend to just ignore it, until I show an anime to someone who hasn’t seen anime before and then I’m hyper aware of it. That’s why when introducing people to anime I usually pick Death Note or Fullmetal Alchemist. These anime have a good dose of the anime goofiness, but very little fanservice, almost none.

While I understand the sentiment, if they switch to SteamOS as a primary focus, what’s the problem with buying someone else’s handheld that’s built to run SteamOS? There are already handhelds more performant than the Steam Deck out there, once they have official SteamOS support what’s the difference? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve actually bought an absurd number of Steam Decks so far for myself and for friends/family, but once they die, if there’s no Steam Deck 2, I’ll probably just pick up a handheld that is built specifically to run SteamOS

I pay for the streaming services, but don’t stream. Maybe this is me trying to justify “theft”, but how I like to think about it is this: I pay for the streaming services. I have the technical know-how to either download directly or rip (screen record) any shows I want from any of the popular services, as well as to write the scripts myself to roughly automate this. I also have spare computers to do this 24/7. However, it’s actually better for the streaming service that I don’t do this myself, since they still get my money without me using the bandwidth. I pay for AMC Stubs A-list but don’t often see the movies in theaters, so I don’t feel bad pirating new releases. As for movies/shows not on streaming services, I could buy used dvd/blurays, rip them myself, then sell them back, but that would ultimately result in a near-net-zero cost anyway, so what’s the point of going through all that? In my mind, as long as I’m paying for these subscriptions pirating feels like it’s no longer an ethical/moral gray area.

Note that I only do this because I can afford to. When I was younger, I would pirate everything without worrying because if I couldn’t afford to pay the streaming service, they didn’t lose a potential customer if I pirated anyway. Now that I am better off and would definitely be paying for these subscriptions, I might as well, but still get to own the content I’m paying for. 120TB and counting!

For those with preexisting lifetime memberships, things haven’t changed yet (outside of basically trying to make Plex a social media thing), but in my eyes it’s only a matter of time. Made the switch to Jellyfin this week after having used Plex for 5 years. If I wanted to invite new users to join my server, they’d have to pay $2 a month to be able to watch on their phone instead of the one-time payment of $5.

I’ve always had to manually add my GPU to system monitor, and since I’ve always had integrated GPU as well, had to sort out which GPU is the dedicated GPU before knowing what service is using which GPU. But this definitely is my favorite method once I get it all set up, makes it really clear if a steam game is using the wrong GPU

My comment was more for offering an option for connection that worked for me without any custom/hacky drivers. Despite my distro of choice, I hate gatekeeping and really dislike the folks you are referring to who like to pretend they were never a beginner. However, one of the lines you posted is generally good advice, which is to file a bug report for problems you are encountering that aren’t documented. Not only will it potentially get you help, but will hopefully prevent your issue from being experienced by other users. Submitting bug reports is scary because people who maintain Linux projects can be rude to beginners, but I recommend just posting your best effort at a bug report, and usually someone will walk you through how to get the additional information needed to make your bug report proper.

Ah, yeah. I don’t even think MacOS supports the dongle, Microsoft has that pretty locked down. All modern wireless controllers should support Bluetooth connection so you could use that instead, a simple usb bluetooth dongle is pretty cheap. Just make sure to plug the dongle into a USB 2.0 port, bluetooth dongles will work considerably worse in USB 3.0+ ports. And if you’re rocking a 360 controller or older (where bluetooth isn’t a guarentee) I don’t think xone is the driver you want to be using, instead use xpad-noone.

Weird, I use arch (btw) and a generic Bluetooth driver and have had zero issues with my wireless Xbox controller… Never needed xbox-specific packages

Been on Plex for years, I will be fully migrated to Jellyfin by the end of the week

I mean, he’s a retired guy with new hobby, it wouldn’t seem too out of the question that he spent a good chunk of time following tutorials for things that have plenty of tutorials out there.

When I had to put our golden retriever down (15 years old, cancer) we called an in-home vet to do it since my dog hated the vet with a vengeance. She would get anxious in the car if we even took the vet’s freeway exit. We cooked her an entire pack of bacon, and sat there feeding it to her while the vet did their thing. It’s a tough thing to go through, but the assurance that my dog wasn’t scared on her way out was worth it

I grew up a windows user, as was my father before me. I first started with Linux in my teens, initially on Raspbian as I was gifted a raspberry pi 2b with a camera, and I wanted to try goofing around with python and computer vision (which was the style at the time.) Once I entered university, I dual booted Windows 7 and Linux Mint, since my professor suggested moving to Linux for C++ homework to make things simpler. I was scared of jumping to a new desktop OS due to my upbringing, so I couldn’t abandon Windows, not yet anyway. Following that I had a cheap Summer fling with Kali as it was a requirement for a cyber security course I took. This replaced my Mint install. After college I got into self-hosting, and my server ran Debian for stability (and still does to this day), however I was still scared of leaving the safety of my littlr Windows garden I called home. But then Windows betrayed me by putting ads on my taskbar, and I got fed up. I installed EndeavorOS on my main machine which was a laptop. I immediately fell head over heels for the AUR, and not needing a deep understanding of linux during the install was a plus. I got comfy with the ins and outs of linux over the next year and a half or so, and when I finally went to build myself a new desktop PC, I made the switch to Arch. It’s been great, and I felt like I understood all the decisions I made during the install. That was 6 months ago. If Arch ever fails me catastrophically,(which would be pretty hard as I am using an os snapshot manager, and backing those snapshots up to my server) I will move to either Debian or Mint for stability, as I am kind of tired of hopping around at this point.

If it runs on a computer, it’s literally “just logic and RNG”. It’s all transistors, memory, and an RNG.

Sure, but this is a bad faith argument. You can say this about anything. Everything is made up of other stuff, it’s what someone has done to combine or use those elements that matters. You could extend this to anything proprietary. Manufacturing equipment is just a handful of metals, rubbers, and plastics. However, the context in which someone uses those materials is what matters when determining if copyright laws have been broken.

The data used to train an AI model is copyrighted. It’s impossible for something to exist without copyright (in the past 100 years). Even public domain works had copyright at some point.

If the data used to train the model was copyrighted data acquired without explicit permission from the data owners, it itself cannot be copyrighted. You can’t take something copyrighted by someone else, put it in a group of stuff that is also copyrighted by others, and claim you have some form of ownership over that collection of works.

This is not correct. Every artist ever has been trained with copyrighted works, yet they don’t have to recite every single picture they’ve seen or book they’ve ever read whenever they produce something.

You speak confidently, but I don’t think you understand the problem area enough to act as an authority on the topic.

Laws can be different for individuals and companies. Hell, laws of use can be different for two different individuals, and the copyright owner actually gets a say in how their thing can be used by different groups of people. For instance, for a 3d art software, students can use it for free. However, their use agreement is that they cannot profit off of anything they make. Non students have to pay, but can sell their work without consequences. Companies have to pay even more, but often times get bulk discounts if they are buying licenses for their whole team.

Artists have something of value: AI training data. We know this is valuable to AI training companies, because artists are getting reached out to by AI companies, asking to sell them the rights to train their model on their data. If AI companies just use an artist’s AI training data without their permission, it’s stealing the potential revenue they could have made selling it to a different AI company. Taking away revenue potential on someone’s work is the basis for having violated copyright/fair use laws.

Nintendo games are excellent games. Some of the highest quality games among AAA studios. What sucks is Nintendo as a company