Prove_your_argument

I have an old Pi floating around that I should probably look at using for stuff like this.

Are they going to be around once Google removes sideloading from unauthorized devs?

I’m never, ever buying digital licenses to video or audio content. My limit is games because avoiding it is kind of impossible.

Too many platforms close down. I’ve lost licenses from the Impulse acquisition and subsequent shutdown, plus one or two others. Any day these guys can just put up a 30 day notice and rip everything out of your library. Usually this happens after an acquisition… looks like bandcamp was sold in 2023 and the buyers shitcanned half the staff too.

Disks are cheap and piracy works until they enforce digital IDs for all connectivity on the internet. At that point we’d be back to swapping thumb drives.

Agreed wholeheartedly.

I built out bluefin as a panacea to issues I had with subtitles on a set of media on my plex server and it couldn’t even give me subtitles.

I hear a lot of rave reviews for Kodi, but that’s serverless so now I need to open up storage or setup a vpn server and isolate a vlan… and how in the everliving fuck am I going to explain configuring this? Oh, and that needs sideloading too and if I go with a vlan now they need to figure out how to connect their device to a VPN. That’s a nightmare.

Sure, I can setup Kodi at home on my TV device and leave plex as is but i’m no closer to a server based transcoding solution. That sucks.

Not far off. Most of what i’ve setup originates from a plex lifetime sub. Maintenance is completely trivial.

Every time I hear about the next thing I think about modernizing which then requires standing up something new. New shit requires a new virtual host and completely new setups of many things. Then training my wife and others on how to utilize the new tech, and then praying it doesn’t just break tomorrow from The Establishment in some way.

Plex is one of the very few solutions that works with minimal sideloading and fuckery. My instructions for someone to start using it are “download the app, check your email for an account link, and enjoy.” I would not recommend any newcomers to go with Plex though, because it’s definitely not a modern solution.

I’ve tried jellyfin, I put substantial time into trying to get it to work but it had substantial issues with subtitles which are mandatory for us unfortunately. I figure any new solution is going to also have substantial challenges in some way as there is no standardized or simple deployment of absolutely anything.

I’d cancel it in a heartbeat but my wife would murder me.

I’ve been paying for a VPN for over a decade and I am up to about 20TB of used disks. Make of that what you will.

I’m doing my part!

My renewal was literally tomorrow too. As these streaming services get worse, I keep on cancelling. Been two years for Prime (literally smashed cancel the day ads were announced) and all i’ve got left at this point is netflix and spotify.

Netflix pricing almost has me there.

People are so stupid in this country. Do what the EU did and make it law that they have to offer sideloading and other app stores and payment methods.

It should be the law to begin with. This walled garden shit is really just another word for controlling what the user does with the device they purchased and not allowing them to do business with anybody else exclusively to add software without apple’s approval and protection racket fee.

Stuff like that puts me off. By default it’s basically illegal, so we have no idea when the developers will need to retain legal counsel that explicitly tells them to delete everything and cease discussing it.

Support and maintenance are a nightmare, and based on the other folks here talking about it, it’s certainly something to have to tinker with heavily.

If i’m going to have to tinker, i’m going to go with FOSS stuff if I can. I’d rather learn something that will be useful for a while.

no actual path to profitablity

You don’t think reddit can make money from advertising?

The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for… so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.

They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn’t to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.

They have their public ‘sponsored’ content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you’re an angel doing god’s work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.

Are there any great alternatives that are easy to use off the shelf (with our own drives) that can compete here?

I’m basically to the point where my next NAS will end up just being a linux desktop running truenas which sounds like a lot of tinkering for something that should have a simple solution. I don’t want to have to buy some big expensive enterprise array for a prosumer use case.

Look on the bright side, in a couple of years they will come crawling back to us, desperate for new things to be built so their profit machines keep profiting.

Current ML techniques literally cannot replace developers for anything but the most rudimentary of tasks.

I wish we had true apprenticeships out there for development and other tech roles.

I don’t think “fully auto drink machines” like what miso makes are really anywhere today.

Even the fully automatic solutions that do exist have limits to output which require human intervention. There’s no drink machine spitting outputs directly to people waiting in cars at drive through windows.

Yep, we definitely don’t have any kind of law prohibiting a business from disposing of food waste en masse.

We do have a ton of liability laws that would punish them from distributing leftover food though, should someone get sick after it is distributed.

Also don’t have any kind of thing preventing households from wasting food either. I suspect countless of perfectly fine meals are disposed of every single day, probably enough to feed the country twice over, if not more.

It’s a tough problem in a land of excess without near-total elimination of privacy and agency.

One person commits suicide from LLMs: OH MY GOD BAN ALL LLMS REQUIRE IDS AND REGULATE THEM TO THE GROUND. (Please ignore all cases of suicide for therapy patients. Therapy is always effective and results in positive outcomes, right?)

One person dies in a car crash with a semi-autonomous L2 car: OH MY GOD BAN ALL SELF DRIVING CARS PEOPLE ARE DYING LEFT AND RIGHT (ignore billions of miles per significant accident for the robot vs hundreds of thousands for humans.)

Just two examples, and odds are you have your own personal opinion about how you absolutely loathe one or another. Maybe you feel like you’re losing control with self driving cars, or maybe you feel like chat bots have encroached on your field of work because you’re a dev and we’ve had countless layoffs after over-hiring during covid lockdowns.) Either way, there’s studies and there’s kneejerk reactions, and in our world the latter is winning right now.

Totally agree. Without details we don’t have any idea what actually went wrong.

What’s the architecture of taco bell’s implementation?

Which LLM are they using?

I worked at a pizza place with a drive through. We sold many items that were non-pizza like wings, subs, salads, burgers, desserts and side items like fries, mozz, etc. My girlfriend’s family owned the place, so I was familiar with more than just grunt work and had some inside insight into the business numbers that normal workers do not get.

We would never have fulfilled an 18,000 water cup request.

If someone came by with a catering sized order in the drive through, we would have had them park somewhere and told them a relative estimate of how long it would be. Sure, maybe someone would have started on a couple of things, but we wouldn’t be able to fulfill such large orders in the time it took between placing an order and the window. There’s only so many workers.

There was obviously plenty of food waste, but that’s baked into the cost of the items.

I just don’t agree man. It won’t do what most people want it to do, it doesn’t at all work like some kind of science fiction “AI” that we classically think of. It’s great at organizing patterns and helping create models to do a specific use case, but when you try to do some real convoluted multilevel thing it just doesn’t.

We’ve been using ML for a ton of tools in tech for a long time. Crowdstrike, Darktrace and Abnormal are all very successful in the realm of what they do thanks to ML (aka “AI”.)

OCR has been used for so long and has gotten really fucking good, thanks to ML.

I don’t think we’re gonna replace humans for thinking, but we can definitely replace them for boring repetitive actions.