IRC depends on channel and time of day

Some channels are pretty active

I have 1gig cable and it works fine. Theoretically can work up to 10 gig down and 1gig up with docsis3.1, which is part of why the US drags its feet on fiber rollout, but it’s far more sensitive to quality of cable

In addition to this I didn’t even touch upon the resentment towards stupid bullshit outside of defense

Like I like in Pennsylvania and the amount of tax dollars that are spent propping up fossil fuel industries. Like I want to spend money on developing energy infrastructure, of course. But I want that money to go into putting power lines underground (my power goes out every six weeks minimum and 2-3x a year for over 24hours, sometimes over 72), nuclear, solar, hydroelectric, etc

But what do I get? Fracking, propping up the coal industry, etc. fucking ridiculous.

Road quality decreases and yet no public transportation expansion. It’s garbage if you have a car and if you don’t it’s impossible if you’re outside of a city.

So that stuff too

I became more aware of how much tax I was paying when I became self employed because instead of paying a bit out of each check like a w2 worker I have to pay it in lump sums quarterly.

I run a low overhead medical practice so I don’t have a tax cheat llc, I take the standard deduction every year and as a result my taxes are pretty much the same as they ever were. Even though it’s roughly the same amount (slightly more actually, now that I cut out the overhead of medical systems stealing 30-60% of my labor) there’s something psychological about paying the amount in a lump sum

I think paying taxes is important and I want to do. However I feel conflicted about spending this money because what I feel paying taxes are important for are generally not what my tax dollars fund, and increasingly so. I want to pay and gladly will for community enrichment, better public schools, access to healthcare, infrastructure like roads, power lines, sewers, moving away from fossil fuels, better handling of trash and recycling programs, rehabilitation programs for criminal offenders, mental health programs including interim programs like community supports and mobile programs that exist in between outpatient and inpatient, social welfare programs that give people access to housing, food, electricity, etc

But instead my taxes pay for these things increasingly less. About 20% of my taxes go to military and defensive spending and while I do think some amount needs to go to this I think it’s absurd. Most countries spend 3-5% on defensive spending. Even China, the second highest after the US, spends 6%.

So I don’t resent paying taxes but I do resent how much when roughly 1/5th of that goes to defense contractors to launder billions from taxpayer and Israel for genocide. I also resent that my tax burden continually increases despite making roughly $60-70k a year while the services around me continually decrease.

I remember reading a conspiracy theory that this key was purposely put in by a liberal employee who believed everything should be free and that’s why the first 5 digits are FCKGW - fuck George w - and that it was the volume license for Lockheed Martin or something

It’s not true but interestingly this key was leaked before windows xp even came out, like a month before, and it’s suspected to be a VLK from dell

Nowadays they’d probably say leftist

FYI there are some sites that index and archive some of the bigger lemmy instances fyi. I don’t know if this is the case for your instance but if you posted to say, lemmy.world there is a chance your post/comment is archived on a 3rd party site that you have 0 control over

Same issue reddit had, except not nearly as bad as reddit was very thoroughly archived prior to the api changes

Sunbeam f1

More than that I remember when you could MOD your phone

You had some money burning a hole in your pocket and/or were good at tinkering? You could change the casing of your phone, add gaudy flashing LEDs, etc

Real nerds like me would wire LEDs into circuits on the phone so that when it rang they triggered. Combine that with some of the circuits from the “baby’s first circuits” book and then you have a ring of LEDs around the screen that chase each other like the knight rider car when it rings. You can see them because OF COURSE you swapped the case with translucent plastic like a 1998 N64 or gameboy color. The resale value is now $8

Some designer asshole was like “b-b-b-b-but that’s not good design!!! My training says so! Myspace.com, livejournal, and geocities are a travesty! Soft edges and muted colors everywhere! All logos have to be a stupid flat piece of shit! Webpages should take much longer to load even though computers are literally hundreds of thousands of times faster! Now everything is BLAND and it SUCKS. I hate the future

Use tunemymusic to export playlist and import into deezer/tidal or use songdata.io to convert spotify urls to deezer/tidal urls then use streamrip

https://github.com/nathom/streamrip

Supports qobuz, tidal, deezer, soundcloud

More labor intensive but you’ll get higher quality files this way (can get 16 bit 44.1khz or even 96khz 24bit if you have premium tidal and it’s available for the song although that’s generally way overkill)

There’s probably ways to rip directly from spotify but in my experience a lot of apps that claim they can rip at the highest quality of the network don’t actually do it. They’ll export a 320mp3 or flac or whatever but they really transcode a lower bitrate file. If that doesn’t matter to you then stuff like notecable works (never tested for spotify but for apple music it def transcodes lossless).

Depends on what your use is for. If it’s strictly personal and you don’t care about lossless audio then whatever. If you plan to upload to red or something and it’s a notable album someone will probably recognize it’s a transcode at some point. Whatever method you use there’s a thread there where you can post spectrals to check before you upload and it can save you grief.

That said I would like to know a way to get top quality from spotify. There is a single album that is only on spotify and no other streaming platforms and as far as I can tell no one has ripped it. If you or I figure it out you should rip https://open.spotify.com/album/1kQYg5es8a8Q1tfTgiH3TV . Great album and I don’t have premium. I have some of the singles on vinyl

Finamp and a few others but plexamp is really plex’s strongest point. Alternatively you can also do a Navidrome or supersonic install and point that at your music

They Jellyfin music apps aren’t bad (Finamp is very solid, actually) but I’ve heard plexamp is quite good. Nothing does sonic analysis besides plexamp as far as I know. Someone will maybe eventually do this for Jellyfin but the music side of Jellyfin in general is weaker tbh

Not the same at all. I realize this is my fault for poorly communicating. I want to sit down while being enveloped in toasty water that brings me back to the only peaceful period of my life, the uterine experience. And really I want to lay down

Wishing that the west had the bathtub culture of Japan so I could be sitting down

Well also from the dev in that thread:

“Dev here, this is correct. Casting is done through them [Vizbee] to simplify our end of the implementation for device discovery and any future new protocols such as Matter Casting. But there is absolutely no tracking being done whatsoever.

They have a tracking product as well which is probably why their domain names ended up on these ad blocking lists, but Plex uses none of this. You can validate this yourself by looking at any network traffic to their actual analytics domain name, events.claspws.tv.”

Maybe plex is changing things for the sake of changing things, maybe they are seriously concerned about matter support for the 3% of users that care about such a feature, or maybe they’re setting up the framework for ad tracking now so it can be easily deployed later. They do have a 40 million dollar investment round to make good on, and that might be a “other things aren’t working to make us profitable enough” idea

https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-android-app-doesnt-work/916336/5

same as usual: team of long-existing, beloved product feels need to justify existence / “modernize” product. it starts off with a plan of having feature parity, but over time the project starts to drag on and features start being cut as “unimportant” or “for later”. eventually the team says fuck it and launches what they have, assuming it is good enough since it works in all the ways they test it themselves.

fuck plex, Jellyfin forever. That said you can use alternative frontends like kodi with plex for kodi plugin (you can do this with jellyfin as well though the plugin is different, jellyfin for kodi). This can be a better option to avoid this bullshit for both as the weakest part of jellyfin imo is the client apps (depending on platform, some are pretty solid)

AI absolutely is the new search but only because the major search engines normal people use have completely destroyed their core products functionality for advertising revenue

AI will likely follow suit. In 5-10 years chatgpt or bard or whatever will give you a completely and obviously biased response promoting a product or service with a sponsored interstitial that is labeled as sponsored before you get the answer to make it seem like the obviously biased answer isn’t a gamed response

It’s good that you’re looking to expand your food repertoire

If you’re dealing with arfid though you should consider a desensitization protocol to help deal with sensory or phobic response driving the arfid. What this looks like varies because it depends on what drives your arfid: is it a fear of aversive reaction, is it sensory, disinterest, etc.

That said building on what you have can be helpful. Changing the burritos slightly - change the protein, add a new vegetable, add guacamole, etc. try a new flavor of protein bar, etc.

If you’re looking for something in the healthy/low prep side of things I tend to make one big meal on sundays for the week and portion it out. It takes about 30-60 minutes depending on what I make. Japanese curry, various pastas, salads, soups, etc. how healthy these are varies. I am vegan so they tend to be a little bit better than the typical recipe you’d see online but some are still not the most healthy (Japanese curry for example is fairly high in fat but portioned correctly with rice is still filling and a reasonable amount of calories)

There’s a supposed message from one of the admins promising it will return

If it does come back it will likely take ages given much of the 20 year old hacked together source leaked. If they simply relaunched as is it would likely go down again in minutes

Chinese cctv systems with AI are dangerous because they let the government watch their citizens for control and repression

Not like domestic drones, traffic cameras used for surveillance, DHS CCTV networks, the sea of cameras that every citizen owns that can be subpoenaed, and the WAMI program with automation software for tracking that has been deployed since 2013. Those are tools of freedom to keep Americans safe

I had a time where the dreaded situation people warn about happen: a parity drive failed during rebuild to replace a drive that had failed. Rebuild operations are stressful on drives. And if you’re like me in a home setup you probably aren’t swapping out drives preemptively, you’re waiting until smart errors occur because you’re not made of money and the data isn’t truly critical

There are many ways to pursue proper backups (to op), backblaze works for me (though there are some that are more privacy focused, not that backblaze is terrible on that front). I also have tape backup but this is overkill and $$$, really only worthwhile to pursue if you have a gigantic nas and also are good at tinkering (can refurbish cheap drives sold as broken). There are a number of other options too

4tb is nothing in the days of 20tb hdds

If you want a NAS you don’t need a beefy pc. I started mine with an ewaste office pc (like literally a $40 2013 pc from a doctors office). I now have a much beefier setup that is still all recycled hardware, 10th gen intel build, but mainly because I wanted to add wayyyyyy more drives and do stuff with vms and local llms and such. otherwise you really don’t need “power” and having it is actually detrimental as it will cost you more money in electricity to run (also the environment)

Keep in mind a NAS/raid is NOT BACKUP. It is far more resilient to keep your data on a raid array of 3-4 4tb drives than simply keeping it on a second external drive that might just die at any moment. But all it takes is one day where a drive in the array dies and then a parity drive dies during rebuild and then poof, your data is gone.

You could do raid 1 with like 3 mirror disks but this is excessive and you could still get got by various things: bitrot, house burning down, power surge, controller failure, you fuck things up, etc

A proper backup solution is necessary if the data is critical.