People judging parents doesn’t sit that well with me. Another example is Brian Laundrie’s parents, who did the exact opposite and attracted everyone’s ire for it, as if it was a simple decision to turn in or cover for your homicidal son. Society vs family, where either choice is a failure towards the other side, is the kind of scenario you get snipped over.

Honestly, I’d prolly die day 1, but as a Honduran, I’d probably consider volunteering to go to Panama and fight you guys if you do end up sending armed forces to take the Canal. Fuck you guys…I mean, not you specifically, or anyone here for that matter, but… you know what I mean…

I honestly don’t think I’d notice a real world difference between 4G and H+ in most scenarios except for, maybe, video. I never understood the hype for 5G, especially considering the horrendous frequency limitations that imply line of sight AND very small coverage radii.

The article makes no mention to the molecules only working on cancer cells. The molecules, according to the article, attach to cell membranes, and then the molecules are jiggled to blow up the cells. That process doesn’t mention an ability to differentiate between cancer and non-cancer cells. The technique was tried on a culture growth, where a hammer would have the same results. It was also tried on mice, where half were left cancer-free, but little is said about the process, the specifics of the results, or what happened to the other half of mice.

We all get the goal of cancer research, OP is just doubtful that this achieves it, as am I, as well as anyone who’s read good news about eradicating cancer in the past few decades. Most are duds or go nowhere even if initially promising, so…

The problem is the content being uploaded to these platforms serves a real and meaningful public, community purpose. Reddit has always been a knowledge base for a plethora of different subjects, YouTube has all sorts of content that has historical importance to the internet, as well as a trove of educational content that is unparalleled in size and quality.

I take issue with that, because it’s not the company’s content, it’s just their platform. The content is vastly more important than the platform, but the companies act as if it’s theirs. They do everything based off what the community has built on their platforms, it’s their true essence and what actually attracts people.

In the specific case of YouTube, I’d say that content is irreplaceable and indispensable. While it’s true that it is a privately owned platform and we don’t have much of a say on its direction, I truly believe the content is so important that the only viable path forward to prevent its loss, is to take said platform off private hands. I don’t believe it’ll ever happen, but it is what should happen, as it’s literally impossible to back up YouTube, just like it’s currently impossible to compete with YouTube.

I don’t trust shipping internationally.

It’s the only way I can get anything, and it can and will go badly, but it is what it is. Currently dealing with returning the wrong version of a pixel 8 pro via Amazon, all the way from Honduras. Amazon’s outsourced CS from India doesn’t help one bit, those guys don’t read for shit. We have one advantage, though, there’s some legal Grey area thingy going on in Honduras and we can import and pay simply based on weight or volume. Like $0.80 per pound if shipped via water. No import fees, even though we should be paying them (and last I checked, they’re high). Gotta love third world countries, amirite?

SSDs are only 2 times more expensive […] and that makes it worth it for me given all the advantages the offer.

Speaking as someone from Honduras, 2-3x the price for the same functionality, specifically if it’s going to a NAS, doesn’t cut it for me. HDDs are reliable and cheap enough that, if you have the physical space, they make the most sense, and if you need the extra speed, you throw a couple of SSDs in raid 1 for caching. Maybe if you’re going for a smaller-sized NAS, and especially if you’re going to do stuff like video editing off it, SSDs make sense. For my needs, which is mostly data hoarding/photo editing/content serving through plex or jellyfin, I want the most space and can accept gigabit speeds (although an SSD cache would alleviate speed constraints if I wanted more than gigabit speeds).

Of course, if you’re not aiming to build or maintain a NAS, absolutely don’t go for an HDD in 2023. That’s probably the same advice I’d give anyone if they’d asked me in the past 5 to 8 years, though.

I don’t understand why more people don’t do this, but if you go to pcpartpicker.com, go to start a build, go to storage, and sort by price per gb, you’ll get all the info you need. I’ve purchased Seagate Exos X20 20TB drives for under $350 us dollars this year. I buy off Amazon US and ship to my country, Honduras. I believe ebay has them at $319 or something.

For reference, that’s around $0.016 usd/gb with some smaller drives going for as low as $0.011 usd/gb (you can get a 6tb Seagate enterprise drive for $64 us dollars), whereas the cheapest SSD you can get is still going to cost you at least twice to three times as much, at $0.037 usd/gb for the cheapest SSD on pcpartpicker, which is still a 2TB SSD for $75 us dollars (crucial p3 plus), amazing value for an SSD but still has a hard time competing with HDDs.

5 20tb HDDs in raid5, for about 1.2-1.5k

I’m in this exact same boat and I don’t love it. I don’t know if my ADHD is acting up or if YouTube has made my productivity take a nosedive (got fired a month ago due to it), but I can’t help myself from watching hours of YouTube a day. I feel like reddit was at least easier to disengage from in order to be productive.

I use mine whenever I want to use my M50Xs. I tried buds, twice. Galaxy buds and Sony XM4s, the XM4s fell into a pool and the galaxy buds were simply misplaced. The galaxy buds sounded like absolute trash while the XM4 were actually decent, but why would I prefer them over the M50X? Now I’m switching from my note 9 to the pixel 8 pro and I don’t know what I’ll be doing about the lack of headphone jack.

My girlfriend has it even worse, her car only has AUX, no Bluetooth. I got her a Pixel 8 for Christmas, so she’ll lose the only way to put music in her car. I also don’t know what I’ll be doing about that.

Honest take? We’ve got neural chips on our phones, we got cameras rivaling pro-level cameras, but we keep losing some very essential and basic features for no fucking reason. The headphone jack should’ve never been removed. Hell, the IR blaster should’ve never been removed, I’d kill for a high end phone with such things. Radio is another one, it’s never going away as a means of communication, but fuck me for thinking I should have an antenna for radio in a box full of antennas for everything else, right?

Hey maybe I’m wrong about radio and it’s just unfeasible to provide good quality signal for all things in a 6 inch box. Maybe I’m wrong about the IR blaster somehow even though TVs, LED stripes, and garage doors still use IR. But it’s ridiculous to force no headphone jack as a trend that everyone just follows, all for pricier and shittier Bluetooth buds.

We used to be able to fit all this shit into phones back then, there’s 0 reason to exclude them over size constraints now. If the reason is “butt fastah phowns”, my 5 year old note 9 still feels more than snappy enough. Maybe we should spend more time making our shit efficient in order to use less space for heat dissipation, as well as better battery life or less battery size for the same battery life. Seriously who needs the kind of computing power found on phones nowadays? Is it really worth it to sacrifice basic QOL functionality for more speed?

For real, we need more phones that are compatible with GrapheneOS. Going to Google for THE De-googled phone is nothing shy of extremely ironic and borderline hypocritical.

I’m too retarded to understand SMART values so, I 100% have read errors on them, I have no idea what the numbers mean, though, so I can’t say how bad it is. I don’t see critical failures or unrecoverable errors being reported on them, so I don’t sweat it too much.

You can get 20tb seagate exos drives for ~$15/tb on ebay, sometimes on Amazon as well.

We can agree about piracy being detrimental for sure! We just disagree on how detrimental it is vs corpo’s own actions.

Regarding the donations, it’s “give whatever you want, even 0, and inly when I say we need new gear”, so I wouldn’t say it’s lost revenue since barely anyone donates and it all goes directly to covering part of the cost of new hard drives. I’ve asked for donations twice so far, and none of the times have seen enough donations to cover for 100% of equipment expenses. Just thought I’d clarify on the “donations” thing :)

I’d have to give Amazon, HBO, Hulu, Disney, crunchyroll, etc. Donations as well since they’re contributing just as much, if not more than, Netflix to my collection now👀

I’m personally dying to see the DMA do its magic. If there’s even a dreamy chance of not having to have the big messaging apps installed on my phone in order to talk to people on these platforms, then I don’t want to stop dreaming.

They’re called donations for a reason, it’s a contribution to keep the service growing (not going since I’m personally invested in keeping it going for as long as possible) and nobody is forced to give a dime if they don’t want to.

At least for piracy of streaming content, I believe what should become apparent to everyone is that convenience drove down piracy and greatly increased gains for everyone, and once corporations got greedy and started rolling out new platforms and fragmenting content between them, everything started going down the drain. Even without accounting for piracy, convenience was lost, multiple platforms mean more fees to get the same content that was originally in one platform, so less people willing to pay. Less income per platform drives down investment in content and drives up cancelations of ongoing projects. Less income than was originally observed when a single platform had condensed content means there’s greater incentive to drive ads and increases prices on all platforms, thus also potentially driving down users subscribing to said platforms.

None of that factors in piracy. If we do factor in piracy, it’s a fact that before fragmentation, subscription rates were high, and after fragmentation, there’s a lot more incentive to pirate content. In some instances, platforms shoot themselves in the foot even further by further charging rental fees or purchases of individual content, as well as region blocks and ads.

Piracy surely is a problem all throughout the history of streaming services (something that could still be argued as not actually something to worry about because those pirates were never going to be customers in the first place, and Netflix was still booming enough to incentivize other companies to roll out their own platforms), but it becomes a symptom of another problem later down the line due to lack of convenience. Even so, the current state of streaming platforms wouldn’t be much different if piracy wasn’t happening. People would simply consume less content due to budget constraints or due to being annoyed at lack of conveniences.

I personally hate depending on a platform that on a whim may decide to remove content I watch. There’s specific songs that have disappeared from my Spotify playlists for no good reason (a lot for geoblocking reasons), there’s shows that just get removed from Netflix, there’s all of game of thrones on prime which I couldn’t watch due to geoblocking and ended up having to pirate it even though I was paying for a platform which had the show. It’s a lot easier, a lot more convenient, to pirate. The content is yours, instantly, until you decide to delete it from your computer. I didn’t mind paying for Netflix for years, and since they incentivized account sharing, I shared the account with 2 other friends and we split the cost. It was super convenient. Now, I have a plex library nearing the 50tb mark with about 40 people watching content on it, everything automated and everyone can request whatever they want, and I simply ask for donations to buy more drives. It’s still more expensive than subscription services due to energy costs, donations not being enough for the equipment needed to store content and run services, and costs of internet, static ips, and domain names, but I’m not planning to stop as it’s overall more convenient, not just for me, but for 40 other people.

Right? I feel it’s really snobby and disingenuous to just snap back and say “just ditch that and use so and so messaging app”, as if messaging platforms didn’t require your direct peers to also use them. As long as messaging platforms operate as walled gardens, we have little say on what apps we use. We’re at the mercy of the general populace and that’s all there is to it, at least until the DMA changes things. I really tried to make people jump ship from WhatsApp to telegram during what seemed like a mass exodus from even businesses (yeah bad choice but I didn’t know back then), ended up back on WhatsApp some 3 months later with my tail between my legs, nobody stayed on telegram even though a ton of people downloaded it and jumped in. Now imagine trying to get them all to use a privacy-focused app that gives them a hard time using it in multiple devices. Convenience is the reason why Meta, Apple, Google, MSFT, etc. are on top. You can’t expect the general populace to sacrifice it for privacy, not after continuously giving up freedom and privacy for the sake of convenience for decades in the digital space.

You honestly got me thinking about the viability of throwing android TV on an RP4. I have one that I was going to use for a magic mirror, but I never got around to building it. I’m guessing I could find a remote and an IR module for the RP4, then just load android TV to it? Time to go down the rabbit hole…