I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.
And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.
I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.
Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.
Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.
I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.
My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.
The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.
Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.
Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.
The problem is conceptual.
There are two types of tracker devices.
AirTags, and similar devices in the Google ecosystem, are short-range Bluetooth beacons. They don’t actually have GPS receivers of their own. They rely on the swarm of other Apple / Android phones in the world that have their Bluetooth radios active. One of those phones picks up the beacon, and sends a report up to Apple / Google with its current location and the beacon signal strength. That is how you can find your stuff, because some random person’s phone called in a sighting. Because these things are very simple, just a very low power Bluetooth transmitter and nothing else, they can run for a year on a coin cell battery.
The other is an actual GPS tracker. This device has a GPS receiver to determine its own location, and a cellular radio to transmit that location elsewhere, often just by sending a text message with its ID and location to some server. This however is physically larger because you need a battery, GPS antenna, cellular antenna, and a cell phone style radio chip. That all uses a lot more power. Most of the ones designed to last for months have a power brick holding 4-8 D-cell batteries, or a large lithium pack. Obviously that is not some tiny thing you lose in a pocket. Those are usually magnetically attached to the bottom of cars. Or, in the case of fleet telemetry, it will be hardwired into the vehicle. But this sort of thing necessarily requires a subscription fee because it has a cellular radio. That cellular thing needs an account with a carrier.
Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?
I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.
But apparently it’s set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.
To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.
I’ll bet they are great live. I actually have only heard one song of theirs, which I found by accident years ago when trying to find something else. Everlasting Light, played live. One of very few songs that completely makes it obvious how much mp3 compression sucks, and even if you download the FLAC (sadly not high res) you can still hear everything wrong with your speakers and if you listen to it on good headphones then you can hear the deficiencies of the mic they used to record it.
Truly a huge amount of audio information in that track. I love it!
That’s assuming raw PCM data, no compression (lossy or lossless) whatsoever.
LDAC can do lossless redbook audio (16 bit 44.1 KHz) at 990kbps. All other modes are lossy.
It’s probably doing something much like FLAC- lossy encoder + residual corrections to ensure you get the original waveform back out, but with less bandwidth than raw PCM.
This one is excellent, thank you for posting I had been re-looking for that for a while.
I would also suggest God’s Debris and I met God on a Train.
All three have a similar idea of questioning the nature of what God might look like. No religious nonsense in any of them.
On a different tack I’d suggest Manna- Two Different Views Of Humanity’s Future. Also a very good read but nothing to do with extracorporeal beings.
The beauty of self hosting is most of it doesn’t actually require that much compute power. Thus, it’s a perfect use for hardware that is otherwise considered absolutely shit. That hardware would otherwise go in the trash. But use it to self host, and in most cases it’s idle most of the time so it doesn’t use much power anyway.
And yet you all are still using SMS two factor authentication. Why does my Xbox video game account have better security than my money?
How does that help for a package of meat that’s leaking meat juice?
I think that there are no all or nothing questions in something like this. I think the lions share of ocean plastic comes from third world countries where ‘dump it in the river’ is the most common form of trash disposal. I think that reducing harm is helpful, whether it’s a little or a lot. I would agree that tackling small issues with extremism while ignoring big ones is performative. For example, telling people in California to take 2 minute showers while ignoring the giant agricultural operations are wasting millions of gallons a day on inefficient air spray sprinkler systems.
Focusing on us, I think keeping plastic out of our landfills is generally a good thing. We use plastic for millions of things in our society. It is simply not feasible to completely switch off plastic, not anytime soon and probably not ever. But reducing or removing single use plastics does an awful lot.
So I say let’s replace single use plastic starting in places where it can be done easily and cheaply, where there are readily available cost effective alternatives.
That is especially true for plastic film, like plastic bags, that can’t be recycled in a normal recycle bin.
Use paper cups instead of styrofoam. Put your take out food in aluminum foil trays or cardboard clamshells. Use paper bags for grocery check out.
And for the vegetables and meats, I don’t suggest banning those because you would get a lot of pushback from both stores and consumers.
This is a good idea. Rather than trying to collect little penny fees here and there, just get rid of the stuff. We don’t need it, we have other options.
I would like to see most single use plastic grocery bags go with that. I think there need to be exceptions, for example produce bags or meat department bags. I haven’t seen a good replacement for those yet. But at the checkout, or for carry out food, just get rid of them.
I would return that UPS and for about the same price or not too much more you could get a cyberpower unit that puts out a real sine wave. Obviously your server does not like Riello’s fake sine wave, so why not feed it the good stuff rather than trying to force it to eat garbage?
Lol Just because the automation exists doesn’t mean it’s always used. In big planes, the system is called cat III autoland and it only works at some airports. It also produces a notoriously rough landing. In little planes, it’s an emergency assistance feature that gives you a ‘emergency land’ button in the cockpit. Not something that you use everyday. And also not something most little planes have, it’s part of a top of the line autopilot system. Given that everything for airplanes costs way too much due to ridiculous certification requirements that do more to keep safety tech out of people’s budgets then to improve safety, not many little planes have it. To take a basic Cessna type airplane and add the system can cost as much as a car.
You can still get a private pilot license if you have 20/40 vision or your eyes can be corrected to 20/40 with glasses or whatever. Even without that, if you can drive you can fly a light sport aircraft. That’s a different category that has more limitations. But those limitations are rapidly going away, FAA is working on something called MOSAIC which will expand the definition of light sport to cover an awful lot of single engine airplanes. And with that you only need a driver’s license.
Pilot here.
There’s already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway.
In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc.
So you could argue that that is already there.
If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says ‘Tessie take me to school!’ and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can’t see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won’t necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren’t going anywhere.
create an out-group so they can control the in-group
That’s not just the media. It’s basically everyone in power. Media, politics, government, corporations… Everyone.
It applies to the Democrats too. Especially in the 2016 election, they managed to successfully make Republicans the out-group. But I believe that was hugely damaging to the country, it created a lot more division when what is really needed is unity to focus on the issues that most people can agree on.
Because here’s the cold truth- there is a body of policies that probably 80% of Americans would agree on. Things like efficient government, ending government corruption, reducing corporate control over government and elections, reducing income inequality, etc.
To quote Dylan Ratigan’s famous rant, the United States is being extracted. And I think most people would like to stop that extraction.
But no major candidate stands for that. Bernie did, but the DNC iced him out because their wealthy corporate donors didn’t want Bernie.
And that in my opinion is why Trump won. Harris certainly didn’t push any major message of radical reform, just a bunch of the usual ‘help the middle class’ talk. Trump may be terrifying, but he does push a message of radical reform and changing the system.
To write that off and say half the country is racist or misogynist is to avoid learning from this situation.
I think most commenters here are missing the point.
There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people’s sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women’s room and being around their little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.
Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as ‘transphobic’ don’t actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.
For me personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I generally don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means.
At the same time though, I don’t think it’s transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
So while I certainly don’t want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women’s sports to those who are genetically female.
Third party voter here. I don’t expect any third party candidate to win. My home state of Connecticut is solidly blue. All of our electoral votes WILL go to Harris, no vote of mine could change that even if I wanted it to, which I don’t. I am no fan of Trump.
I vote for whichever third party looks likely to get the most total votes, because of a third party can drum up 5% of the total national popular vote they get a lot more federal election funds in the next election.
My voting priority is for next cycle, to get a third party on the debate stage. That’s what I’m voting for.
More likely, most of the sources that produce photos and videos would not be using the digital signatures. Professional cameras for journalists probably would have the signature chip. Cheapo Chinese surveillance cameras? Unlikely.
I believe Darwin might have had something to say about this attitude…