There is nothing more cat than hanging out, getting cuddles, and then running like hell at the first sign of danger.

It is more than a bit of a fallacy, but the general idea is that any product worth using will distinguish itself. Whereas the products that spend vast amounts of money on advertisement “can’t stand on their own”.

Like I said, it is a fallacy that insists companies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and ignores the reality of the landscape these days.

THAT said: nordvpn goes REALLY hard on the advertisements and is still one of the more popular/few remaining big sponsors for podcasts and influencers. And THAT gives me pause because it has generally been shown that those are horrible venues for “getting a product out there” and mostly exist to take advantage of parasocial relationships. And, based on the linus media group leaks and corroboration from various twitch streamers, the big outfits are asking for a LOT of money per sponsorship spot.

And considering there is no way to really vet a VPN and you are inherently trusting them to do what they say they do (or do the good version of what they don’t even bother to talk about)…

And the way that many (most? (all?)) private trackers implement their monitoring kind of requires an open port.

Like basically all tech companies, the leadership are libertarian tech bros. It sucks, but whatever. The problem is also that the CEO (?) has been making public statements to try and cozy up to the trump administration over the past few months

Some of that still falls under the LTB effect (These policies benefit the company so fuck everyone else, etc) and it DOES make sense for a company to try and earn themselves an exception for the upcoming hellscape in a market that will REALLY want VPNs. But it still leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Not in an “I MUST LEAVE PROTON NOW” state since I like the products because they tend to be pretty honest about what they will and won’t do when the goons come a knocking and that mostly boils down to “cooperate. So do X Y and Z to protect yourself by preventing us from having the information they want”). But that, plus protonmail being kind of a shitshow if you want to keep offline copies of your emails, is motivation to shop around.

It is “news worthy” in that basically every outlet doing printer reveiws/content will mention it. Even fricking Norm on Tested pointed out the problems with bambu and the issues if you want to use the laser cutter on anything other than Windows.

Holy shit. There is so much gatekeeping here that Cerberus themselves would say “Yo dog, take it down a notch”

I think there are two big aspects to this.

The first is that, yes, we are seeing a big push toward locked down ecosystems. Bambu is a great example of this and people are still falling all over each other to talk about how amazing their products are. And, as someone who has been pointing out that AMSes don’t actually do what people think they do for years now, it has been frustrating to watch them take over the cultural zeitgeist even before the current bullshit.

Which leads into the second aspect. FDM printing is very much a “prosumer” hobby. It is about taking industrial/corporate processes and marketing them to hobbyists. Some of that is awesome because it provides a platform to rapidly prototype and iterate on new tech (which benefits the companies more than the users but…) and some of that is miserable because it means we have astroturfing campaigns out there to explain to people why they NEED 24 AMSes chained together for their single printer… because that model works a lot better for print farms.

And, as an aside before I get to the “real” point: We see the same with home cooking. There was a MASSIVE push that everyone should sous vide everything for a couple years. And… that was mostly because we had restaurant chefs talking to The Masses without a Food Network/PBS producer telling them to shut up. So OBVIOUSLY the best steak you will ever eat is the one that spent 11 hours in a hot water bath and was quickly seared to be plated in under 5 minutes. Rather than the understanding that this is a crutch used because a line cook can’t spend 10 minutes butter basting their steak.

And most of that still is incredibly obnoxious and outright wasteful. But it also led to people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt who used that to popularize “reverse sear” cooking.

So, now to the real point. People are gate keeping mother fuckers. They are angry that they had to read twelve different articles to figure out what “the paper trick” was rather than having a printer having an automatic tool that kind of gets you… probably closer than you would have gotten anyway. And countless other pain points that were resolved because… they were pain points.

And people decide THEY are heroes and legends rather than realizing that people like Naomi Wu et al came before them and got it to the point where it was learnable for the hobbyist sickos.

Which… not to shit on the OP TOO much (I would not be surprised if this came out of the LLM pass) but it is why I more than side eye anything that has “Make them great (again)”. Because, invariably, it is a case of people yearning for a time that never actually existed where they are on top and everyone bows before them.

Yes. the system logs every entry/exit by keyfob.

Whether the building managers associate those fobs with individuals or even know how to look at the log is a different discussion entirely.

That said: If the building cares enough to have a lock on the door then they have a camera too and THAT is much more likely to be recorded. So if your “friend” depends on people not knowing he is entering or exiting his building for whatever reason… good luck with that.

Fun story time: I used to work at a facility that was VERY strict about people badging in and even out of many areas. At one point it came up in a safety debrief that there was no way to log who was inside or outside of an area… that required badging in and out. Could see someone’s brain cell trigger in real time as they proceeded to ask a lot of very pointed questions that boiled down to:

They had an access control list that was checked. They did not know how to access the log files to know when that list was checked or even the result of a check. The person who asked questions was pushed out of the company because it was easier.

If a government has you in the nebulous situation where you technically aren’t in the country yet and they want your phone, it doesn’t really matter what security system you have on there. You either give them access or go to a black site.

That’s why every company of “moderate” size ends up adopting a policy of “DEVICE for foreign travel”. You don’t take your actual work laptop/phone/whatever. You take a burner (except they hate the term “burner”) that can remote in but stores little to no data locally. And you realize that any good remote access software has logic to detect if you are accessing it from a security checkpoint and flag you…

So what does that mean for you, an individual?

• A super locked down device is just gonna get your ass beat… if you are lucky.
• A completely clean factory wiped device? That is going to raise a bunch of red flags (kind of rightfully) and more or less equate to the above

Like almost all things privacy/security related: Nothing is easy if you actually need it. A good friend of mine is a journalist and they semi-regularly do the kinds of stories that get a person “investigated”. And the reality is that there is nothing they can do, in software, to protect themselves. So what they instead do is have completely separate devices that are never in the same physical location. So, unless they are communicating with a sensitive contact, they always have a device that “looks real” because… it is. Texts from the partner about a dinner party next week, spam from facebook, etc.

And if they need to access something sensitive while on foreign travel or otherwise unable to get back to their “private” devices? Either buy a cheap laptop at a best buy equivalent or use one of their burner emails/accounts.

I want to agree with Beart but…

SAG et al have already more or less abandoned voice actors. In the very near future it won’t matter if actors agree to work for these companies because they won’t NEED those actors. They’ll have training data or they’ll pay randos off the street to generate some training data that they then heavily tweak to sound like Ashley Burch and so forth.

And before people pretend that consumers won’t stand for that: Anyone with any knowledge of scene composition or lighting clowns on Netflix et al near constnatly. Guess what the super popular movies that everyone watches are? Because, yeah, there will still be works of art like a Blade Runner or even an Anora (the plot was shite but the cinematography was peak). They’ll pale in comparison to people pretending they aren’t going to watch Happy Gilmore 2.

And same with VA. People will claim they are opposed and it is horrible and complete trash compared to a human… and they’ll still buy the games until having “human” voice acting is the exception and only for “arthouse” games.

You’ve kind of keyed in on one of the things I was hesitant to say:

There are two big uses for an “offline” media library.

Some people just use it for all the stuff they grabbed off the pirate bay (probably avoid TPB in 2025 but…). You don’t really care about quality and just want to consume media.

Others, like myself, primarily use it to rip/back up their blu rays and UHDs and the like. If I am watching on my TV in the living room? I want that to be the highest quality I have available and I want to revel in every shadow gradient and so forth. If I am watching it on my computer? I don’t need anywhere near that much detail. And on a tablet? Compress that shit like an exec at netflix just saw the storage arrays.

That is the benefit of transcoding and offline caching. It means you, as a “server”, just focus on backing up your library/finding the best quality rips or whatever. And you, as a “user”, don’t have to worry about figuring out how many different versions to keep so that you always have an appropriate version for whatever your use case is that week.

Storage is cheap until it isn’t.

On my desktop where I have something like 6 TB of NVME storage because I am a sicko? The only thing that makes me think twice about a flatpak is if I need to give it access to devices or significant parts of my filesystem (yay permissions weirdness).

On my laptop where I can have one drive and replacing it involves opening the entire laptop AND reinstalling Fedora (or dealing with clonezilla/dd)? Yeah… I very much care about just how much bloat I am dealing with. And, as the other person pointed out, flatpaks can balloon REAL fast.

If dependencies are articulated (and maintained…) properly, it is very doable and is intrinsically tied to what semantic versioning is actually supposed to represent. So appfoo depends in libbar@2:2.9 and so forth. Of course, the reality is that libbar is poorly maintained and has massive API/header breaking changes every point release and was dependent on a bug in libbar@2.1.3.4.5 anyway.

Its one of the reasons why I like approaches like Portage or Spack that are specifically about breaking an application’s dependencies down and concretizing. Albeit, they also have the problem where they overconcretize and you have just as much, if not more, bloat. But it theoretically provides the best of both worlds… at the cost of making a single library take 50 minutes to install because you are compiling everything for the umpteenth time.

And yeah… I run way too many appimages too.

Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.

And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to “weirdness” when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a…

That’s nice.

That doesn’t work if you are on an airplane (unless you want to spend the entire flight downloading one episode). Or if you just don’t want to deal with hotel wifi. Or if you just don’t want to expose your internal home network at all.

Which is the point and why this is one of those big features of plex that there are so many tickets and requests to get into jellyfin et al. Because yes, you can just copy files from your NAS to your phone’s internal storage (assuming you don’t care about transcoding and the like)… at which point there isn’t much use to a metadata oriented media server/service.

Or you can just set up Plex to always download the next 10 episodes of whatever show you are watching when it has network access. I mean… that probably won’t work (see: 40%) but when it does, it is awesome. Which is the “it just works” functionality.

Which gets back to the issue where, because it is FOSS, it is the greatest thing ever and anyone asking for anything else is wrong and stupid. Which is a shame because if the Jellyfin devs could actually get the “download the next N episodes” functionality to reliably work (even at 80-90%) it would be a killer app. And, for what it is worth, I have liked the devs a lot when I interacted with them in the past. But the users and evangelists are just… what we can see in this thread.

Did they? Or is that still the old hack of “just download the raw file. Your tablet is just a computer”?

Because I didn’t see it advertised on the main web page and a quick google got me to https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/364 which is open and abandoned tickets for the ios apps.

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-offline-downloads?pid=16373#pid16373 suggests it is also in the same boat for android. You can find workarounds but they aren’t using jellyfin.

Which is “fine”. I watched WAY too many movies over the years with VLC on a laptop. But… why are we using a shim to treat a library as a streaming service in that case? Which gets back to Jellyfin just not actually being a Plex alternative for the majority of users.

Yeah.

Jellyfin is spectacular for LAN usage on two computers. Once you start using devices (because, you know, that is what people tend to plug into their TVs…) or going on travel, it rapidly becomes apparent that it just isn’t a competitor.

Hell, a quick google suggests jellyfin STILL doesn’t have caching of media for offline viewing. Plex’s works maybe 40% of the time but… 40% is still higher than 0%.

I have a lifetime pass for Plex and encourage anyone who even kind of cares to get one next time it is on sale (or shortly before the scheduled price hike). I have tried Jellyfin a few times over the years and… it is basically exactly what I hate with FOSS “alternatives”. It isn’t an alternative in the slightest but people insist on talking it up because they want it to be and that just makes people less willing to try genuinely good alternatives.

To put it bluntly, Plex is an “offline netflix” as it were. Jellyfin is a much better version of smbstation and all the other stuff we used to stream porn to our playstations back in the day.

I think this kind of sums up everything. “Well, they are actively trying to lock down the ecosystem and make everything worse but shiny ad!”

As for the industry as a whole: Multi-filament setups have always been a marketing tool. They are useful in lab environments where you want users to be able to switch from prototyping to production filament without ever touching the bowden tube. Actual multi-material prints are INCREDIBLY finicky due to temperature needs and multicolor prints are a novelty that people use for social media clout but stop when they realize it can increase print times by an order of magnitude.

But multi-tool? That DOES start to make (some) multi-material prints viable as you can balance ambient temperature between the filaments and keep both strands near enough to temperature that you can still bond the layers. And multi-color is even easier.

That said? Having both filament in the same printhead/tool is going to have a large impact on what kinds of multi-material prints you can do because it is two differently hot things in the same box. Which is why most existing multi-tool setups are closer to a “real” CNC mill where said tools (think “printheads”) are kept on a shelf in the back of the chamber and the arm swaps them. Both (Will Smith’s Tested’s) Adam Savage and Shane from Stuff Made Here have done great videos demonstrating these and why are so awesome.

I dunno. I am pretty certain that the big thing for 2025/2026 (if chips and supply chains hold) will be multi-tool setups. In large part because CNC Kitchen and a few other channels have been doing deep dives on multi-filament versus multi-tool setups and it is pretty known that Stefan has a lot of industry contacts. I assume it will basically be the same as it was for the multi-filament era: Bambu is early/first to product for a consumer friendly version and all of their poor decisions (massive amounts of filament waste) become industry standard as everyone copies them. But they will have a drastically reduced social media presence this time since most of the major FDM influencers either have ethics or realize they can just get a bigger sack of cash from Prusa and Qidi.

So… I assume that means linus media group are going to do a massive collaboration with Bambu, heh.

Nah. he is just gonna make selling your stocks (if you aren’t an oligarch) just as much a terrorism as attacking a tesla.

If you find an author you like, check their website. There are decent odds they directly sell ebooks or link to their publisher’s website first. I’ve heard mixed reports on it, but some people claim buying direct from the publisher gives the writer a bigger cut (and, obviously, buying from them directly does).

Usually resutls in a DRM free ebook without any effort.

Yeah. Adobe is basically easy mode. It is why so many people, erroneously, claim that Kobo has no DRM (it also uses Adobe Digital Editions).

Guides for that are basically everywhere and versions don’t matter at all. Was going to set that up with just a bottle but it is harder to get ADE to run under wine than it is to use the drm removal plugin with it and I have this Windows VM just sitting in a folder…