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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • Do you need it to do realtime video transcoding of high resolution video (>1080p)? If so, you may need a video card to do it efficiently. Otherwise, that should be more than sufficient. I know others have recommended a raspberry pi, but I don’t think jellyfin supports arm CPUs, though I could be wrong. So you’d have to run it in a virtualization layer and that would increase the hardware resources and may or may not be OK on a pi, but likely would not be as energy efficient as a pi usually is and almost definitely will have trouble with realtime transcoding.

    To get around the realtime transcoding you can either make sure your devices support the codecs of the videos you are playing, or you can use a separate device to do batch transcoding of the files before giving them to jellyfin. I haven’t implemented jellyfin yet, though it’s next on my list, so I’m not sure if there are ways to do background transcoding inside it.

    If you’re not hung up on Jellyfin, check whatever streaming software for it’s hardware recommendations, but Jellyfin is pretty good overall from my playing with it. It’s not the lowest resource using system, though.



  • RCS text messaging is another to consider, at least in the US. The carriers implanted it in a proprietary way, so only Apple and Google apps have it. It’s a poor substitute for an IM/chat app and not private and secure like it was promised due to poor implementations, but it’s still far better than plain SMS. I still have people I can’t get to use Signal or another secure IM app.

    The Android Auto is the only one I’d be sad about. I love not having to use my phone’s screen for navigation and the navigation built into most cars is crap and expensive to keep maps and data updated. I like being able to use any navigation app, though Google Maps/Waze is still the only one I’ve found that has both live traffic info, which is extremely important with my city, and reading the street names rather than just “turn left” it says “turn left on some street” so I don’t have to look at the screen as much.

    I use GrapheneOS and that’s what I won’t be able to replace once I finish my Immich and Home Assistant self host setups to replace Google Photos and Google Home/Nest, but st least they are sandboxed a bit.

    Though Google has been moving to make it even more difficult to use their apps on these alternate OSes. Like I just found that Google Photos latest version pops up a not closeable error screen if it doesn’t have full “photos and video” access. Doesn’t work with the limited access or storage scopes that come with GrapheneOS, at least for now. I have photos I don’t want google to scan and index even if they are not being uploaded, which they do now. It’s obviously a ploy to get access to your data since it used to work fine. Now, I just use the mobile website instead until I have time to get Immich totally working and get people to switch if they want to see my stuff or share with me.



  • ICE agents just like all law enforcement agencies, are public servants employed by taxpayers. Good luck finding any other legitimate job you can hide your identity from your employer. If you choose to serve the public, you choose to be in the public eye and should be identifiable. I could care less if they wear a mask or not, but they should be required to have some other identifiable marking if not, like a badge number, or hell, even something to identify that they are agents and not just random kidnappers would be an improvement.

    As for being harassed for doing their job, if they’re doing the job in a reasonable way, they wouldn’t be harassed. Sure they wouldn’t be able to hit the quotas they’re given, but having quotas for finding criminals is a backwards concept in general and means they have to create criminals when there aren’t enough that are easy to catch. It shouldn’t be easy. It should be thorough, especially if no life is in danger from the “criminals”.


  • A little over half have them. But several other states do have anti-union laws that are similar to that part of the right to work laws. So that’s not all that different across states anymore even though that’s what the laws were originally supposed to be for.

    The other smaller part of the laws that’s actually usually more impactful these days especially for bigger cities, is that local governments can’t make laws to limit firings and without unions to make agreements around what kind of things people can be fired for, it effectively allows businesses to fire people “with cause” (i.e. they can’t get unemployment) for things that wouldn’t be fireable offenses in many other places. This causes large cities to end up with having to support a lot more unemployed people when big companies use these kinds of tactics to fire a lot of people.

    For example, often “insubordination” doesn’t require that the thing you were told to do and didn’t do was in your employment contract. Like a salaried employee who’s contractually obligated to work a minimum of 35-40 hours refusing to work an 18hr day when they’ve already worked 18hr days all week is generally easier to fire someone for “insubordination” for than in some other states that treat employment contracts as actual contracts.


  • “Right to Work” refers to the concept that companies don’t need a valid reason to fire someone without notice or severance benefits.

    It’s marketed as employees not needing a reason to quit or change jobs, but that’s not really true anyway considering most of the states allow binding non-compete agreements and your health insurance is tied to your employment and usually impossible to get at similar cost outside of the employer group market due to “stop loss” policies and other risk sharing plans.

    And there aren’t many laws anyway that prevent employees from leaving a job without a reason in non-binary"right to work" states, so the only real advantage is to companies.


  • Yeah, the definitions are actually more about alignment with the US political parties rather than left or right. And since both parties are demonstrably right of center, just to different degrees, the bias meter should only be used to determine which political party’s sponsors likely biased the article.

    For example, an article saying climate change is not human caused and presenting debunked evidence will be ranked mostly center and second mostly right. But an article calling for incentives to reduce use of fossils fuels will be ranked mostly left. That’s mostly center if anything. An article calling for the government to explicitly force companies to stop using fossil fuels would be mostly left and center. One further advocating for the government to take over energy companies that don’t comply and make energy production public would be mostly left. Just presenting scientific evidence and refusing to give a voice to debunked “alternative facts” is not a leftist position, it’s a centrist one at best and should be the baseline.



  • NFS is really good inside a LAN, just use 4.x (preferably 4.2) which is quite a bit better than 2.x/3.x. It makes file sharing super easy, does good caching and efficient sync. I use it for almost all of my Docker and Kubernetes clusters to allow files to be hosted on a NAS and sync the files among the cluster. NFS is great at keeping servers on a LAN or tight WAN in sync in near real time.

    What it isn’t is a backup system or a periodic sync application and it’s often when people try to use it that way that they get frustrated. It isn’t going to be as efficient in the cloud if the servers are widely spaced across the internet. Sync things to a central location like a NAS with NFS and then backups or syncs across wider WANs and the internet should be done with other tech that is better with periodic, larger, slower transactions for applications that can tolerate being out of sync for short periods.

    The only real problem I often see in the real world is Windows and Samba (sometimes referred to as CIFS) shares trying to sync the same files as NFS shares because Windows doesn’t support NFS out of the box and so file locking doesn’t work properly. Samba/CIFS has some advantages like user authentication tied to active directory out of the box as well as working out of the box on Windows (although older windows doesn’t support versions of Samba that are secure), so if I need to give a user access to log into a share from within a LAN (or over VPN) from any device to manually pull files, I use that instead. But for my own machines I just set up NFS clients to sync.

    One caveat is if you’re using this for workstations or other devices that frequently reboot and/or need to be used offline from the LAN. Either don’t mount the shares on boot, or take the time to set it up properly. By default I see a lot of people get frustrated that it takes a long time to boot because the mount is set as a prerequisite for completing the boot with the way some guides tell you to set it up. It’s not an NFS issue; it’s more of a grub and systemd (or most equivalents) being a pain to configure properly and boot systems making the default assumption that a mount that’s configured on boot is necessary for the boot to complete.


  • But, but, it’s a corporation doing all that not the government, so the constitution doesn’t apply, right? /s

    And there are laws already to protect your privacy. Sure the punishment for breaking the law is exponentially lower than the profit they make by violating it and there’s no punishment beyond the financial one and no punishment to the people doing it, but you’re protected, right? /s /s /s




  • Nope, Texas had no problem denying my unemployment and appeal when the company had a major change in leadership and I wasn’t interested in playing politics. They came up with some made up excuse that I was not coming to the office daily per the policy. And my boss had already been pushed out of his role as COO and Executive VP and moved to a marketing director job with no real power, so he couldn’t help.

    When I was fired the date they gave that I hadn’t come in I was able to present evidence to the unemployment when I came in the office and left because traffic was bad that day and I took the toll road and had the receipt. So, they came back with another day. That one I hadn’t used the toll road and since I wasn’t allowed to get other employees to say they saw me there, so I had no evidence that wasn’t fully under the control of the company. That was enough for them to rule I was insubordinate by not coming into the office for 8 hrs/day when it was policy to do so. Forget that I was paid salary and worked way more than 40hrs a week. And that I was doing way more than I was supposed to be based on my job title and I was barely being paid anything for what I was doing. They weren’t saying I wasn’t working enough. Just that I violated that one rule even one time was enough for unemployment to be denied. That’s all it takes. I could have appealed higher, but that would have required a lawyer and would have cost more than the pittance I would have gotten from the unemployment anyway.

    So, yes, refusing a direct instruction, even once, is even more severe than that and likely would be enough to have your unemployment denied in a “right to work” state.





  • GPT5 just proved what many of us in the software industry on the technical side have been saying since the beginning.

    LLMs are not AI. And they are only as useful as the information they are trained on, and with the industry using all of the internet to train the majority of them, they have tons of false information. And everything an LLM says is based on s confidence level that it’s correct, but those confidence levels are configured so low that it’s often way off. Plus people are used to computers giving specific, correct answers, but LLMs are all about small talk and making things up to fill time because that’s what they’re trained on. People need to learn these aren’t AI and everything they say needs to be taken with that in mind. Double and triple check it before believing it. But since we often don’t even do that with humans, thus the whole anti-vax thing for example, it’s even harder for people to want to do that for something that was explicitly marketed as preventing them from needing to do the research.

    So now that those not profiting directly from AI are seeing that it’s probably never going to get better as promised, they’re losing confidence. But it will stick around for s while. The energy industry is powerful and is lobbying hard for it since it’s the first time in a while our energy demands have spiked so high. And with the mechanisms to monitor climate change being shut down or explicitly destroyed in the US, and conservatives convinced that the natural disasters are just short term, dirty fuel demand is back, more than ever. So they have a ton of incentive to keep it alive ss well as the companies making it.