The average death age of any empire is 250 years.

Tick tock America. You’re proving that figure to be correct.

Agreed.

I’m not going to defend Ubisoft here.

I will make a comment about NFCs. Basically, if you’re trying to validate a set number of items in a digital market, NFTs are not the worst way to do it. In the context of a video game, it would be that you have the NFT for, let’s say, a limited character skin, associated to your game profile/account/whatever. As long as that token is attached to your account, you get access to that skin. If you trade it out, you lose access to that skin in the game… As an example.

NFTs would accomplish that goal, while being (at least in theory) decentralized, and in theory it’s immune to errors and exploitation.

All of that being said: there are much better ways to accomplish the same with less. Any blockchain, by its very nature, will eventually become a slow, unmanageable mess because anything written to the ledger is immutable. So the ledger will continue to grow and grow and grow until it’s so large that it’s unmanageable, slow as shit, and just garbage to try to use/work with.

For shit like digital art or whatever, NFTs make even less sense. All you’re actually buying is essentially a receipt that you paid money to someone for the receipt. It’s a lot like going to a store to buy air. You pay for it, get your receipt and now you “own” some air. The only thing that proves you “own” air, is the receipt. If you lose the receipt, oh well, you can’t prove you “own” the air anymore, but you’re still 100% able to use the air, to fill your lungs, and breathe for another day, whether you “own” it or not.

The only difference with a “web3” game is that owning the NFT may give you access to stuff inside the game that you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Great in concept, horrible in practice.

So. I’ve kind of had two eye opening moments with meds.

I first started with concerta, and it was like stepping into the light. The problems were certainly not gone, but they were at least manageable. I could break out of mental loops that were not productive, and focus on stuff I actually needed to do. I still had a bit of an obsession with being as near-perfect as I could, but I could focus those efforts into things that were actually useful, instead of my mind going in circles.

It improved my emotional state. I was kind of in a long term funk of “everything is meh”, and I found myself smiling so much it hurt my face. A lot of that diminished over time, but it hasn’t gone away, it’s just less intense.

Recently I started on an NDRI, Wellbutrin, which had more subtle positive effects. Immediately I noticed the negative side effects, dry mouth, some GI issues. I stuck with it for a week and most of that has subsided. I dunno if the negatives made the positives more shrouded, or if the positives are just minor in comparison, but I find my emotional state and attitude is more on the positive side rather than sitting fairly firmly in the middle.

As for my usual ADHD symptoms, with the combination of the concerta and Wellbutrin, I have little or no difficulty doing the little routine things that I always had to push myself to do before. The phrase “super easy, barely an inconvenience” applies to all the little trivial tasks I do daily, when before it was always some level of mental effort to get myself to do things.

I feel more “normal” now than I ever have before.

I must say, if this is how non-ADHD (and/or non-executive function disorder) people are, then I get why they don’t understand us. This is an easy, quick, and trivial task, it takes no time or effort to do… But when you have an executive function disorder, the task might as well be “climb Mount Everest” not “fold laundry”.

I made the foolish mistake of thinking things had finally started to make sense when Netflix happened, and I got my hopes up that going legit would be viable.

Oh well

I’ve been back to the high seas for a while.

Before I get into it, I’ll give an honourable mention to the RIAA/music industry, which is largely just putting all of the music on every platform and letting users choose which one they want to use. This is the way, and I’m happy to pay one service to get access to the stuff I actually want to hear.

Back to video/MPAA. Are you all on crack? I saw this coming back when Netflix was the only licensed media game on the internet… I was subscribed and enjoying some shows, the shows then… Went away, they disappeared. After looking into it, the show I was enjoying was pulled when a copyright was revoked by the publisher, so Netflix no longer had the right to distribute the show.

I saw the writing on the wall. That publisher was going to make their own Netflix competitor with their stuff on it, to try to extort more profit from the streaming stuff. Clearly their c-suite thought that people would be willing to pay for just their content separately from Netflix. I saw that writing and noped right the fuck out. Grabbed my tri-point hat and flag from storage and set sail, and I’ve never looked back.

The copyright holding asshats, ruined internet streaming, because everyone wanted to be their own thing. They splintered the entire online streaming thing into a bunch of disparate platforms all with some subset of the media available via streaming. It’s worse than cable, honestly.

IMO, the only good move that’s happened for streaming (but horrible for so many other reasons) was Disney gobbling up all the other media studios and production companies, then putting all their stuff on one service. There’s a few holdouts, but by and large the two biggest players right now are Netflix (the OG) and Disney (+)… So a bunch of good media ended up on D+, and so it’s kind of “the” streaming service… For better or worse (mostly worse, as OP points out).

I’m still firmly on my ship, sailing the high seas. Unless they go the way of music, and allow all shows on every platform and you pick your platform based on your preferences, I’ll stay on this ship. Thanks.

Hey, don’t point it out! People are blissfully ignorant of how much they are owned. Don’t try to educate them.

• corporations, probably.

Mine are.

One thing that was recommended to me by someone a while ago, is that, unless you need it for something specific, mount your media in Plex as read only.

Plex has functions where you can delete content from the library from their UI. If you need that for some reason, obviously don’t make it read only. If you’re hoarding the data, and therefore never delete it, or use an external system for deleting files, then RO all the way.

The only caveat to this is if you’re using a local disk on the Plex system, which then shares out the drive/folder for adding new content, in which case, you’re screwed. It has to be rw so the OS can add/remove data.

In my case, as I think may be common (or at least, not rare), my back end data for Plex Media is on a NAS, so it’s easy to simply have the system running Plex, mount that network share as RO, and you’re done. The data on the NAS can be accessed and managed by other systems RW, direct to the NAS.

Since Plex is exposed to the internet, if anyone with sufficient rights is compromised, in theory, an attacker could delete the entire contents of your media folder with it. If you limit RW access to internal systems only, then that risk can be effectively mitigated.

Don’t argue with the court or the judge, keep your personal comments to yourself. If you disagree with the ruling, keep your mouth shut about it, thank the judge regardless of the outcome.

A lot of “turn the other cheek” applies here. Anything less and you will be held in contempt of court and it will make things worse.

Listen carefully, speak when it’s your turn to speak, don’t talk over anyone, especially the judge.

Beyond that, be honest, and don’t conceal the truth. Do everything you can to be a good participant in the system. Arrive early and if you can, watch what others do and learn from their actions. What they do, what they say, and especially what not to say or do.

You’ll be fine at the end of the day.

Also renew your damn license ASAP. Don’t drive the vehicle that got the infraction (duh), and if possible, get a ride to the courthouse and back again, whether that’s a friend, a taxi, an Uber/Lyft, it doesn’t matter. If the judge decides to put you in jail (unlikely, but possible) you don’t have to worry about your vehicle being towed or something, and you won’t get additional fines as you travel there.

All the best OP. You got this.

That’s fine, Qualcomm has followed suit, and Samsung is doing the same.

I’m sure Intel and AMD are not far behind. They may already be doing this, I just haven’t kept up on the latest information from them.

Eventually all processors will have it, whether you want it or not.

I’m not saying this is a good thing, I’m saying this as a matter of fact.

Both apple and Google have integrated machine learning optimisations, specifically for running ML algorithms, into their processors.

As long as you have something optimized to run the model, it will work fairly well.

They don’t want to have independent ML chips, they want it baked into every processor.

Depends on the UPS. Many cheap offline UPS units don’t. Anything line interactive or online will.

APC makes low end offline UPS units, which are cheap garbage.

They also make line interactive and online ups units, which are decidedly not completely garbage.

I pick up line interactive APC units from used locations like eBay, and go buy off label replacement batteries. Haven’t had any problems with them so far.

To date, over the last ~10 years of running a homelab, I have used mainly SMT 1500 units, one was a rack mount. I’ve recently upgraded to an SMX2000. I’ve replaced batteries, but never a UPS, and never any server components due to power issues. I’ve run servers ranging from a Dell PE 2950, to a full c6100 chassis, plus several networking devices, including firewalls, routers and PoE switches. Not a single power related issue with any of them.

Fair enough. Local admin is generally not something that I would want to restrict from people, especially those that are, or at least, should be, more knowledge than most.

I’ll fight for that right for people most of the time.

Some users I would say should not have it, but generally developers are not those people. You know the ones.

I try to be understanding with my software brethren. We’re different sides to the whole. Ying and yang, so to speak.

That said, I’ve gotten some brain-dead requests from you developer types.

I’m not saying all of you are the problem, but there’s definitely some of you that need to learn how things work.

As IT/network/security, using a well known port for something that’s not what is supposed to run on that port, is inviting all kinds of problems.

Especially the very well known ones, like ftp, ssh, SMTP, http, HTTPS, etc (to name a few). People make it their mission to find and exploit open FTP systems. I opened up FTP on a system once to the internet as kind of a honeypot, and within a week or so, there was someone uploading data to it.

No bueno. Don’t use well known ports for things unless the thing that well known port is known for, is what you want to do.

Traitor.

I think I watched a summary of it by a YouTuber.

The same reason that filament based incandescent bulbs burned out. Planned obsolescence.

There’s a very real conspiracy (not just a theory) about the “arms race” in light bulbs for long lasting bulbs. Eventually, they made bulbs that lasted so long that they stopped making money.

Lighting manufacturers intentionally made worse bulbs to simply improve profits. They realized that they were driving themselves out of business. Everyone in the light bulb industry agreed to stop development of even longer lasting bulbs, just so they could continue to move units and make money.

Also, with LEDs, the thing that burns out fastest isn’t the LEDs (there’s usually a dozen… ish, in an LED bulb)… It’s the electronics. The power needs to be converted from line power to something the LEDs can handle, which is usually DC. So there’s a full power supply in the bulb to convert AC to DC, with a certain voltage to power the LEDs.

Sometimes this conversation is simple, a full bridge rectifier with little more than a filtering capacitor, other times it’s very complex.

The power supply in the bulb is usually what fails first.