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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • 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 sad thing is, I think you are correct, without even joking. I think he literally needs some kind of help.

    I try to keep an open mind always. So a while back he did a Lex Friedman interview, and I listened to it. For anyone not familiar, Lex does long form interviews of an hour or more and gets deep into various subjects.

    I got about halfway through before concluding that there is something seriously wrong with West. Maybe he is just stupid (not as an insult, I mean like he lacks any sort of intelligence) or maybe he has brain damage or maybe he is just delusional. But you listen to the guy talk for more than 5 minutes at a time and you wonder what the hell is wrong with him.

    For example, he spent a lot of time blaming the ‘Jewish media’ for a lot of America’s problems. Lex repeatedly asked him for specifics, challenged him to call out specific members or leaders of said media for specific actions, challenged him to use his platform to identify bad actors. He had few if any specifics and saw no particular benefit in any specific call outs, in his world it’s all a conspiracy and the whole ‘Jewish media’ and everyone part of it is all one and the same.

    Furthermore, he spent a lot of time explaining why we should stop teaching history in schools. Said we should focus on science and technology classes and not waste time reliving the past. Lex tried hard to challenge that, even brought up specific non-partisan examples from history that presented useful lessons for today. It had no effect, West continued to double down on the position that teaching kids history is a waste of time and resources.

    At this point I had wasted about half an hour listening to the guy, and decided he was simply not worth my time to listen any further, because he obviously fundamentally misunderstood how the world works, how human nature works, and had little or no facts or evidence to back up his positions. I concluded that any further ideas from West can probably be safely dismissed without much consideration, because his thought process shows no evidence of rational or scientific thought.

    Honestly the best analogy I can think of is like going to a mental institution and listening to a crazy person. They will talk your head off for an hour about how aliens infected their brain or whatever, and the only thing you will get from it is an hour older.


  • Not at all. In fact Creality seems quite open for a Chinese company. There’s literally an option on the touch screen menu to enable root access. That gives you full SSH access to everything on the board, no hacks or jailbreaks needed.

    The firmware is Klipper based, mostly open but there’s a few binary bits. There are some open source firmware forks but the one thing they haven’t got running yet is the bed pressure sensor so you need to add a separate sensor for leveling and z axis zeroing.

    However the stock firmware works great and with some open source scripts you can add whatever you want to it like fluidd/mainsail.

    My k1 Max has lived its entire life on a private network segment, only internet access it gets is NTP to set the clock. It’s perfectly fine. I have never registered with Creality cloud nor has the machine tried to force me too. I use orca slicer and feed it the g code and it works great.


  • 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.


  • 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.



  • I would agree to this but with one caveat Let’s try to be better than Reddit. These days, Reddit and to some degree let me also has become a circle jerk of closed minds (on all sides of any issue). When confronted with a position they disagree with, people are far too quick to write the person off as a racist, statist, Nazi, anarchist, commie, etc. Rather than considering the merit of the person statement. Let’s be better than that. Let’s all be better than that.

    Having a closed mind is easy. It’s lazy. It gets you to that hit of dopamine faster, you tell someone off and hit post and you feel like you’ve done good. But most of the time you haven’t. You’ve done nothing to persuade them of your viewpoint, or enhance the discussion for others.

    That’s not to say nobody’s wrong. There’s plenty of people who are wrong about every issue. But tell them why they’re wrong. Have a little good faith, assume that just maybe the person on the other end of the thread has good intentions, also wants the world to succeed and society to be great, they just think their view will help make that happen better. So rather than calling them an idiot, tell them why you’re right and your ideas are better. Engage with them.

    That’s how Reddit used to be. Not recently, I’m talking way back in the early days before the digg migration. It was a place for intelligent people to have reasoned discussions. Let’s make lemmy more like that.



  • For switches / dimmers try Inovelli. Very very very tweakable. Can program things like minimum dim level, so even when you command 1% it still puts out enough power to start the LED bulb. And it will report taps and multitaps up to five taps as scene control actions. They also have a fan canopy module which can receive zigbee commands directly from a switch so the main paddle controls the light bulb and the secondary button above the LED bar controls the fan speed.


  • Of course it’s their choice. But I also think some people in some situations should recognize a broader responsibility. Because we get into a larger question of, what happens when the public square is privately owned?

    With a website like joinfediverse, that domain becomes a primary resource for people looking to get into decentralized platforms. By not including something, the maintainer is not just making the choice for himself but for every new user who visits the site. That responsibility should be taken seriously and the choice not just made based on personal opinion.

    Think of it this way, imagine I made a site called whoshouldIvotefor.com and it would ask you questions and then recommend a political candidate. Sounds like a good idea, right? Now what if I make it so the site always recommends a Republican candidate, and only justifies why the answers you gave to the questions indicate that vote? I’m certainly allowed to do that. Free speech and all. But it could be argued that I also have a responsibility to the voters who come to my site who don’t realize it is biased, in that I am pushing my personal opinions on them and causing them to make a decision that they wouldn’t have made if they had all the facts.

    (Disclaimer- I’m not a Republican, I consider myself liberal-libertarian. I’m using that as an example.)

    I am just saying that a site which sets itself up as an authoritative on ramp to the fediverse should try to be unbiased and not based on personal opinions of its editor.


  • Well, since you’ve vocally criticised the developers and they haven’t bothered changing their ways, wouldn’t you agree they deserve to be gatekept?

    No. In fact, I strongly dislike that whole attitude of ‘do what I want or else I will cancel you’. I am not the arbiter of what is ultimately right and wrong and neither are you and neither is parent commenter.

    I believe people have the right to make their own choice. And since Lemmy has significant user base and significant active discussion and thousands of communities, I think the users have the right to make that choice for themselves. Make them aware of the situation, make them aware of the potential downsides, make them aware that lemmy.ml is run by tankie assholes, maybe recommend some better instances, and let them choose for themselves.

    That is why I like Lemmy and the fediverse as a concept. I can choose the instance that has the policies that I want. Among those policies is which other instances to defiederate from.





  • Quantity isn’t everything

    That right there hits the nail on the head. There is a certain critical mass, an activity level that makes satisfy most discussion needs for most users. It’s a tiny fraction of the total traffic of a place like Reddit or Twitter.
    But if we have that, and keep the quality level up, we can succeed.

    Success to me doesn’t mean killing Reddit and Twitter. It means creating a place where smart people can come and find enough content and discussion that they don’t need Reddit and Twitter.



  • There’s currently no way to delete an uploaded image.

    That’s especially problematic since pasting any image into a reply box auto-uploads it. So if your finger slips and you upload something sensitive, or if you want to take down something you uploaded previously, there’s no way to do it.

    What should happen is whenever you upload an image, the image and delete key get stored in some special part of your Lemmy account. Then from the Lemmy account management page you can see all your uploaded images and delete them individually or in bulk.

    So it seems you can now do this- Profile, Uploads shows you all your uploads. Go Lemmy!