Democracy doesn’t get any wins anymore. That part of the voyage is over.

My guess?

anthropomorphism.

People are assigning thought and specifically intent to the replies that they get from ML and LLMs. They don’t realize that the model is essentially just an unchecked auto correct that uses the entirety of everything posted on the public Internet as it’s basis for what to reply to a prompt, the same way your phone tries to predict what word you want to say next based on what you’ve typed so far.

It’s just a lot bigger and more complex than the auto correct and word prediction that your phone has.

But that’s it. That’s all it does. It’s not thinking. It’s not intelligent. It has no intent. It cannot cognitively understand what it’s saying or doing.

Taking to “AI” is basically having the average of all Internet content as a basis for the reply. That means it’s going to make shit up, tell you to eat glue, and generally fuck around.

But most people seem to assign it human-like traits of reasoning and intent, when there isn’t any. CEOs included.

AI also needs a lot of other shit to run even at a basic level. Networks, and systems… A dedicated nuclear power facility on three Mile Island.

AI can’t run without so many people plugging in the servers, and power, and installing the operating systems… The list of supporting characters is long.

What if we… Just… Stopped supporting the companies that were pushing AI?

They were mostly threatening. For me the peace of mind of knowing that they can’t really track what’s being downloaded to my ISP/my account/me, is enough.

I don’t know if the MPAA is going to lose its mind like the RIAA did with the whole Napster thing. I don’t want to get caught up in it if they do.

For that peace of mind, I pay for my VPN.

If that’s not valuable to you, then you’ll make different choices. I’m not here to tell anyone what to do, I’m just giving my experience and opinion.

Good luck out there.

And no, I wasn’t charged either for the notice, nor legally charged as the result of a notice.

All I’m going to say is that my ISP used to send me notices from the MPAA about what I was downloading and that I should:

1. Cease and desist
2. Remove the content I downloaded.

Since I setup a VPN, I do not get those notices.

Do I need to say more?

I remember renting a game, and it was on a high density 5.25" inch floppy at a whopping 1.2MB; but or family computer only had a standard density 5.25".

So we went to the neighbors house, who was one of the first computer nerds (I’m not sure he’s still alive now), who copied the game to a 3.5" high density 1.44MB disk, then we returned the rental because we couldn’t play it on the 1.2 MB HD 5.25" floppy.

… And that was the first time I was party to piracy.

I had a similar experience with Samsung. I had a bunch of evo 870 SSDs up and die for no reason. Turns out, it was a firmware bug in the drive and they just need an update, but the update needs to take place before the drive fails.

I had to RMA the failures. The rest were updated without incident and have been running perfectly ever since.

I’d still buy Samsung.

I didn’t lose a lot of data, but I can certainly understand holding a grudge on something like that. From the other comments here, hate for Seagate isn’t exactly rare.

Why do you wound me like this?

I too, am old.

There’s always the exceptions, but they’re rare, and getting more rare.

The vast majority of works are owned by a few major corporations, even smaller, more indie games often get published through a major studio, which then retains a good amount of the profit. Almost all media, TV and movies, is owned by one of a handful of companies. Music is largely the same.

It goes the same way for so many other things too. It’s not just games and media.

There are always going to be exceptions but on the whole, it’s vastly more likely/common that the people profiting from something is a large, faceless organization, which only answers to their shareholders.

Yeah, why the fuck not?

Obviously, something made in a specialized vehicle manufacturing plant will be better/more durable/whatever, but given the option between downloading a car vs spending a year’s salary to buy one… I’d rather download one.

Unless my wages get better (which they are not) or cars get cheaper (which they won’t), I’ll continue to have this opinion.

There’s a nontrivial number of cars that cost more than a house did in the 80’s and 90’s. So it’s entirely possible for someone to spend the same dollar value on their home, when purchasing it in the 90’s, as they do 25 years later, buying a house in the 2020’s.

Stupid.

The only damage that exists from piracy is to the copyright holders profits…

Since the copyright holder is usually a corporation that is owned by shareholders, the majority of which are richer than all of us combined, ask me if I give a shit and I will show you my field of shits to give, and you will see that it is barren.

Eat the rich. Or Luigi them… I don’t care.

I take it, you use arch?

It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

I just upgraded to a Xeon E5 v4 processor.

I think the max RAM on it is about 1.5 TiB per processor or something.

It’s not new, but it’s not that old either. Still cost me a pretty penny.

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.