It’s suffering from being new and different. If it can hang on long enough for Reddit to go full Facebook, maybe it can hit a stride and prosper but I honestly don’t know.

I’m starting to lose faith, but we’ll see in the long run once Meta enables federation. It may be bad for the fediverse, or it could force unprecedented growth. My main fear is that activitypub ends up the way of e-mail, regulated by the big players. I’m too dumb to figure out if it can happen, though.

No doubt in my mind I’d kill myself.

There’s also what another comment pointed out. It’s not so much that most of us are stupid but that we’re not really equipped for the internet as a species. We get bombarded with too much crap from all directions, get stuck on echo-chambers, and don’t really fact-check, even when we do, because you can’t just fact-check everything that’s thrown at you 24/7. It’s a lot easier to not care, or care too much without substantiating your beliefs.

For example, Covid wasn’t the first time the anti-mask, anti-Vax, conspiracy theorist, all-around crazy movement popped out their head. It wasn’t the first time money beat forethought. It wasn’t the first for much of the negative shit we saw, and yet for me it marked the moment I lost hope for the future of our species, after all, how can we hope to deal with stuff as huge and hard to see as climate change if we can’t even believe the existence of a virus that’s actively killing us? Are they all stupid for not putting in some effort to prevent this virus from spreading and killing millions? Am I stupid for thinking they would? Am I stupid for losing hope due to listening to all these stories of people fighting masks and vaccines? How many people worldwide actually fought back and resisted? You see it in my own words, I’m sort of convinced the crazies got riled up, and for sure in some parts of the world they did, but the scope of the internet spreads all sentiments on the matter to every corner of our interconnectedness, before we’re even aware it’s happening. All of a sudden we’re seeing conclusions from all sides without checking for how they all got where they did nor how many people actually believe it, we pick one side, maybe skim over another, and decry the rest as insane and sometimes even malevolent. These republicans sure want their voters dead or at the very least are too stupid to understand the dangers of the virus, this bill gates guy sure wants everyone microchipped or at the very least wants the medical world in his hands, these Chinese fellows for sure developed and released the virus or at the very least had it slip from their fingers. How am I supposed to know, or care, for all of it? How is any of us? Is it our personal responsibility to know and clear every fact we can? Spread awareness and fact-check everything? Just shut up and don’t get involved? What the fuck do we do, what can we do? Do we fight dissenting voices online? Do we march on the streets over beliefs we might not fully grasp nor could we?

We’re just a bit too overloaded with everything to make a good job as a species about anything. At least that’s what I think, at least for the individuals that make up our species. Whatever you choose to believe, whatever actions you choose to take in response, someone somewhere will see you and think you’re an absolute idiot… And, I think, there’s not much to do about it.

You’re absolutely right and it is something I sometimes fail to account for since it nourishes hopelessness in me. I do, however, believe that such empathy is developed and not something you’re born with. You see it in varying degrees by how much someone cares for their families, friends, their community, and really even themselves. Some just care about themselves, some care about their peers but not their communities, and some don’t care about themselves but would bend over backwards for others. Empathy for lives beyond our own species is something that would be nurtured just like empathy for other humans is.

When I talk about our options as a species, I am inclined to believe that most of our species leans towards having empathic feelings for lives beyond our own species. It may just be a matter of hope that I’m reflecting on my comments, but it is also an evolutionary advantage for us to develop such empathy as we further develop our abilities to morph this world to our needs and wants, since we do depend on other species for almost everything.

Maybe I’m intertwining the necessities of our species with our individual feelings over those necessities, but I would believe this moral conflict would surface for most of us, with the level of such moral conflict varying greatly from person to person. My previous comment mostly wonders of the possibility that a great number of us start to develop such moral conflict over more than just domesticated species or cute mammals or such.

With regards to the trolley problem, you’re right. By me profiting from the atrocities of others, I’m a part of such atrocity. It’s a fact of more than just harvesting farm animals. It affects our economies, our climate, our biodiversity, our social norms and behaviors towards outsiders and minorities, as well as our digital lives. It’s a cop-out to just wash my hands from such actions and only hold myself responsible for my direct actions regardless of those of others that my benefit me, and that’s why I said it was a cognitive dissonance, one that I just have to live with of my own choosing.

I understand that people, especially children, are malleable into believing and doing horrible things, and it’s a fact that this will happen to many under Hamas or as a consequence of the ongoing conflict regardless of Hamas, but it’s also unfair to those hostages to assume that they’re already murderers. It’s a tragedy waiting to happen for multiple dimensions of reasons for many people involved in this entire conflict (wouldn’t you be radicalized if you saw your entire family covered in rubble or being treated like trash by other groups of people?), and it’s extremely unfortunate, but we can’t just instantly label them all as bad apples for something that may or may not happen to them, or that may or may not describe them currently. They’re still children, we can’t cast the dice on them, or we’re no different from those radicalized beyond common civil morality.

On one hand, animals are animals, so one should either object to eating all or not object to eating any.

I feel like this is a sort of ironic dichotomy we humans find ourselves in due to our evolutionary development that lets us reflect on our actions, along with our empathy stemming from our understanding of suffering of life in general.

On one hand, we are omnivores, we eat plants and animals, it’s not that we decided to eat animals, it’s that we’ve evolved to do so. Vegan diets end up relying on supplements and lots of hoop jumps to achieve the same results an omnivores diet would have. That, while commendable on those who try, shows us quite clearly that we’re going against our most fundamental evolutionary traits.

On the other hand, we understand we are causing suffering to other beings in order to sustain ourselves. No matter how humane out treatment of such animals may become, it’s still something that we will struggle to accept, or that we will ignore outright to not have to struggle with the thought.

It’s a terrible situation to find ourselves in, because that’s literally the solution life itself has come up with, we steal nutrients and energy from other life, period. Yet we understand we are denying other life forms their chance to life, and a lot of the time they suffer while being denied that chance. But what other solution is there? We haven’t come up with better solutions, and we may never do so. We defined a certain threshold for what we deem acceptable, some of us move that threshold, but none eliminate eating life entirely, because it’s not possible. Plants are still alive, fungi are still alive, bacteria are still alive, insects are still alive, and we never ever stop to think about them like we do our farm animals, we only stop to think about life that resembles our own. And that’s, unfortunately, necessary to not starve ourselves out of the equation.

I wonder if we will ever solve this riddle for ourselves. Will we simply accept this forever as a given that some animals just have to suffer for our sake? Will we start growing our own meat, and declare the threshold to be “organisms without a complex neural system”? Will we be able to forego depending on other life entirely and develop our nutrition in factories or through biological modifications without even relying on other cellular organisms? Where will we draw the line next, and will we be able to satisfy our moral qualms?

I can’t be for or against any of this, all I can do is hold my own actions to my own moral line and accept that everything else is just how things have to be due to the cruel reality of being alive. I’m unable to kill, and I’m convinced I’d first die than kill even a chicken to survive (or if I do, the guilt will eat me alive), but I eat chicken every day and I will continue to do so until the day I die, even though there’s a strong cognitive dissonance there, since I can’t really do much about it without compromising my own nutrition in some way, I can’t go against the very rules of life. It’s truly a cruel joke that life has played on us, forcing us to depend on taking life from other organisms to stay alive, while also allowing us to empathize with other life forms and enter such a dissonant state of mind. That’s just the torture of life, I guess.

I’m too retarded to understand SMART values so, I 100% have read errors on them, I have no idea what the numbers mean, though, so I can’t say how bad it is. I don’t see critical failures or unrecoverable errors being reported on them, so I don’t sweat it too much.

You can get 20tb seagate exos drives for ~$15/tb on ebay, sometimes on Amazon as well.

I don’t know of a country there that allows private ownership of firearms

Well, we do allow private ownership of firearms, just, AFAIK, a very limited number of models provided by a very specific entity rather than just about anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if most countries in the americas allowed some degree of firearm ownership (don’t care enough to look it up).

I didn’t mean that when I said “privately owned militias”. I meant the banana companies which dealt with strikes by sending privately owned troops on privately owned ships to these countries in order to reign in their poorly disguised slavery.

I’m a proper American, from the Americas. You know, one of those countries your country likes to fuck around with every now and then with a little coup or private militia invasion. With those guns you guys worship so much. That kind of American.

Wrap it up folks, not enough people were killed, we can continue glorifying guns!

Americans be like “see, not enough children died, so we should keep our glorious god given guns” as soon as any discrepancies in number of kids killed show up.

Ah yes, the 39 women and children released on Friday definitely stabbed schoolchildren. The list of 300 people Israel plans on releasing, most of which are underage or teenage boys, definitely stab schoolchildren.

This whole “associating a group of people with a government/country” thing is kinda fucking whack. Your everyday jew is not going to be celebrating the shit Israel does any more than your average Palestinian will celebrate Hamas’ doings. Why the fuck would you imply antisemitism on the very notion of criticizing a government that oppresses its neighbors and steals their land? OP didn’t even mention jewish people, they mentioned Israel specifically. Israel doesn’t speak for all Jewish people, just like Hamas doesn’t speak for all Palestinians.

I was also on the fence. Ended up jumping into it all a few months agk, and my plex server went from a very small and informal media repository that a few friends kept nagging me about because I always procrastinated downloading, categorizing, and adding media to it, to now a vast collection of thousands of movies and hundreds of shows, spanning about 50 users, around 40TB+ of content (which reminds me I need more drives soon…) and everyone requests whatever they want. There’s still work to be done, there always is, especially if your server grows and your peers start using it (wait to see that one person start requesting Korean stuff that never gets found automatically), but it’s a night and day difference for me, and the organization of it all helps me concentrate and tackle stuff quicker.

So the stack usually goes like this:

-sonarr, radarr, readarr, lidarr, etc. : they each specialize in a media format (series, movies, books, music, respectively), they will fetch Metadata from known Metadata sources, and will perform searches on whichever indexer you like (think piratebay for torrents, or nzbgeek for NZBs from usenet). They’ll connect to your download client and send torrents and NZBs to be downloaded, will know if a download fails and search again, and will import completed items automatically. They’ll organize everything, rename everything, and keep track of quality with constant upgrades to your media by parsing RSS feeds from said indexers. They won’t go out of their way to downloading things you didn’t ask for, you have to ask for everything. You can monitor collections for movies on radarr if you want future movies, but that’s about it as far as waiting for new content not explicitly requested.

-overseerr, requestrr, etc. : these are front ends that you can share with your friends and family. You only need one. They’ll be able to search for content as well as browse trending or new contenr, see if it’s in your library, request content, and follow the progress of the requested content. No need to tell anyone “this isn’t done yet”, they can just check what’s available and whatnot, and you can designate request quotas per user and decline requests.

-jackett, prowlarr, etc. : these helper services will make it easier for you to keep track of your indexers. They’ll communicate with the content handling arr services to provide them all the indexers they need. You only need one. You set them up once on these services rather than once for each arr service. They also have the ability to perform better manual indexer searches than the main arr stack services.

-honorable mention, bazarr: this little fella will integrate with your arr services to monitor all media and download subtitles for it all, set to your standards. It even has the ability to use a WhisperAI server (speech to text LLM developed by openai) as a source for subtitles, so you could create your own subtitles if you don’t find any. Of all of them, I find this one to feel the jankiest, but it does a decent enough job, even if not perfect by a long shot.

There’s other services that I haven’t messed with. For instance, there’s Tdarr which is used for automatic remuxing and conversion of media files to whichever format you prefer, in order to standardize your entire library. I feel like this is a destructive service that could easily backfire if I’m not careful (say, HDR H265 conversion to H264, buhbye dynamic range and color accuracy forever on that file if you don’t provide an accurate tone mapping which is usually not a one size fits all thing, so a lot of intervention anyway) , so I’d rather not even risk it.

Almost everything can be thrown into docker containers, and you can find some pretty decent guides on YouTube by searching for these services one by one. After the first one, you’ll get the gist of it all I think. Bazarr runs as a service (at least on windows) and has some bug with its front-end sometimes, which requires you to restart the service to get into the page at all, though apparently setting the service to delayed start fixes the issue, which I did and haven’t run into this bug since, so something to keep in mind.

As others mentioned, there’s guides to setting up qualities, filters, exclusions, and priorities on your content, and trash guides are usually where you go for that. I find that trash has a high standard for quality, which will eat through your storage like a bodybuilder eating 20 eggs for breakfast in a single seating, so you will always have to play around with your preferences and it will take some time to get things just right (some edge case scenarios on content are hard to spot at first, but you’ll get that one download of a very questionable release that will make you tear your hair off for a bit), but it will get better as you tinker around.

So to summarize, if you have even a little bit of trouble maintaining your media repository, these are a must. Even if you don’t, the process of searching stuff, downloading stuff, renaming and categorizing stuff, and then checking that everything is OK on plex by comparing stuff on thetvdb and whatnot, its a lot of time-consuming work even if you don’t notice it, and all of it can be automated by the arr stack easily. I have a couple of friends helping as admins of it all, and they’re just as freaky on management as I am, so we all just work together to get everything right, and it’s really helpful and easy to go down this route. Good luck and have fun!

Ah, final tidbit, if you don’t yet use the usenet, this is the moment where you will realize you have to spend money on it because it’ll help that much more than torrents once your arr stack is going at it. I’m at two usenet indexers and I think two usenet content providers. I want more. Help.

Especially infuriating given it can be corrected

I mean I’ve been a pirate for a WHILE and you generally do see ads on opensubtitles subs. Generally it’s opensubtitles saying you can advertise with them, or credits for subtitles that stay on the screen for way too long, but this has been a thing forever now, I don’t recall a time when this wasn’t done.

I don’t think I can take the moral high ground on it seeing as…well, I am a pirate lol. We out here doing our best to stay afloat, opensubtitles included.

But that’s not fighting, that’s exterminating.

Or just wait for the secessions to inevitably start rolling in, then the gringos can drop the name. They were second anyways.

I mean, that is true of a ton of other, if not most, consumer goods