Yeah, the music industry gets it and nearly everyone happily pays for Spotify as a result. Spotify is slowly enshitifying but it is still fairly convenient and has most things you would want to listen to.

I was on this train. I paid for Netflix for a handful of years. Really my only complaint is that I couldn’t share screenshots because of the DRM (you don’t want free advertising?). But then the selection went downhill, new seasons of shows I was watching started appearing on other services. The UI got worse and slow. I eventually started getting pissed off and was wondering why I was paying for a frustrating service.

I had a very similar arc for YouTube Premium a few years after that one, I must have been a subscriber for 5 years at least. But then it got worse and worse.

I don’t think this is a major “this is why people pirate”. Pirate sites also regularly get cracked (possibly more often the the average streaming service). It isn’t like bank details were leaked here so the only real difference is that in some pirate sites you don’t need a login at all.

Ah great, so a messenger run by a data hoarding giant that resists usage of anything but the proprietary non-free client.

IDK, what else do they use? Email has to be the least bad option. At least with email you can choose your provider (or be your own).

IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don’t recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don’t, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.

That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don’t need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.

And after all of that I don’t think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).

That’s true. And I’m not saying B2 is bad, it is just something that you should be aware of.

Their automatic replication isn’t quite as seamless as GCS or S3 though. For example deletes aren’t replicated so you will need a cleanup strategy. Plus once you 2x or 3x the price B2 isn’t as competitive on price. My point is that it is very easy to compare apples to oranges looking at cloud storage providers and it is important to be aware.

For me B2 is a great fit and I am happy with it, but I don’t wan to mislead peope.

I think it depends on your needs. IIUC their storage is “single location”. Like a very significant natural disaster could take it offline or maybe even lose it. Something like S3 or Google Cloud Storage (depending on which durability you select) is multi-location (as in significantly distinct geographical regions). So still very likely that you will never lose any data, but in the extreme cases potentially you could.

If I was storing my only copy of something it would matter a lot more (although even then you are best to store with multiple providers for social reasons, not just technical) but for a backup it is fine.

I’ve been using Restic to Backblaze B2.

I don’t really trust B2 that much (I think it is mostly a single-DC kind of storage) but it is reasonably priced and easy to use. Plus as long as their failures aren’t correlated with mine it should be fine.

It’s really nice of them to collect the best piracy sites into an easy to navigate list! They even have proper linking between the index and PDF pages, that is some quality work.

Pacific Mall, Toronto

You know, they aren’t wrong. (Well at least this was well known when I was younger. IDK I thought it was cleaned up a bit in the last decade.)

Yes, that is why I said “Sounds great”.

Sounds great. I think it is super valuable to have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe in all sorts of ways. Having ActivityPub is also nice.

You could also just plug in the 10 amp cord and plug the device into it. The chaining doesn’t change anything here.

GMail could actually use more competitors. However I definitely won’t be trusting Musk with my email.

“Residential IPs” are quite valuable for web scraping. Many scraping prevention tools and services use the source IP as the primary metric. If you come from a public cloud provider like AWS, GCP or DigitalOcean you get blocked 99% of the time. If you come from a US residential ISP then you get much more relaxed screening.

We did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be easy.

I switched to Immich recently and am very happy.

1. Immich’s face detection is much better, very rarely fails. Especially for non-white faces. But even for white faces PhotoPrisim regularly needed me reviewing the unmatched faces. I also needed to really turn up the “what is a face” threshold because otherwise it would miss a ton of clear faces. (Then it only missed some, but also has tons of false positives). On the other hand Immich just works.
2. Immich’s UI is much nicer overall. Lots of small affordances. For example the menu item to “view in timeline” is worth switching alone. Also good riddance to PhotoPrism’s persistent and buggy selection. Someone must have worked really hard on implementing this but it was really just a bad idea.
3. Immich has an app with uploading, and it allows you to view local and uploaded photos in one interface which is a huge UX win. I couldn’t find a good Android app for uploading to photoprism. You could set up import delays and stuff but you would still regularly get partially uploaded files imported and have to clean it up manually.
4. Immich’s search by content is much better. For example searching for “cat with red and yellow ball” was useless on PhotoPrism, but I found tons of the results I was looking for on Immich.

The bad:

1. There is currently a terrible jank in the Immich app which makes videos unusable and everything painful. Apparently this is due to some Album sync process running in the main thread. They are working on it. I can’t fathom how a few hundred albums causes this much lag but 🤷 There is also even worse lag on the location view page, but at least that is just one page.
2. The Immich app has a lot less features than the website. But the website works very well on mobile so even just using the website (and the app for uploading) is better than PhotoPrism here. The fundamentals are good but it just needs more work.
3. I liked PhotoPrism’s advanced filters. They were very limited but at least they were there.
4. Not being able to sort search results by date is a huge usability issue. I often know roughly when the photo I want to find was taken and being able to order by date would be hugely helpful.
5. You have to eagerly transcode all videos. There is no way to clean up old transcodes and re-transcode on the fly. To be fair the PhotoPrism story also wasn’t great because you had to wait for the full video to be transcoded before starting, leading to a huge delay for videos more than a few seconds, but at least I could save a few hundred gigs of disk space.

Honestly a lot of stuff in PhotoPrism feels like one developer has a weird workflow and they optimized it for that. Most of them are counter to what I actually want to do (like automatic title and description generation, or the review stuff, or auto quality rating). Immich is very clearly inspired by Google Photos and takes a lot of things directly from it, but that matches my use case way better. (I was pretty happy with Google Photos until they started refusing to give access to the originals.)

Most Intel GPUs are great at transcoding. Reliable, widely supported and quite a bit of transcoding power for very little electrical power.

I think the main thing I would check is what formats are supported. If the other GPU can support newer formats like AV1 it may be worth it (if you want to store your videos in these more efficient formats or you have clients who can consume these formats and will appreciate the reduced bandwidth).

But overall I would say if you aren’t having any problems no need to bother. The onboard graphics are simple and efficient.

Yes. As this is a workstation the memory use is highly variable, >95% of the time I would probably barely notice having 32GiB. But other times it is a huge performance win to have that capacity available. Sometimes I am compiling lots of stuff and 32 compilers running + ample disk cache is very important. Other times I am processing lots of data and other times I am running a few VMs.

It is a bit of a luxury. I think if I was on a tighter budget I would have gone for 64GiB. However the price difference wasn’t that much and at least a handful of times I have been quite happy to have that capacity available. And worst case I just have everything sitting in disk cache after a warm up which is a small performance win on every small task.