• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • My guess is that with TV/Movies streaming you generally sit down to consume a given piece of content in chunks of minimum 1hr, and people rarely watch an episode of one show back to back with another show. So having that content fragmented between services doesn’t provide much friction to normal viewing.

    Contrast that with music, where having to switch services to listen to a different album would be extremely disruptive to the way most people listen. The only way that would work is if the separate services were generally clustered by genre, like radio. Having said that, I’m a little surprised that niche music streaming services haven’t popped up (like how you have Crunchyroll for anime, for example).



  • That is so odd… I’ve only ridden Amtrak a few times, but I was amazed at how many stops were just some small town that happened to lie on the rail line.

    Most small towns that lie on a major highway and are supported by commuter traffic are only going to support a truck stop and a few fast food restaurants at best. Sure, a true high speed rail line would likely only stop in larger metropolitan areas, so those meager income sources may dwindle. But on the other hand if I were a rail commuter in one of those rural/suburban areas, I’d be much more likely to spend some time doing a bit of shopping or lingering in a restaurant during that transition from the train to my car after work, than if I were just passing through in my car.





  • Honestly, I get it. If you have a relatively small stash of media, say a couple TB worth, you can pretty easily say "well I watched this movie, so I’ll delete it and make room for the next. When you get into the 10’s of TB range, the mindset has switched from it being a dynamic, temporary library to a repository. And it becomes easier just to plug in another 10-20TB drive occasionally, rather than trying to curate thousands of movies and shows.

    I can see both sides though. There’s certainly something to be said for being deliberate about the media you consume–and therefore only needing enough storage for your immediate viewing plans. I’m not quite into the 100TB range with my library, but I definitely have moments where I feel like having so many options makes any given option seem less appealing.




  • Problem is, by the time they’ve failed the test, the opportunity for them to learn the content is largely passed.

    The purpose of school is to educate and teach thinking skills. Tests are just a way to assess how effectively you and your students are achieving that goal. If something (in this case easy access to AI tools in the classroom) is disrupting that teaching/learning process, sure it’s useful to detect that through testing, but I’d doesn’t do anything really to solve the problem. Some fraction of kids are disciplined enough to recognize that skating by on classwork will lead to poor test results and possibly retaking classes, but generally those aren’t the kids you need to worry about anyway.


  • I also thought I’d miss Hulu and Netflix a lot more than I do. What used to irk me so badly was how utterly shit Netflix is when you just want to sit down and find something new to watch. Their front page would be list after list of things like “Hot New Comedies” “Best Independent Films of 2025”, “Classic Action Flicks” and somehow it always felt like the same 30 or 40 movies randomly shuffled together. So I’d spend 15 minutes scrolling through the same slop in different orders, get frustrated and search for a movie that I remembered wanting to watch, only to find that it was on none of the services I was subscribed to, and cost $8.99 for a single watch of a 20 year old movie.

    We had been Netflix subscribers since the very start when they delivered discs through the mail. Kinda sad how they went from having virtually anything you could think of to watch (and having a halfway decent recommendation algorithm to boot!) to where they are today.







  • Beginner here (to Linux and networking anyways), running Unraid for about 18 months now. Fully agree, it’s been great for actually getting up and doing useful things quickly and relatively pain free.

    Eventually I would like to try working backwards and getting things running on a more “traditional” server environment, but Unraid has been a great learning tool for me personally.

    It’s like… Maybe some folks learned to overhaul an engine before they got their driver’s license, but lots of people just need to a car to get to work and back today, and they can learn to change their oil and do a brake job when the time comes.


  • Honestly, as long as it’s easily DIY upgradable (accessible speaker mounting locations, standard DIN panels, etc) I am all for this. Most OEM audio systems are stupidly overpriced and suck complete donkey balls compared to what you can get for a few hundred bucks at Crutchfield and install in an afternoon.

    For the last 20 years or so, most factory audio systems are so integrated into the rest of the electronics that they can be an absolute nightmare to upgrade unless you are a pro, which means you get the worst of both worlds: garbage audio, AND a steep upgrade path.


  • Just speaking for myself here, but as someone with only basic literacy in networking and almost zero prior experience with Linux or Docker, I found Unraid extremely straightforward to spin up–especially with the numerous guides floating around on Youtube. I started out with a used SFF PC that cost about $120 and a few drives I had lying around, and was up and running with basic NAS functionality in an afternoon.

    I’ve mucked up a few things trying to do something more advanced without fully reading up, but I haven’t had a single hiccup with Unraid itself.

    1.5 years later, and I’ve got ~80TB worth of refurb enterprise drives and hosting several media and other storage services, and I don’t see myself outgrowing it anytime soon.