If you already have a NAS, (since SMB was mentioned, I’m assuming there’s some sort of NAS setup going) then you may even be able to host Plex directly on the NAS. It likely won’t be powerful enough for things like video transcoding, but just audio should be fine.

There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

Yeah, fuck this specifically. I’d rather have a good troubleshooter. I work in live events; I don’t care if an audio technician can run a concert and have it sounding wonderful under ideal conditions. I care if they can salvage a concert after the entire fucking rig stops working 5 minutes before the show starts. I judge techs almost solely on their ability to troubleshoot.

Anyone can run a system that is already built, but a truly good technician can identify where a problem is and work to fix it. I’ve seen too many “good” technicians freeze up and panic at the first sign of trouble, which really just tells me they’re not as good as they say. When you have a show starting in 10 minutes and you have no audio, you can’t waste time with panic.

Yeah, and you can dupe items in RuneScape by dropping them and pressing Alt+F4. Don’t worry, I’ll stand way over here to prove I’m not trying to steal it. If I try to pick up the item you’ll see me move, and you can just pick it up first.

Yup. Pretty much anyone who knew anything about copyright law agreed that they were making a monumentally stupid move. And their only defense basically boiled down to “bUT wE’rE a LiBRarY.” Which completely ignores the fact that even libraries need to comply with copyright laws for ebooks, via licensing agreements with the publishers.

At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:

The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:

The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.

The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.

The rich engineers weren’t the demographic affected by the “rolling” brownouts. The people in McMansions had power the entire time, while the people in apartments were shitting in grocery bags because their toilets had frozen solid from lack of power for heating.

The “rolling” brownouts were really just rolling around the same poor areas.

That’s because they’ve been pushing the iPad as a sort of Mac Lite, but they can’t do that unless you can plug peripherals or a thumb drive into it. You can 100% plug a USB-C laptop dock into an iPad, and it’ll work. You can even use a mouse with it if you really want to.

But they wanted to keep Lightning around as long as possible, because they made a commission on every single lighting cable that was sold; Companies had to license the rights to use the connector, and had to pay Apple for every one they used. That’s why Lightning cables were always a few bucks more expensive than a comparable USB-C cable. That extra few bucks was going straight into Apple’s pocket. It was a huge source of passive income for the company, which they were reluctant to let go of.

If you want Windows without a GUI, you should be using MS-DOS. The whole point of Windows is that it has a GUI.

Well there’s already WinToys, which does a lot. It may be a new project for them to just add in a legacy Control Panel tab.

I can’t believe I didn’t do this…well, 15 years ago.

For what it’s worth, your experience 15 years ago likely would have been very different. It’s only in the past few years that things like drivers for basic hardware have become widely available on Linux without a bunch of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. And even today, there are still certain drivers that often don’t like to play nice.

Ask anyone who had an nvidia GPU 15 years ago if they’d suggest switching to Linux. The answer would have been a resounding “fuck no, it won’t work with your GPU.”

Ah yes, the Apple “we know design better than you do” of the Linux world.

Why not just use something like Fences on Firefox? It allows you to containerize individual tabs. I use it all the time to separate work and personal accounts.

Can also use Vinegar (for YouTube) and Baking Soda (for basically every other site with videos) with Safari on iOS. It’s not a perfect solution, but it at least revamps Safari’s built-in video player so watching in the browser is actually tolerable.

Lemmy has a really biased idea of what the average computer user can do. Imagine Janet in accounting, who calls help desk to reset her password every morning, and takes 30 minutes to remember how to check her email. Or the late GenZ just entering the workforce, who was surprised that their desktop wasn’t a touchscreen, and doesn’t know how a file structure works, because literally every device they’ve used growing up has been either a tablet or a Chromebook. That’s the average user.

Yup. And the issue here is that the cars back into and out of the parking spots, and are also programmed to stop if they get honked at. So car 1 begins backing into a spot, car 2 honks, car 1 pauses and then begins backing again, car 2 honks again, repeat… And when you have 30 cars in a parking lot, all trying to find a parking spot, there’s a lot of backing up and a lot of honking.

Sure, but that feels a little bit like saying “We don’t need guards inside the prison, because we already have them patrolling around the perimeter.”

It’s important because it allows them to directly modify the CPU’s microcode. Basically, the CPU has its own set of instructions, called microcode, which controls how the chip functions on a physical level. If they manage to change your microcode, even a full system reformat won’t kill the virus; You’ll need to either re-flash the CPU (which is not something the standard user or even power user will know how to do) or replace the entire CPU.

The need to seize the company. Boeing holds too many military contracts to be allowed to die. They build planes for the military, so they’ll get an inevitable bailout.

Instead, the government should start seizing parts of the company as part of the bailout. “Oh hey, we paid you all this money, so we own these parts of the company now. Shareholders have been fairly compensated for it by the bailout money, so you can’t say it’s unfair. You have proven that your leadership is lacking and you can’t be allowed to operate without oversight. So now that we own large swaths of the company, we’ll be making lots of the big decisions.”

The tricky part is that Google isn’t wrong about Manifest v3 increasing security for some people. Just allowing any extension to access the full URLs from a webpage is honestly pretty sketchy for most things that aren’t adblockers. Think about Beth in accounting who has 27 bloatware toolbar extensions installed on her home PC, which are happily collecting her full browser history and sending it off to gods know where. Manifest v3 is targeted at increasing security for those users, by making it more difficult for extensions to track you.

The issue is that it also makes ad blocking virtually impossible, because the blocker is forced to just trust that the browser is being truthful about what is and isn’t on the page. And when the browser (developed by one of the largest advertisers in the world) has a vested financial interest in displaying ads, there’s very little trust that the browser will actually be honest.

The issue is that there’s not some sort of “yes, I really want this extension to have full access” legacy workaround built in. Yes, it would inevitably be abused by those scummy extensions, which would just nag idiot users to allow them full access. And the idiot users, being idiots, would just do it without understanding the risks. Even if Chrome threw up all kinds of big red “hey make sure this extension actually needs full access and isn’t just tracking your shit” warning flags, there are still plenty of users who would happily give bloatware full access without reading any of the warnings. But it would also allow ad blockers to continue to function.

Honestly, +1 for SpeedQueen. That’s the brand that every laundromat uses, because they’re basically the Crown Vic of washers; They’re uglier than sin, but they’ll run for literal decades with very little maintenance. They do exactly one thing, (clean your clothes), and they do that one thing very well. They’re the “somehow my grandma’s appliances still work 70 years later, while mine all break after three years" of washing machines.

SpeedQueen doesn’t have any of the modern bells or whistles… But that also means there’s nothing to break prematurely and turn the washer into the world’s largest paperweight. Samsung washers, for instance, have infamously shitty LCD panels, which are notorious for dying right after the warranty expires. And when it dies, the entire washer is dead until you replace basically the entire control interface. SpeedQueen doesn’t have this issue, because they don’t even have LCD panels; everything is just physical knobs and buttons. If something ever does break, it’s just a mechanical switch that you can swap out in 15 minutes with a YouTube tutorial.