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Comment Re: Vim is already available for Windows (Score 1) 105

Well I know that you can't argue over personal tastes, and many people like modal editors, but I don't think it is about "educating yourself". Perhaps the opposite is true, as this interview with vi's creator, Bill Joy, explains:

REVIEW: What would you do differently?
JOY: I wish we hadn't used all the keys on the keyboard. I think the interesting thing is that vi is really a mode-based editor. I think as mode-based editors go, it's pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me.

Comment The Surface Studio had a good screen, at least (Score 1) 16

I never had a Surface Studio. But I always wanted one for its 4500x3000 display. Microsoft did a good job in pushing 3:2 aspect ratio and driving the PC market away from the horrible letterboxing that dominated laptops and monitors for a decade. It's a pity that panel was never sold in a standalone monitor (Huawei talked about it but the product never reached the market).

Comment Re:Fundamentally Similar to Fake Quotes (Score 1) 85

Did you try asking one chatbot to check the quotations given by the other chatbot? If you ask the AI to find something then it will do its best to please you. But if you ask it "is this quotation real" or "is there any evidence for X" then at least some of the time it can perform the useful service of saying "no, can't find it".

Comment Might free up some hardware (Score 1) 91

I upgraded my video card recently. I need four DisplayPort outputs so I picked a Nvidia RTX A2000 (old generation, not Ada). The prices on ebay.co.uk looked good value. Then I looked at the seller, and he had about a dozen of these cards for sale. I guess Bitcoin or crypto mining costs have reached some threshold where these cards no longer make money.

(The A2000 is a power-limited card drawing only 70 watts, intended for workstations, but I guess that might also make it suitable for mining.)

Comment Re:Plex = Subscription-Ware (Score 1) 69

I don't think it directly supports remote streaming

It does, but you'll need to route the incoming traffic through manually. For me, that involves having the router forward traffic on port 443 to the server and configuring a reverse proxy on the server to hand off traffic addressed to jellyfin.$HOME_DOMAIN to the Jellyfin daemon. In my case, Jellyfin is one service among many on a Docker host, with Caddy directing incoming traffic to wherever it needs to go.

It's not automated like Plex, but I've streamed movies and TV shows from across the country without any problems.

Comment Re:Cannot wait... (Score 3, Informative) 159

I used to screen scrape jail registry records for county jails in my home area. Though the IDs weren't exactly sequential, doing groups of 50 would get hits for two of the local counties.

What I found was that, while the website UI wouldn't show juvenile records, you could access them directly w/the ID. Surfacing it to the county took a day or so to find the right person but they quickly closed that hole, but who knows how many records were handed out to malicious actors over the years before I found it.

Comment Surely AI can check its own hallucinations? (Score 1) 74

Couldn't you take the legal brief generated by an AI, and feed it into ChatGPT asking "please look up all of the cases cited in this brief and give a URI for each"? Personally I feel that getting AI to check for errors in work is much more useful than getting it to write the work itself.

Comment Re: Nice Speeds (Score 1) 32

I recently switched my service plan (with Cox in Las Vegas) from 500 Mbps with a 1.2-TB (IIRC) monthly limit to 250 Mbps with no limit. After a couple of months of overages that basically doubled my bill, it'll be nice to have predictable billing no matter how much we end up using. 250 Mbps has been fast enough so far.

Comment Re:Plex (Score 1) 25

Plex is available on many more devices. Jellyfin has PC, iOS, Android, AppleTV, AndroidTV, Roku, and LG TVs. But Plex also has PlayStation and Xbox, Samsung TVs, Vizio TVs, and many other smaller streaming boxes.

I used to run Plex. I even paid for a lifetime subscription years ago. I now run Jellyfin; it's been less of a hassle to keep it running and it puts less load on my server. I shut off my Plex container last month after switching my parents' Rokus over to Jellyfin. At home, I switched to Chromecasts (the newer ones that run Android TV) after having run OpenELEC on Raspberry Pi 3s for a while.

Plex also has better remote access support. Just enable it and setup a port forward/firewall rule. Jellyfin? Have fun configuring a VPN on each client to access it.

My Jellyfin instance shares a box with a bunch of other services. Caddy routes traffic on port 443 wherever it needs to go: to Jellyfin, to one of the *arrs, to Nextcloud, GitLab, etc. One rule at the router passes inbound port 443 off to Caddy. No VPN is necessary.

By comparison, there were more than a few instances where Plex's "it just works" networking configuration didn't just work.

Comment Re:Premium Pro surely means half-decent screen (Score 1) 77

Hmm, I've been using hi-dpi (220 pixels per inch or more) for about twenty years (starting with the IBM T221) and using them with Windows has usually been fine. Even ancient versions let you set a text size of 200%. They mucked it up starting with Vista, doing a blurred scaling in the GPU for some applications, but you can turn that off.

Comment Re:Tarriffs to impact this and all of Walmarts goo (Score 1) 83

The Walmart nearest to me has been putting more and more products in locked cases. Not just laundry detergent (WTF?), but things like razors, most OTC meds, batteries, and liquor come to mind. I went to a larger store a bit further away for some things for the puppy I just got and found they'd even put dog collars and leashes in a locked case. Waiting for someone to come unlock the case (which often takes several minutes) is bad enough. On some occasions, they've even insisted on carrying the item to the checkout instead of just handing it over. For that kind of hassle, I'd just as soon fire off an Amazon order if I don't need it right now.

tl;dr: The way Walmart treats all its customers like would-be criminals isn't exactly endearing.

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