MudMan

I barely even remember what the specific dealbreaker was, honestly. I was just dabbling, considering expanding my NAS and maybe getting the gear to dump my 4K BluRays. I gave Jellyfin a try first, I went through the setup process and I remember it being a) confusing to set up directly on my NAS, and b) very ugly.

I gave Plex a try to cover my bases and that looked better and got me up and running faster, so I just stuck with it. Easier remote access was a feature for me there, too, but the choice was made purely on the onboarding process, there was nothing activist to it. It’s maybe the most user-level, unresearched decision I’ve taken on software in a while, honestly. I was already trying to figuring out the ripping and encoding at the same time, so I didn’t want to put any additional attention on library management.

If anything I gave Jellyfin a bit more of a chance than I otherwise would have because I had heard a lot of angry chatter from people about Plex. I guess I came in after they made the changes that pissed people off and didn’t mind the state of the current product without a frame of reference. I would have bailed if there was a subscription, but they do have a one-and-done purchase, so now I’m set up, it’s working and I’ve paid them as much as I’m going to, so I’m fine with it. I do appreciate a free alternative existing, though.

Not the UI, the UX. The UI may be editable, but if I have to make my own UI to be happy with what it looks like or works like, then that’s bad UX.

I get that sometimes those terms are used interchangeably, but they’re not the same.

Should I swap Audible for Steam and start another flame war? Is there a poll widget on this thing?

Hm. I gave Jellyfin a try and the UX was a turnoff, so I ended up in Plex. The separate management of metadata does sound like a pain to me, too, but maybe there’s a bit of sunk cost fallacy to that.

Either way it seems people are mostly fine with their choices and there is a viable free alternative, so… all good there.

I guess people jumping to unfounded conspiratorial conclusions while accusing the plebs of being the cause of all ills doesn’t sit well with me these days.

I wonder why that’d be.

It really, really doesn’t.

Man, I am as frustrated with Nvidia as anybody, but that type of vaguely-informed ranting really makes me go on the defensive.

For one thing, the dumb gatekeeping at the end is absurd. I’ve been building PCs since the early 90s, there are more informed users now than there have ever been, by far. And those that aren’t regurgitate whatever they hear on Youtube from tech influencers anyway. Fortnite casuals aren’t what’s keeping you from owning a 5090, friend.

Speaking of uninformed users regurgitating half-understood Youtube talking points, Nvidia certainly wasn’t going to ship 5090s with a single damaged ROP unit as 5080s, those two cards are built on entirely different dies. It’s very likely that they’ll have some 5080SuperTi thing coming out eventually perhaps built on cut down GB202 instead of the GB203 in the base model, but it’d certainly not be cutting down an ROP and leaving everything else the same. That’s not even the 5090D spec. Plus Nvidia confirms other cards in the 50 series are also affected.

More importantly, neither of us knows how these made it to market. There’s certainly at the very least some lax QA, and I’m sure there was pressure to get as many of the very limited 5090s to retail as possible, but crappy as the 50 series is in many areas I genuinely doubt Nvidia would be so dumb as to deliberately putting chips with this very specific, very consistent fault in the pipes hoping nobody would notice a performance drop and peek at GPU-Z even once. That’s not how this works. I’d love to know what actually happened to cause this, though.

So yes, the 40 and 50 series are named one step too high on the stack. Yes, the pricing increases have been wild, and it’s frustrating that demand is high enough to support it and regulators aren’t stepping in to moderate the MSRP mishandling. Yes, Nvidia mismanaged the 50 series launch in multiple ways, from bad connector design to rushing the 5090 to misleading marketing on frame generation and probably underbaked drivers. That doesn’t mean every issue is the same issue, and it certainly doesn’t mean that a lack of “knowledgeable users” is to blame.

For those not clicking through and reading all the way to the bottom:

More cards are apparently affected, they say Nvidia acknowledged the issue, is telling them that users can get a replacement from the manufacturer and that they’ve addressed the root cause for future units.

Opposition to Israeli genocide was not a problem. Consistently blaming Israeli genocide on the Democrats was an astounding self-own actively encouraged by both Israel and US fascists and it does put at least some of the blame on the dereliction of duty of the US left.

They wrote a nazi manifesto, it got reported on widely, they barely denied it and they won anyway.

Nothing that is happening on their end is the slightest bit unexpected, so I’m just isolating myself from America and Americans as much as I can until I don’t get a choice. However, when I see things like this post by accident I do feel a remarkable urge to grab anybody who expresses disappointment or surprise and shake them by the lapels until they pass out.

This is the most baffling use of hypertext I’ve seen since the early 90s.

Anyway, the premise is flawed. You reality check a toxic optimist ignoring the likelihood of a bad outcome more often than a toxic pessimist, but it’s not always the case. Ultimately they’re all biases. It is true that being a self-proclaimed “realist” is often just an excuse to misbehave under the cynical assumption that a rule is systematically ignored and can’t be amended or enforced, though.

Some frequently repeated false premises, particularly on what AI is and does, but mostly correct conclusions on the effects of regulating it through copyright expansion, IMO.

Hah. I’ve stepped away from Samsung, but you have to give them Dex. That looks less ridiculous in one of theirs.

Yeah. I genuinely don’t know how universal that type of usage is, but I don’t even consider anything else at this point.

Well, an actual full size keyboard. But, you know, for a phone.

Hah, yeah, I had a work one in latter days, too, and there was definitely a sense of weird self-importance associated with it you don’t get from touchscreens.

I don’t know if people reviling virtual keyboards would get much from it, though. Honestly, typing on it was just as annoying. I am probably faster and more accurate using swipe inputs than I was on that thing.

Do Americans think granite is particularly cool or luxurious? It’s generally perceived as being a bit old timey and cheap where I’m from, but I heard someone say that’s not universal.

Maybe one grenade, though. Or two. I can take three, maybe. Look, I’m saying there is a right number of grenades in my tank and it’s not very high, but it’s definitely not zero.

They may not be immune, but they are surprisingly resistant to them.

You have to shoot some of those guys A LOT. Some of them will be some semi-naked bald guy and still take multiple rockets to the face.

First off, I didn’t know the guy’s name is “Kovid”. It must have been a very weird five years for him.

Second, this is an amazing piece of text and I will show it to people to explain why having engineers make design decisions is often a terrible idea.

I genuinely believe there is a strong correlation between FOSS projects getting structured and well funded enough to hire designers and their chance of taking over as the default choice against commercial projects. If UX designers were as interested in volunteer work as engineers the software landscape would be completely different.

The Cortana version of it specifically, it seems?

People tend to overreact to Microsoft announcements (see last week’s panic about an out-of-context policy change for OEMs misreported as a lack of support for older Intel chips), but in fairness MS doesn’t make it easy with the obtuse way they communicate in a whole bunch of areas.