LocalSend should be called God Send because it’ll save your life. It’s AirDrop, but for everything and open source. Works really well, no setup, no server.

Audiobookshelf. Not exactly a “hidden” gem at this point, but I’m putting it here for today’s lucky 10,000. Simply the best way to store and stream audiobooks. Does podcasts too, and ebooks, although there are better tools for those.

I came here to say this exact same thing. Videogames are an art form, and the history of that art should be preserved, both the successes and the failures. People should be able to look back on what was a hit and what was flop, on the ideas that worked and the ones that didn’t, on the well made games and the badly made games. All of it matters, all of it is part of the same story.

Yes I expect to get downvoted

You should. Not because you’re some bold warrior for free speech valiantly defying the woke mob like you seem to think, but because you’re just flat out wrong. You’re spreading disinformation and acting like you’re standing up for facts.

Trans women who are engaged in medical transition are either taking high dose androgen blockers, or have had their source of androgens removed entirely. In fact, the average medically transitioning trans woman has less testosterone than the average cis woman. I know trans women who work out, who engage in physical sports and even combat sports. They struggle immensely with the fact that their bodies just flat out refuse to build muscle. I know people who do the kind of exercise and eat the kind of diet that would put the average guy at 200-220lbs within a year, and their bodies resolutely refuse to go past 140-160.

Trans women are at an astonishing disadvantage in sports. The few who excel do so either because they’re in sports where those disadvantages don’t matter (in which case, there’s no advantage to be concerned about either) or do so in spite of those disadvantages. This can be seen in the numbers; until recent panics started leading to bannings, many international sports including pretty much all of the olympics allowed trans women to compete as their stated gender, and yet trans women are actually under-represented among trophy and medal holders. Statistically, by sheer population ratio, they should be winning more than they are.

Transphobes love to latch on to any individual example of a trans woman performing well as if it justifies their argument, but when looked at in aggregate the statistics show that there is no danger of unfairness being posed by trans women in sports. No amount of bullshit about “bone density” and other meaningless shit that has never been suggested to matter in these competitions until hateful bigots needed an excuse can change the reality that sports are doing just fine. The only reason more trans women are winning in sports now is because more trans women are competing in sports, because more people feel comfortable openly expressing this part of their identity.

The point is that clouds aren’t inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they’ve become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it’s not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.

Basically everything can be set through server / game rules. How do zombies work (speed, strength, toughness, hearing, vision, nocturnal or not, memory, intelligence, etc), how does the virus work, loot availability, XP gain, how long its been since the outbreak, whether power and water should shut off at some point, and so many other things. And that’s all without even touching a single mod. It’s incredibly versatile.

For the record (mostly saying this for the benefit of people who don’t play but might) Zomboid is one of the most customizable games ever. Rules like “How zombie virus transmits” are completely up to you. My wife and I play together and we decided that all survivors are immune to the virus in our world, so we turned off transmission entirely. It just made more sense to us if it was something like an airborne pathogen.

I often describe Project Zomboid as a toolkit for creating your own personal zombie apocalypse.

The Nvidia Shield is still the best option for this. I’ve tried all kinds of homebrew solutions and always had headaches. In the two years I’ve had my Shield, I’ve never had a problem. Smart Tube Next lets me cast YouTube without ads, Kodi/Jellyfin gives me all my media library, plus I’ve got official apps for Nebula, Dropout and Spotify. Custom launcher removes what little amount of ads there were (and that was unobtrusive background banner stuff even at its worst). Plus the pro version can handle some pretty powerful emulators.

Was 100% going to buy it. Absolutely won’t now. Fuck em.

Aren’t they processing high quality data from multiple sources?

Here’s where the misunderstanding comes in, I think. And it’s not the high quality data or the multiple sources. It’s the “processing” part.

It’s a natural human assumption to imagine that a thinking machine with access to a huge repository of data would have little trouble providing useful and correct answers. But the mistake here is in treating these things as thinking machines.

That’s understandable. A multi-billion dollar propaganda machine has been set up to sell you that lie.

In reality, LLMs are word prediction machines. They try to predict the words that would likely follow other words. They’re really quite good at it. The underlying technology is extremely impressive, allowing them to approximate human conversation in a way that is quite uncanny.

But what you have to grasp is that you’re not interacting with something that thinks. There isn’t even an attempt to approximate a mind. Rather, what you have is a confabulation engine; a machine for producing plausible fictions. It does this by creating unbelievably huge matrices of words - literally operating in billions of dimensions at once, graphs with many times more axes than we have letters - and probabilistically associating them with each other. It’s all very clever, but what it produces is 100% fake, made up, totally invented.

Now, because of the training data they’ve been fed, those made up answers will, depending on the question, sometimes ends up being right. For certain types of question they can actually be right quite a lot of the time. For other types of question, almost never. But the point is, they’re only ever right by accident. The “AI” is always, always constructing a fiction. That fiction just sometimes aligns with reality.

That doesn’t seem to bother OpenAI insiders, though, who hope to be bringing in $125 billion in annual revenue by 2029.

To hit that kind of revenue they would need to convince 5% of the world’s population to spend $20 a month on a chatbot. Netflix has barely managed to reach about two thirds of that subscriber number, and they offer a whole-ass streaming service. Obviously OpenAI can supplement consumer sales with enterprise and API access, but so far they’re doing a very bad job of that.

But even if they did hit those numbers, they’d still be running at a loss. By their own admission their product isn’t even profitable at $200 a month. More customers won’t make you more money when everything you sell is a loss leader.

Honestly, none that are all that great. I tried Kodi in various forms, LibreElec, OSMC, MythTV, Steam Big Picture, and KDE TV (or whatever its called), but you’re just never going to get a great experience with stuff like Netflix and YouTube on Linux.

In the end, I bought myself an Nvidia Shield, switched out the launcher for one without ads, installed Smart Tube Next for ad-free YouTube, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I’ve got my apps for Nebula and Dropout. I’ve got Kodi and Jellyfin for my home library. It has barely any power consumption, it boots fast, it runs a huge variety of emulators, the included remote works great (plus there’s a remote app for your phone that controls the entire system), and the wife acceptance factor is exceptional.

I’m really big on self-hosting and building all my own stuff; I use lots of repurposed hardware salvaged from companies I and my friends work at and I try to avoid off the shelf products. But I’m genuinely kicking myself for not buying a Shield sooner. It really is the best TV solution for a self hoster.