Musician, mechanic, writer, dreamer, techy, green thumb, emigrant, BP2, ADHD, Father, weirdo

https://www.battleforlibraries.com/

#DigitalRightsForLibraries

  • 3 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • There can be a lot of ways this has nothing at all to do with you.

    Begin anecdote: I just got back from two years out of the country and am back to visit family and earn more money for my next trip. I’m hugely depressed. I drained about $80k in savings that took me 15 years to build, have no job, no car, and am sleeping on a concrete floor in a family member’s basement. I’m grown with three adult children.

    My older cousin has three kids in their late twenties and early thirties. Two daughters live together and have game night every Tuesday. They adore me and invite me weekly. I’ve not had the stamina to endure a long activity like that, and I also am waiting for both sisters to be available, as one had been working nights, but has next Tuesday off.

    When I canceled this past Tuesday, the working sister told me the following day that her father and sister are angry with both of us – convinced I favor working sister more than the two of them. They assume (as is their dramatic nature) that anything that affects them was intentionally done with malice.

    I had a doctor’s appointment the day of game night that ran until 3pm, and game night was 70 miles away at 5pm.

    These two are sure that I’m slighting them, when in reality, I was home rocking on a cold floor trying to find the motivation to face the public so I could eat dinner. I never did eat. I woke to the revelation from working sister, and now, visiting game night seems 50 times more awkward and uncomfortable to me.

    If they hadn’t taken it personally that I’m a mess, I’d be scheduled for game night in two days. As it is, I’m almost 98% guaranteed to skip it to avoid that drama. My canceling had nothing to do with them. My depression and self-loathing are of my own making, and when people feel the need to pressure me or shame me, it never helps in any way.

    End anecdote.

    If you took it personally that people didn’t show to your party, I get it. I’m sorry. But it likely was not you, and isn’t indicative of the care these people have for you. Its their own thing. My advice is to laugh it off as a plan gone wrong and put it behind you. There are real things that affect us. We don’t need to invent them.

    “Remember that time I decided to celebrate my birthday for the first time in decades? I thought 50 would show, but it was 5? Guess that didn’t go as planned!” Its funny, if you let it be.

    Take the win: you stayed on-task and for a big shin-dig planned. You have 50 friends.

    Maybe you can keep gatherings small and simple for a while, and let the large gatherings happen more organically?

    I hope your week is a good one and you can smile about this soon. Happy birthday.



  • Kodi on my 2015 Nvidia Shield doesn’t stutter for me playing back 30GB+ 4k files on a 1Gb network from an ancient (2012) AMD Athlon TrueNAS box. It could be network related, but you can test this from another machine (laptop, desktop, etc) or by using local playback on the pi. I have cheap network hardware, and have never needed better. All this is to say Kodi mounting NFS shouldn’t need much bandwidth or high end gear. Perhaps the issue is on the playback side. Good luck!

    Edit: and an



  • Thx. I’m dabbling rn with a 2015 Intel i5 SFF and a low profile 6400 GPU, but it looks like I’ll be getting back to all my gear soon, and was curious to see what others are having success running with.

    I think I’m looking at upgrading to a 7600 or greater GPU in a ryzen 7, but still on the sidelines watching the ryzen 9k rollout.

    I still haven’t tried any image generation, have only used llamafile and LM studio, but would like to did a little deeper, while accounting for my dreaded ADHD that makes it miserable to learn new skills…





  • They also don’t always keep the metadata in the same archive (zip or tar) with the pictures they belong with, and that can throw off imports with tools that process Google Takeout archives directly. Its a pretty nasty solution, for real.

    I moved about 140GB to ente.io before they had their newer takeout process, but some destinations can enable third party apps (like rclone) to do cloud to cloud. Nor sure which work best, since I couldn’t go that route myself.


  • I personally believe that the campaign against tiktok is more an issue with rich people ensuring that they remain rich in the future then it is with any actual national security concern.

    I agree, and the evidence is pretty clear about who started the panic, and who benefits from it. That said, it’s clear that Tiktok does have security concerns. They’ve been caught spying on journalists. But that’s a problem with what’s legal in the US of A, not what one company does.

    And Bytedance worked on multiple initiatives to make US regulators happy, like moving all data operations to Texas (IIRC, sleepy brain can’t find the links this early) and other acquiescences that actually served security needs, but were inexplicably forgotten and abandoned by people in our end, not theirs.

    They either want to force tiktok to play by the rest of American companies rules

    They already do. Facebook and Google and Apple have all been complicit in genocide, oppression and domestic spying, but that benefits US law enforcement, who lobby against reforms that would prevent it. Those are the rules: hoover up the data and use it however the f#@k they want, selling access to all bidders.

    or to take it out so that American companies can vacuum up the user space and AD revenue.

    Exactly. Even at the cost of an entire generation of voters’ goodwill. If “security” is the concern, why doesn’t Congress care about repeated breaches like this?

    But who are we kidding? If we cared about national security, would we permit a felon and proven fraud to be elected president? Would we be lying naked with bedfellows such as Saudi Arabia? And look at who is putting up the money to buy Tiktok.

    It’s very Randian.

    Indeed. Government intervention in the economy, crony capitalism, and economic nationalism. A Randian trifecta.



  • It’s performative posturing by politicians who want to look tough on China and/or have been (or are pretending to be) convinced by TikTok’s competitors that they are a national security threat because they gather lots of data, just like every other app does.

    If law makers really wanted to prevent the data being vacuumed up, they could pass meaningful privacy laws, but they own stock in companies that compete with TikTok and that also profit by vacuuming up everyone’s data, so they pretend that it’s just Chinese apps we have to worry about.

    Except, since we have no privacy laws, if China wants to get the data, it’s perfectly legal for them to buy it from data brokers. We could enact laws that make what they (and Facebook, and Google, and…and…) are doing is illegal, but data brokers make billions, and politicians enjoy enabling billionaires in their exploitation of the general public. So the ban doesn’t stop China from bring able to get data on American citizens.

    What the ban really does is (try to) force TikToks owners (Bytedance) to sell/divest to US companies that will enrich lawmakers and those lobbying the lawmakers.

    Ars Technica has some good write-ups on the situation, and Techdirt has far more, and they don’t pull punches. I suspect EFF has something written on the subject too.