I used it for almost a year at the lowest tier, then got the couples plan more recently and it has high spouse approval factor, even though there was some initial setup

Dunno. Check their about page, but appears to be through GCP?

Kagi. Privacy focussed, no ads, and excellent results with options for sorting preferred sources to appear at the top, or not. Costs money but man, it’s fast and good in the way Google was back in the day. Some plans also include anonymous access to a variety of LLMs though they are older models, and if they can run them locally, they do. Really liking it.

Just Watch is a pretty great service for this, especially when recommending a show or movie to others. Other services integrate with it too (like Trakt, which is a nice one stop shop for discovery, scrobbling, and list management).

…that mediocrity can pay to greatness”

All this “mediocrity” is pretty overwhelming right now.

But did you solve your own problem?

The National Film Board is totally free, and you can watch the Log Driver’s Waltz anytime you please!

Karma doesn’t always ripen in this life, but upon reincarnation.

One third of Americans (non voters) were happy to watch whilst another third (MAGAts) attempts to murder the other third everyone.

Charmin instructions unclear. Wiped butt with polar brown bear

Given (in our house, anyway) cover songs don’t count, I’m going to make a ruling that as a derivative work, your Wham!-ageddon streak remains safe…for now

You may want check out Infuse for the AppleTV. I have found it fixed every audio drift and video jitter concern that I’ve ever had with Plex or Jellyfin.

You can point it either directly at an SMB share, or a library hosted on Jellyfin or Plex. The advantage of this is it caches the artwork in the library, not on the AppleTV, because the AppleTV will periodically flush its local cache, leading to long re-fetching times and waiting to watch things.

I have no recommendations for the Chromecast.

Maybe. I was a kid so probably was given crap equipment anf cheap film and likely didn’t treat it well. But the principle is the same. Having deeper shadows that preserve detail, and brighter highlights that aren’t blown out is what, for me, evokes a more visceral response when watching content, whereas Increasing the number of pixels from 1080p to 4K doesn’t.

First, good job on not having a smart TV. They’re truly awful.

I would de-emphasize the actual resolution benefits of 4K. Most of us don’t sit close enough to notice the difference.

For me, it’s about high dynamic range (HDR).

For example, when I was a kid, I was always annoyed by how the photos I took of what I thought was a gorgeous landscape, and then developed the film (yes, I’m an old) it always looked horribly bland and drab.

Watching 4K content on a TV for the first time was like looking at the beautiful landscape again. (It actually was - Netflix’s Marco Polo had the most stunning vistas!)

Most answers here are missing the benefits of a home Mac running 24/7 if you’re already part of the Apple ecosystem. For example, you can have it sync all your iCloud data (documents, photos, iTunes content) and back them up locally, then elsewhere outside of Apple’s ecosystem. You can also have it act as a local CDN for OS updates, whereby it will cache OS downloads locally so any subsequent updates will be super quick.

On the downside, I found native Docker on macOS kinda sucked, and just installed Ubuntu on my 2012 Mac Mini (now running Proxmox for funsies), but I have an old iMac to do the caching. You could probably virtualize and get both benefits, and I am considering moving to a new M4 mini for the power savings and sheer speed. That M4 Pro chip has absolutely incredible Geekbench numbers while sipping power.

If I use your math of 99.999% dying, only ~80,000 people will survive, not millions…

It’s down 10% which is the literal definition of decimated!

Trump and Vance, as of today, are just private citizens.

JD Vance is a sitting US senator.

Thank you for introducing me to Wilhoit’s Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

To properly answer, we need to define what we mean as “airborne” which has gotten a bunch of people very upset recently. Prior to the COVID pandemic, the transmission model for respiratory viruses focussed on 3 distinct models of transmission:

• Fomites are collections of excretions on surfaces containing live virus. An infectious person cough into their hand, pick their nose, or similar, then touch the doorknob. The next person touches the doorknob, then their mucus membrane (nose, eye, mouth) and they get infected.
• Droplets are large collections of excretions that are transmitted during talking, shouting, singing, coughing, or sneezing. They are ballistically expelled, but don’t remain in the air. An infected person expels these droplets, and must be in range of another person who is struck by these droplets in their mucus membranes to be infected.
• Finally, airborne transmission occurs when micro droplets small enough to ride on air currents are expelled from infected people, and non infected people inhale them into their airways.

COVID was presumed to only be transmitted through the first 2 methods. But weird things were observed, where transmission occurred when people (or ferret model experiments) were separated by barriers through which ballistic droplets couldn’t pass, like air ducts with multiple 90° bends. People also got sick after being in rooms many minutes after infected people had been present, long after ballistic droplets would have harmlessly fallen to the ground.

In reality, droplet models were just close range transmission, and airborne long range transmission of bio-aerosols, or micro droplets created from breathing, shouting, singing, coughing, or sneezing. The range was more a function of the transmissibility of the virus. Highly infective things can infect at low doses at long range. Less infective things occur with much higher doses, when people are quite close to one another. This folded in the prior models quite nicely. It was, however, not well accepted.

If a disease is to be transmitted by bio-aerosols, the disease vector needs to be able to enter the body through the surfaces with which it will interact upon being “breathed in”. This doesn’t work well for the STI viruses or bacteria, nor the malarial parasite, as they aren’t actively expelled in the respiratory system, so don’t generate bio-aerosols, and require access to highly specific host cells not easily accessed through the respiratory system at the necessary volumes to create an infection.

So, no, not really possible for non-respiratory viruses to become “airborne” in that sense.there would need to be a LOT of intermediate steps.

But diseases that we used to consider to be transmitted by the now defunct ballistic droplet model can become “airborne” (instead of “droplet”) if their ability to infect a subject becomes more successful at lower doses of pathogen such that it can occur at longer range, and over longer times.