Youtube would rather be able to track every user and make more profit per person than go big tent all audiences.

True, but consider that Google, Alphabet, whatever, is fundamentally an information broker. All of their services and technologies are simply a means to that end. They have no incentive to go big tent if it means sacrificing their ability to harvest data on individuals and groups.

I’m not saying TrueNAS and ZFS aren’t good. For large enterprise systems, arrays with sufficient redundancy, servers with reliable power management, I can see its advantages, esp. w/ snapshots, etc. I acknowledge that Open Media Vault is mickey mouse in comparison.

I just feel compelled to share my experience when I see people considering TrueNAS for their first foray into building a small home media server, running a z1 array, with no mention of battery backup or power management. ZFS isn’t inherently safer. It’s safer when paired with sufficient redundancy and power management.

When I built my first server, TrueNAS, ZFS, and Raid z1 made perfect sense. And I loved it for the first couple months. Then an update and unexpected shutdown rendered my storage pools unrecoverable. Had backups for most but not all of the files, and spent almost a year of bits of free time here wading in way over my head on highly technical support forum threads & there trying to bring the pools back online. Nothing worked, the array was toast.

I don’t know how tech savvy you are, but here’s the advice I’d give my past self - Take a few weeks to read documentation and play with TrueNAS before filling up your drives with stuff. Peek around in troubleshooting forums, see if the troubleshooting you may have to do is in line with your experience level.

After wiping my drives and starting over, I built around Open Media Vault. It’s less pretty and less feature rich than TrueNas, but it’s also much less fragile in a raid z1 setup and I never worry about it.

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Always worth taking a peek at a user’s home instance. Some are pushing out more ragebait than others.

I have a theory about her intentions for writing about killing that dog.

Noem published her autobiography while vying to be the republican running mate in the election. On the one hand, why would she choose to publish something so openly sinister in her autobiography, at such a consequential time for her political career? She must have known that story would get picked up and blasted in the media. But part of me wonders if maybe, that was her goal. Maybe by including the dog story in her book, Noem was sending a signal to Trump that she wouldn’t flinch to do the cruel, dirty work that maga wants done. And now here she is, doing dirty work.

Filtering doesn’t necessarily have to be driven by AI.

Take recipes for example. Recipes are now almost impossible to get non AI results for via search engines. But, simple hardcoded parameters that set a preference for older results, ones without affiliate links (Marginalia does this), ones with fewer than 5 domains executing javascript on the site, some analysis of the date of the domain registration and activity on the domain, some analysis of the top level domain to filter out blogspam, these would all make the search results more human.

My hope is that eventually, there will be a paradigm of search engine optimization, maybe even an open standard for the absence of excessive javascript, affiliate links, social media buttons, etc. Sites that lack those elements are way less likely to be junk.

I think tools for detecting and filtering out ai material from search results would go a long way to improve the current situation, and is a middle ground between an internet revolution and a technological dystopia. There is still an unfathomably large amount of good information on the internet, the issue is that there is 20x more trash. And the trash is scaling rapidly, humans are not.

If you haven’t already, give the Marginalia search engine a try. They’re doing something interesting in this space. You can filter out results with javascript, affiliate links, tracking, ads, and cookies. After filtering, the internet feels a lot more like it did 20 years ago, more sincere, more human.

If I recall correctly, Marginalia is made and maintained by one guy. As the trash to good content ratio worsens, I think more people will want to build on and use projects like Marginalia.

I’d like to be sealed in a sous vide bag, that way I can be perpetually protected from anything that tastes good and live forever.

The process to log in to the online portal of Outlook is so bad it’s crossed into comical territory. So much friction, only to shunt you to a full screen clippy copilot page.

I’d be curious to know what the usage statistics are for that page. Like, what could a person possibly accomplish there?

I got this wrong a while back - I think it’s ‘medias’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res

I like feedbro too. Haven’t found a standalone selfhosted solution that has the same degree of customization.

I’m trying out freshrss right now and don’t like it. Possibly my issues stem from user error, but, I can’t figure out how to automatically hide articles based on keywords, adding extensions is a pain, and the ui feels large and very in-the-way. By default it truncates article titles, which I find absolutely baffling.

Be careful about mentioning who you bank with on the internet, using an account that anyone can browse your comment history.

I might be the only one, but I really liked the ending of Mass Effect 3. I appreciated that at the end, there are things that you can’t save, all the choices you’ve made in aggregate sometimes don’t make the difference you think they will, and at this grand level, maybe nothing you do will feel like the ‘right’ thing to do. I thought there was a really unique, deep sort of meta-philosophy about that.

I also played the games back-to-back over the course of a few weeks, not as they were released. Part of me wonders if it would be possible to have an ending to the trilogy that satisfied the sort of player who played the games over the long arc of their release and spent years casting their imaginations toward an ending.

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There are good RSS reader web browser extensions. Firefox has a few. Check out Feedbro.

Cool, I’ll check this out! I assumed that since it was branded as ‘like a dragon’, it had the turn-based combat style, but it doesn’t, which I think is good. Turn based combat in Yakuza doesn’t look very fun so I’ve been avoiding those titles.

A Yakuza game set during the Meiji Restoration would slap.

POV: You’re the world’s largest producer of lentils, by far

Conservatives: “They’re eating the bugs”