Chinese companies famously ignore patent law and do make copies and try to flood the western market with them.

Most startups don’t have the time and/or money to patent their ideas and big corps do squash them/steal their ideas routinely once they become noticeable.

If anything, startups can’t develop their ideas because some company will hold a generic patent like “clicking a button does something” (or “glide with a pet”) from 30 years ago.

Thank you, I’ll give it a try tomorrow.

I’m in the same shoes about new job having to use teams and I wildly disagree. It is awful.

The best part of it is the noise cancellation on the microphone in calls seem pretty good and having a chat created for meetings is a good integration. BUT…

• voice quality significantly decreases as soon as it’s more than 2 participants… you can clearly tell the difference as soon as a 3rd member is invited.
• annotating on the screen share is extremely useful in slack (not sure if zoom has it too), not a thing I could find in teams
• the channels Vs chats separation in the UI is just weird
• the chats don’t have threads… that’s such a strong feature to contain conversations. I know the channels kinda serve this purpose but it feels weird to use them and closer to sending an email or posting on a forum than directly talking to someone (with having to write a title and bring presented in 1-2 messages per screen due to the size

Compared to zoom, I guess it’s not a big deal really. I’d prefer zoom but it’s oh well. Compared to slack (which has it’s own set of problems, but still) however it seems like a pile of shit in my opinion.

Plex runs relay servers where your Plex server will connect to the relay and your player will also connect to the relay, making both ends of the connection egress type as far as routing and access control goes. https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/

It’s optional and likely not everyone uses it, but this provides a way for Plex to do remote streaming without the Plex server being reachable directly from the internet.

Separately, it costs money for Plex to run.

The issue isn’t with AI, it’s with how companies position it. When they claim it’ll do everything and solve all your issues and then it struggles with some tasks a 10 year old could do, it creates a very negative image.

It also doesn’t help that they hallucinate with a lot of confidence and people use them as a solution, not as a tool - meaning they blindly accept the first answer that came out.

If the creators of models made more reasonable claims and the models were generally able to convey their confidence in the answers they gave maybe the reception wouldn’t be so cold. But then there wouldn’t be hype and AI wouldn’t be actively shoved into everything.

Interesting, for all its faults I have found Plex to work very reliably for playback.

You can also try emby, it has its own different faults but I’ve found it better for my above issues than jellyfin. I remember finding something else with it which made me go back to Plex again, but it escapes me what it was.

Not OP but there were 3 things that made me switch back after about 2 weeks (around 5 months ago):

1. Lack of intro and credit skipping (I think they’re working towards it tho?). There was an add-on but it just wasn’t a comparable experience
2. Poor options to customize subtitle display (wasn’t even looking for much, just a black outline and maybe bolder font). I forget the detail about what was missing at this point, just remember being annoyed with it.
3. The android app on TV just felt like they never considered it may be used with a remote (some buttons and menus in annoying to reach places, like the alphabet for quickly jumping in a library). Also felt like there were 3-4 differently bad screens for browsing the library rather than 1 good one.

It’s very impressive how good they made jellyfin with volunteer effort, it’s just very tough to compete with paid staff (in terms of how much time can they put into each feature and part). I do hope it gets there, cuz plex has been circling the drain for a while for me now.

“If you get sued for the lies our AI pumped onto your website that we paid you for, it’s on you and nothing to do with us gl hf.”

Unfortunately for some of them even if the game works there are often cases where either mods don’t work or some overlay/other additional software.

On your answer though, I was under the impression that when you configure the KVM passthrough setup it makes the video card you use for the passthrough inaccessible for the host itself and that to make it accessible, it requires undoing some of the config and a restart. Is this incorrect?

To install a game you have bought on steam you need the steam client, the steam servers, internet and your steam account. If any of those stops being available you can no longer install the games you have bought. So while you can play the games once installed without most of the above, you can lose access to your not currently installed games.

Also, on steam you purchase licenses to the games which they can revoke. I.e. if steam turned evil they could take away games from your library and you couldn’t do anything about it really.

Comparatively on GOG, you get a binary installer you can download and can keep forever without DRM so you don’t need anything else to install the game in the future, even if it disappeared from your GOG account for some reason, you could still install and play the game.

Yes, chrome certainly had other merits too. Neither of us can say with certainty why it succeeded. Personally, I don’t think a crap browser pushed by Google would have but also an amazing browser pushed by an unknown independent developer would have either.

Certainly agree with your 2nd point though.

It’s true, although chrome has gotten a significant boost from Google promoting it in search and every Google app (which I don’t know if they still do).

So chrome beats edge on users, but it’s also likely largely because of the unfair advantage it receives/received from that promotion. Those options are not really available to other browser developers (unless Amazon or meta also decided they want a browser for some reason).

I’d guess it’s corporate circlejerk - they probably made deals with hardware manufacturers who are annoyed people are not replacing their perfectly functional systems with new ones. Windows gets pre-installed on new systems, and in exchange windows requires new things forcing people to upgrade their old systems - or be locked out of the most popular OS in the world.

So this means every user who contributes posts and comments on a paid subreddit will get a cut from the subscribtion revenue right? Right…?

So untrue, an LLM is way more apologetic when it messes up…

Imagine if it got told the API pricing idea is stupid and it just went “you’re right, my bad” immediately. We’d probably be having this conversation on Reddit.

Boeing engineers are advocating for flying Starliner as is, that enough is known about the problem that failures will not occur during the vehicle’s return to Earth.

Yea honestly those engineers should go and fly on Starliner themselves first. They could even replicate the issue on the ground, and yet it’s still unknown what’s causing it but they feel comfortable to just say “nah it’s fine”?

I wonder how the astronauts feel about getting back on it to return…

Just a warning: the photo part of proton drive is incredibly basic to be generous and even that doesn’t seem to work smoothly (on android). Just to handpick 2 very annoying things aside from lack of features: opening a picture that’s locally on your phone takes 1-2 seconds, and when you back out it has to refresh the gallery view every time, which also takes 1-2 seconds - incredibly annoying while looking for the correct picture.

I use it as a second type of backup for my photos, but I definitely couldn’t live with the UX the app provides. IMO the drive part in general is very lacking.

I’m still happy with my proton subscription for mail and VPN, but I’d suggest you trial the drive part before committing to it (unless you already know it’s ok for your needs, in which case great!).

I just hope that 1 IP they’re so bent over turns out to be a CGNAT IP.

I don’t know if there are agencies focussing on this, but in general it probably comes down to the company more than the agency. Probably worth filtering for companies offering flexible hours in the description

I would say at the moment the IT job market is incredibly competitive for candidates, so it might be even more difficult to find truly flex roles when they can so easily find 100s of people who just work regular hours.

On your last question: I’ve been a hiring manager in 2 companies (although in the UK) for software engineers and adjacent roles (like devops, platform, QA) and I would not care whether someone needs equipment. In the big scheme of things spending $800 for a monitor, keyboard and mouse is not even a drop in the bucket for the cost of an employee. What I would want to know is how do you work in a team in your situation and what arrangement can we do where you have a good experience, but other people in the company can still count on you. E.g. if you are working on a project and an issue pops up that’s blocking others from progressing and we need you to discuss, but you’re having a bad day and not working, what are the options you can offer? Or what if you get blocked when everyone else is asleep so you can’t progress?

I think being prepared and upfront about this in an early stage of interviewing would be ideal, it signals that you have thought about others around you and also weed out any companies who aren’t willing to make this arrangement work. That being said, as above it’s a very competitive market right now so chances are pretty slim (at least in the UK).

Also keep in mind once you look at companies who hire from abroad, you’re now also competing with (comparably) cheap labour from developing countries, who will likely agree to much worse terms.

Edit: one thing I forgot, you may have the option to be your own boss (depending on your skill level) and freelance on a project basis rather than on a per-day basis.

I get the convenience part so the staff doesn’t have to go around do it by hand, but it just seems infeasible to do it for the other examples mentioned.

E.g. you go in, pick up item listed for $10, finish shopping in 20 mins, item now costs $15 at till… probably leave it (so now the staff has to re-shelf it) and start shopping at a place that is not trying to scam you.

For the other example, if there are a few packs of something expiring and they reduce the price for all the items on the shelf, everyone will just take the ones which have a reasonable shelf life left leaving the expiring ones.

Both of these just seem stupid.