I like this logic, lets all become shareholders.

Power, Domain Name (if using a standard paid one instead of the cheaper route), VPN are the 3 that I pay for that I feel are the bare minimum.

I pay for a domain that’s $12, but you could easily get the $1 ones for the same purposes. I pay for a static and service VPN with Windscribe, which comes out to be like $35+$89 respectively. So that’s already $136 a year excluding the cost of power. I could cut that cost easily, but I use them for more than just my selfhosting so I feel like it’s a fair price for what I get out of it.

I’m not sure if iGPU’s are typically used for transcoding, which may be part of why you’re having difficulty finding solutions.

As for re-encoding H264 into H265, increased file size is common. Encoding from source for the first time into H265 will lower file sizes, but if you’re re-encoding something you’re almost always going to lose data while increasing file size, especially on hardware encoders due to the methods and time it takes.

Basically, try your hand at Very Slow software encoding. Wait a day. This H265 file will likely be smaller than the Hardware Encodes of the same thing.

Hm so it is, I could have sworn that Temu was around before 2022

I think Temu has been around a bit longer, Wish just got more popular during Covid

With Ublock Origin, click on the extension and at the bottom there is “element zapper” and “element picker”. I usually select one of these, then use it to select the unwanted pop-ups.

Just be careful, sometimes the popups are designed to blank out the whole page you’re trying to view. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t

Are you not able to use the element zapper to block the pop-up from appearing?

PSN hates refunds so I can see that being a large influence.

In similar spirit, my theory is that this is part of how they fix the issue where PC players and PS5 players have issues making/accepting friend requests. Recently the players ID’s were changed from being randomly generated to a set assigned ID, and I would have bet money that the PSN account linking could have been a way to resolve whatever issue was going on there.

Alas, no way to confirm this now haha!

Full frame or part frame?

The former is 1bil^6 pages and the latter is 30 pages

Diabolical?

doesn’t change the fact a lot of stuff is still made in mainland China.

Which doesn’t change the fact that you can do your due diligence to avoid purchasing things made there? That is their point, afterall…

I use lib-redirect for everything if I really need to get to a reddit link. It’s rare, but there are certain types of communities where I’d like to get a “average laymans” perspective and unfortunately just due to the size here on the fediverse there is rarely wide-spread availability. As you mentioned, specific games. Lots of hobbies. Even the opportunity for consumer tech talk, if I’m interested in replacing something that’s 8+ years old there’s just not a lot of existing content to search through here and that leaves blog posts and… Reddit.

I’ve had plenty of time recognizing what astroturfing looks like, so I rarely feel like I’m left out of options to search. All that said, I’ve been doing this a lot less since the whole shift happened. Maybe an endeavor every few months, rather than few days/weeks.

I’ve been having issue with it the last couple days, but I also tend to just have issue with it overall lol

Search the credits on linkedin and the like, I’m sure you’d be able to find some

At this point digitally downloading things needs to just stop being called piracy and start being called digital archival. WiFi went down, luckily I have my digital archive.

All the people who made the content already got paid for their hours in large media. If you’re pirating from a studio that is 1 to 10 people you probably know that and probably know it’s lame. The money we’re paying to view/listen is literally just the corporation trying to “make money back”, even though the CEO and execs are probably a few tonnes richer than the rest of us, and the regular working class is getting paid hourly.

We’ve really got to be moving away from restricting knowledge, honestly even the idea of a $/hr type thing. Imaging being charged 15c every time you heard 40 seconds of a song or TV show. I like the idea of artists being paid royalties but our current system is such a scam with us, the core creator, getting hardly anything after the corporations get their cut. FFS, audiobook producers get more share of royalties than musicians do (most audiobooks are ~40% royalty share and musicians are lucky to get 25%.

It’s hard as an artist. I want to be able to make money off my music, and be able to live from just that. The very real reality is that piracy (digital archival) would have almost ZERO affect on me due to the scale of it. People would be more likely to hear about me through its word of mouth than they are currently trying to buy my music with my advertising (none). I’m also not making music for money, but so that it can be listened to. Making money from it is more of a benefit than the goal, despite how nice it would be to do nothing but make music.

So, really, if I am hardly affected by people archiving my work, why in the fuck would HBO be? And if it were true, why would they remove hundreds of movies and shows from their service, lost forever. How are the royalties from those being lost when I archive it?

No, there is none.

There is only one reason to not digitally archive something. One alone.

Metrics.

If you like something and you want it to survive, fucking pay to watch it. I love It’s Always Sunny. I have all of it archived, and mostly watch it there. But I will put money into Hulu once in a while just to stream Sunny, for the new season, for whatever. Because those guys have more hours of my life than any other show, and I want them to be able to continue making it, and they can only do that if FX sees that enough people watch them to justify continuing. I don’t agree with everything Hulu does, like their showing ads for networks even on the “Ad free” tier (the network contracted for it, which leads me to wonder when other networks won’t leverage for the same deal), and something else that I had on my mind but just escaped me due to the late hour. Those guys all already got paid, the crew and teams, everything is taken care of. But for another season to happen enough people have to have seen it on a platform that matters to them, so the only thing that really matters is the metrics.

Of course, if you’re HBO even that doesn’t matter and it can be all thrown out anyway… so…

to digital archival I go

Keep in mind that thinner paper is more likely to jam whatever printer you have, so you may want to consider workarounds such as smaller text, wider margins, and thinner line breaks.

It reminds me of that bit from Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Dennis is talking about Hollywood movies.

I mean, it used to be only, like, the hard-line conservatives, like the pearl-clutching types, were the only ones that were overly vocal and extreme in their policing of sexuality. But now you got this, like, liberal wave of moral authority sweeping the nation. You know, it’s nuts. I mean, think about it. If the conservatives had always run Hollywood, movies would have sucked. You know what I mean? The art would have suffered. So I guess the question we’re asking is how will art fare under the oppressive thumb of this new liberal Hollywood moral PC elite?

It’s just so silly and yet so accurate. Whether it’s social values, politics or even just the opinion of AI and it’s capabilities vs. it’s potential vs. how people actually use it, there’s this pervading idea that restrictions en masse are a viable solution. I feel almost the opposite, like to some extent the oversaturation of it intrinsically lowers the negative reception of it. Prohibition philosophy - when it’s not allowed people will work even harder to use it in those ways, when it’s not only allowed but widely used and even encouraged, people just inherently care less over time.

We’re at a point right now where we are getting some pretty poor quality oversaturation of AI content and the tool alone is what is being blamed, to the point where copyright is being touted as this saving grace despite it consistently having been used against us smaller artists when corporate money is involved. Copyright isn’t promoting small artists, rarely has, nor is it preventing AI, but it’s somehow suddenly meant to ensure that the art you uploaded isn’t reproduced? That seems not only unlikely, but like it’s a scapegoat for a larger issue. Generative art isn’t a problem because Ms. Jane working two 40-hour jobs uses it to make art featuring existing characters. That circumstance was and never will be a problem because Jane very likely would never have the money to commission an artist in the first place. What Jane makes is 100% irrelevant, so long as she’s not claiming it as her original creation and trying to sell it - beyond that? I don’t think anyone should care or fault her, because she is doing the amount of art that her circumstances allow her.

What I absolutely agree is an issue is businesses and corporations using AI, cutting staff further overworking employees that remain. However, that Secret Invasion intro that seemed likely AI generated? I can’t in good faith try to argue “they should be tried for infringement” but I can fully support the fact that they should have hired an artist who would at least try to better use the tools at their disposal. I can simultaneously feel that the fact that Deforum may have been used is absolutely awesome, while also being annoyed and frustrated that they didn’t utilize artists who deserve it.

There is a very large difference between Ms. Jane making AI images, even movies, and any corporate product - or that AI generated rat for the science journal. For the former, it is something that IMO is fully necessary in order for Jane to be able to enjoy the experience of a creative process under the bullshit system we’ve worked out. The latter is a completely unnecessary replacement used to cut costs. And yet, for neither does the concept of infringement actually matter that much, because copyright isn’t the fundamental issue of AI, it’s just the one people are latching on to. Without realizing that the likelihood of copyright laws helping someone like us is nil. Especially since there’s probably an overlap of people who laugh at NFT’s and pirate files because bits of data aren’t a physical commodity that runs out, but a generative Imaging tool that does it is… Too far?

I think AI’s issues are separate from what I’ve mentioned here. What people blame AI for is something else entirely. AI is still just the tool that speeds up the process. We have the concept of safeguards utilized as signs, barriers, and nets, so that if someone wants to use a bridge for the wrong purpose there are some measures in place to prevent them. We don’t blame bridges for what the person is trying to do - we recognize that there is some reasonable level of safeguard and beyond that we just have to trust the person to do the right thing. And when it does show to be a pervasive issue, even still there is pretty much a bare minimum done - add another layer and a net and call it a day - instead of focusing on maybe why people in society are so inclined to jump.

The issue is always us. Yes AI makes evils job easier, like so many tools have. But trying to safeguard AI to the point of non-existence is just absurd from every angle, given that the bad stuff is likely going to happen in abundance regardless. I don’t particularly see AI as the evil so much as the humans creating the meaningless AI generated articles.

SteamDRM on GitHub

This one needs to be remade with the contemporary version.

Answer: “Comment deleted by creator/This user has deleted their account”

Response: “Wow thanks, that worked perfectly!”