As per your other thread, incase others are interested. I dont own one but on searching options seem to be limited. It can be jail broken and Kodi installed.

That may be a jumping off point for doing more but I can’t see that anyone has successfully installed linux on it for example.

https://github.com/NSSpiral/Blackb0x

I’m a UK based professional and I come to the US for a conference each year. I won’t be coming again.

I dont want to have my phone searched at the border, I dont want to risk arbitrary arrest and detention without legal representation, and frankly I dont want to spend my money in the US anymore (its a week long conference and costs a couple of thousand pounds including conference fees, flights, hotel and expenses). I’m already trying to buy European because of trumps other behaviour, so not spending mony in going to theUS is an easy win too.

Now multiply that out - even if its a small percentage overall there are lots of people who are no longer going to want to visit the US in the current climate. Expect a downturn in US tourism guvent the horror stories that are coming our of US ICE detention centres.

How is it misleading? Plex Pass is a subscription? It would be confusing to many people if it said “Plex pass” instead of “Subscription” as not everyone would necessarily even know what that is. Subscription is very clear.

I use Jellyfin as a home media server - in my set up I have it running on my desktop PC, and I use it to stream a media library to my tv.

A home media server basically just means its meant to be deployed at a small scale rather than as a platform for 1000s of people to use.

Your scenario is exactly what Jellyfin and Plex can do. If you have 5 users then you just need a host device running the server that is powerful enough to run 5 video streams at the same time. The server can transcode (where the server takes on the heavy lifting needing a more powerful CPU) or direct play (where all the server does is send the bits of the file and the end user’s device such as a phone or smart tv does the hard work of making a quality play, so a lower power server device can work).

If this is contained within your home, your home wifi or network should be fine to do this, even up to 4k if your network is good enough quality. If the 5 people are outside your home then your internet bandwidth - particularly your upload bandwidth - and your and their internet quality will be important determinant of quality of experience. It will also need more configuring but it is doable.

This doesn’t need to be expensive. A raspberry pi with storage attached would be able to run Jellyfin or Plex, and would offer a decent experience over a home network if you direct play (I.e. just serve up the files for the end users device to play). You might need something more powerful for 5 simultaneous direct play streams but it would still be in the realms of low powered cheap ARM devices.

If you want to use transcoding and hardware acceleration you’d need better hardware for 5 people to stream simultaneously. For example an intel or amd cpu, and ideally even something with a discrete graphics card. That doesn’t mean a full desktop PC - it could be an old PC or a minipc.

However most end user devices such as TVs, PCs, Phones and tablets are perfectly capable of direct playing 1080p video themselves without the server transcoding. Transcoding has lots of uses - you can change the audio or video format on the fly, or enable streaming of 4k video from a powerful device to a less powerful device - but its not essential.

Direct play is fine for most uses. The only limitation is the files on the server need to be in a format that can be played on the users device. So you may need to stick to mainstream codecs and containers; things like mp4 files and h.264/avc. You could get issues with users not being able to playback files if you have say mkv files and h. 265/hevc or vp9. Then you’d either need to install the codecs in the users device (which may not be possible in a smart tv for example) or use transcoding (so the server converts the format on the fly to something the users device can use but then needing a more powerful server)

I prefer Jellyfin as its free and open source. It has free apps for the end user for many devices including smart tvs, streaming sticks, phones, tablets and PCs. Its slightly less user friendly than plex to set up but not much. And the big benefit is your users are only exposed to what you have in your library.

Plex is slightly more user friendly but commerical. You have to pay for a licence to get the best features and even then it pushes advertising and tries to get your users to buy commercial content. Jellyfin does not do that at all.

Finally if your plan is to self host in the cloud, again this is doable but then you stray into needing to pay for a powerful enough remote computer/server, the bandwidth for all content to be served up (in addition to your existing home internet) and the potential risk of issues with privacy and even copyright infringement issues around the content you are serving. A self hosted device in your home is much more secure and private. A cloud hosted solution can be secure but youre always at risk of the host company snooping your data or having to enforce copyright laws.

Edit: the other thing to consider ia an FTP server. If you just want to share the files, its very simple to set up. What Jellyfin and Plex offer is convenience by having a nice library to organise things, and serving up the media. But direct play from a media server is not far off just downloading the file from an ftp server to your home device and playing it. But you can also download files from a Jellyfin server so I’d say its worth going the extra step and to use a dedicated media server over ftp.

No, as a lack of empathy isn’t the only defining characteristic of psychopathy. There is also a lack of remorse, disinhibition, and egocentrism amongst other traits.

A lack of empathy alone doesn’t make someone a psychopath. For example some people on the autistic spectrum can exhibit a lack of empathy but are not psychopaths. (Should be noted a lack of empathy is not a defining feature of autism - its variable and a lot of people on the autistic spectrum do have empathy).

So its true to say a lack of empathy is a feature of psychopathy but not true to say that psychopathy is the inability to be empathetic.

Conservative commentators criticized the portrayal as outdated and offensive, calling it an unfair caricature of Trump voters.

Who cares? Time to stop giving a crap about racists and biggots feelings. What a bunch of snowflakes.

So Bird Flu is coming for humans. The conditions for it moving into humans are perfect in the US: it’s spreading rapidly through commerical herds and flocks, with minimal attempts to restrict it due to prioritising public health over money. The more animals it is incubated in and the more contact they have with humans the higher the chances a mutation will successfully jump species.

We have a US President who has already presided over a chaotic and poor pandemic response. Now he is back, and he’s withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization, is letting a moronic billionaire disrupt the CDC, and has now appointed a conspiracy theory loving anti-vaxxer.

The conditions are already perfect for a flu pandemic, and now the conditions in the US are rapidly heading towards perfect conditions for a devastating pandemic. And it will affect the whole world as a poorly controlled initial out break will lead to rapid global spread. The only hope left is that a mild version of the Bird Flu mutates into humans, rather than the deadly version we’ve seen devastating birds and that has caused high mortality in previous small human outbreaks.

I wouldn’t worry, with Trump we’ll all soon be infected with bird flu instead. Trump Flu, alongside Trump Inflation and a Trump Drought in California.

At this stage it will be challenged in the US courts as it is apparently unconstitutional and also illegal.

Supporting non-profits that use the legal system to hold the government to account is the way to go for now.

Also the scope of this remains unclear - it’s possible that it will blow up in Trump’s face when all the schemes that directly benefit voters disappear, including potentially medicaid. So everyone just needs to keep reminding people that “Trump did this” - make him own the shit that is coming.

It says a great deal about the us political system that this was an executive order and not an actual law.

Unfortunately this is just a sign of how bad the US has gotten.

There have been impeachment attempts on Clinton, W Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. Impeachment was supposed to be used to stop a president acting illegally but its just become another political weapon in the US capitol.

The US system is so unbelievably broken. It entirely depends on bipartisan support to get things done but things are now too polarised to function and the electoral system prevents 3rd parties access at any level.

The two parties have destroyed democracy. It could be fixed but it would need to start at the state levels with 3rd parties coming in and rebuilding the electoral system. But the 2 parties have even gerrymandered the constituencies so only the two parties can win.

Even other countries with first past the post systems have other viable political parties - look at the UK, Australia and Canada. Fptp is flawed and breed an replacing but the US version is next level for locking in the status quo.

Thats still beaten badly. The election is entirely about winning electoral votes, and the dems failed that. They didn’t win votes in the right places and lost votes compared to the last election.

The entire presidential election campaign is always about winning electoral votes and that means winning votes in swing states.

The right wing media are using nukes, while the liberal media are playing with sticks.

So from what I’ve seen on Lemmy over the last year is that the quantity of posts and variety of topics feels like it’s going up. I certainly enjoy engaging on here.

Will it stagnate? I’m not sure. It might be that the monthly user levels stabilise but thats not the same as stagnate. If people are engaged and enjoying their time then it has value.

My feeling is that Lemmy will slowly grow over time. I don’t see it becoming a huge platform like Reddit anytime soon. Its feasible but it feels like for now it will remain niche.

But I also dont want to it suddenly become huge. I was on reddit for a long time and I saw it evolve from being something small and interesting to a behemoth and enshittification to make money. Small is sometimes better, and small or stable in no way means stagnation.

Trump has a narrow majority in both chambers so hes going to held hostage by numerous minority interests in his party. He is going to be largely tied up in republican in fighting once the honeymoon period is over. Expect lots of accusations of traitors in the republican party and threats to remove republican opponents.

He will do some of the work for them but the dems really need to focus on fixing their own party and listening to voters. I’m not sure the party leadership get why they lost even now.

These are people who would see Franklin D Roosevelt as an extremist.

Instead he was the most consequential and effective president the US has ever had and the right have been unpicking his legacy over the decades since. The Democrats have been complicit in that.

When it comes to the spending deal this is a last gasp - the dems are out of power as of 20th Jan.

Then we get the opposite shit show - the republicans have slim majorities in congress so small groups within the party will try to hold the government hostage. We’ve seen it before and will see it again.

An early sign has been Trump pushing for a raise in the debt ceiling and fiscallly conservative republicans ignoring him.

Expect conflict between republicans to be the dominant story of the next 2 years.

This has been obvious from day 1 of the Trump and Musk show. Trump is an ego maniac and does not like other people taking the lime light.

Trump is predictable in that sense but then highly unpredictable as he turns to his next round of courtiers and sycophants.

During the election people aggressively shut down criticism of Biden and the Democrats, and that any 3rd party discussion was just a vote for Trump.

This was and remains a crock of shit. Both sides of the US two party system are corrupt and irredeemable. When you vote Democrat you endorse this shit as much as when someone votes Republican endorses their shit. Even if they’re the lesser evil, they’re still an evil.

90 million people didn’t vote in the US election. I don’t blame them when you see what the dems get up to. And in particular, fuck you Joe Biden.

All told Trump is up about 2m votes and Harris down 7m compared to Biden in 2020.

This is not a massive increase in support for Trump but it is a significant drop in support for the Dems that lost them the election.

The mandate “myth” is irrelevant. They won all 3 parts of government , they got their mandate.

In the UK we had Brexit and it was extremely close at 48% to 52%. Yet ever since all we ever heard about is how it was decisive and people treat everyone in the UK as if we’re pro Brexit. In our elections the tories got 42% of the vote yet massive majorities so dictated what we did.

In short the problem is not the number of voters, it is the electoral system. In the US system if you win enough votes in the right places you win decisively. That seemed like a good system when there was a consensus. Not so good when there is division.

The solution in the US is the same as the UK - electoral reform is needed. The problem in the US is the same as the UK - no one will deliver that as the parties that win power are the ones who benefit from the rigged system.