From bouncing around my favorite corners of the Internet, I get the impression that large numbers of people have "a guy" (of any gender), akin to a weed dealer in furtiveness and legality, who is hooking them up with an underground, probably Plex-based (but increasingly moving to Jellyfin), streaming service. I get the impression that there are hundreds to thousands of these little "Plex server" operations, each serving a couple dozen to a hundred or so users out of the goodness/vileness of each "guy"'s heart and the hobby budget of that "guy"'s homelab. This isn't all Plex gets used for or even necessarily the main use case, but I think they're out there.

Obviously no "guy" will admit to doing this, but my "Plex Server Guy Theory" neatly explains this post announcing that general discussions of piracy are allowed in the Lemmy.ml Plex community and this post by someone apparently serving enough new Plex user volume that a webhook would be convenient to have. I've also seen people discussing Plex refer to "my users", as if they have a user base of friends and trusted or semi-trustred acquaintances rather than just a household or family.

I personally neither have nor am a "Plex Server Guy", nor do I know anyone who has admitted to me that they do have or are one, so I can't be sure they really exist. But I have suspicions.

Are "Plex Server Guys" as I imagine them real and common and I am just too square to have ever been invited to do crimes with everyone else? Are they rare in real life but enriched in the dubious/cool corners of the Internet? Does it depend on your country? What's the deal?

If you can historically re-enact the 1890s, can you do the 1990s? Where does it end?

Please help.

Apparently data centers routinely burn through water at a rate of about 1.9 liters per KWh of energy spent computing. Yet I can 🎮 HARDCORE GAME 🎮 on my hundreds-of-watts GPU for several hours, without pouring any of my Mountain Dew into the computer? Even if the PC is water cooled, the water cooling water stays in the computer, except for exceptional circumstances.

Meanwhile, water comes out of my A/C unit and makes the ground around it all muddy.

How am I running circles around the water efficiency of a huge AI data center, with an overall negative water consumption?

Steps to reproduce:

1. Start a Node project that uses at least five direct dependencies.
2. Leave it alone for three months.
3. Come back and try to install it.

Something in the dependency tree will yell at you that it is deprecated or discontinued. That thing will not be one of your direct dependencies.

NPM will tell you that you have at least one security vulnerability. At least one of the vulnerabilities will be impossible to trigger in your particular application. At least one of the vulnerabilities will not be able to be fixed by updating the versions of your dependencies.

(I am sure I exaggerate, but not by much!)

Why is it like this? How many hours per week does this running-to-stay-in-place cost the average Node project? How many hours per week of developer time is the minimum viable Node project actually supposed to have available?

Through witchcraft and dark magic, Zig contains a C standard library and cross compiler for every architecture in 45 megabytes.

Julia Evans has done it again.

cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/88689

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

Doesn't seem like that acronym is used for anything important at the moment, I'm sure we can grab it.

That's right folks, I want to see you post your... old dreams.

Many AI image generators, including the big UIs for Stable Diffusion, helpfully embed metadata in the images so that you can load them up again and get all the settings you need to regenerate the image.

But Lemmy's built-in pict-rs image hoster, and most image hosters that resize or re-encode images or that try and stop people from doxing themselves with photos' embedded GPS coordinates, will remove all the metadata. This is counter-productive for AI image generation, because part of the point of sharing the images is so other people can build on the prompts.

What are some good places to host images that don't strip metadata?

Most of the Lemmy instances seem to require an email to sign up. That's fine, except most of the places you would go to sign up for email want you to... already have an email. And often a phone number. And almost always a first name, last name, and birthday.

I promise not to do bad stuff, but I don't want that sort of information able to be publicly associated with my accounts where I write stuff, when everyone inevitably loses their databases to hackers. Pseudonymity is good, actually; on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, etc.

Is anyone doing normal webmail registration anymore? Set username and password, receive email for free? I don't even need to send anything to sign up for accounts elsewhere.

Right now, NSFW-marked communities are by default(?) not shown by their home instance to non-logged-in users in the community list, and even if you go to them manually no posts are shown.

Fine, but they also aren't shown to logged in users on other home instances, unless somehow already federated over. If you go to the community's instance, it can't tell you are logged in, and if you go to your home instance you can't see a list of all communities on the other instance that might be available.

Also, older posts that are marked NSFW can't be gotten by anyone with an account anywhere other than the instance they were posted to. When you subscribe to a community on another instance it federates over a few posts, but to doesn't request and federate older posts as you try and page back through the archive. The normal solution is to view the old posts on the source instance, but if the community is marked NSFW the source instance won't let you read the archive there without a local account.

I managed to federate https://sh.itjust.works/c/[email protected]/ and it gets the header and avatar but it doesn't seem to actually pick up any videos.

Maybe they're all too old or the wrong type.

Well not mine, this is an xpost.