I think the precedent folks were pointing to was the great depression--no strong signal of assurance to temper public concern means things like bank runs and sudden collapses of institutions that would have otherwise made it because of group fear. Not sure how accurate that comparison is though.
We do definitively know, with climate change level certainty (read: there is still the odd ball expert that dissents), that it absolutely needed to happen.
What is much less known, because it kinda kills the talking point, is that the "too big to fail" bailouts were fully repaid with interest, to the tune of an ~$17B profit.
The losses from the program were from the auto industry ($12B) and the struggling homeowners fund ($31B). Which is a bit ironic, because those two are probably the ones that would have the most public support.
Doomsday scenario is a self-reinforcing feedback loop of:
1) economy tanks, people earn less disposable income or become unemployed
2) consumers spending less tanks the economy even more
We have historical precedent for this in the great depression, and the government going hands-off back then made the problem almost certainly much worse.
You could even make a pretty credible argument that the Nazis only got into power thanks to this, so there's your doomsday scenario.
I don't think this characterizes the situation accurately. The economy doesn't cease to exist, it moves out of the existing financial system. Able-bodied workers, supplies, equipment, knowledge all still exist, they're just awaiting orders. You have your choice of how to spur productivity with the extant resources, including direct investment and propaganda. Many people credit WWII for the recovery, but it was actually just those two things, with the war as the excuse. But you can do it without a war, as with the Japanese economic miracle: some amount of austerity, everyone works towards a common goal, the government backstops the effort. Bonus: no golden parahute overhead.
I think we screwed up after 2008 and I would like to see us get it right this time. The government absolutely should be hands-on, but the focus should be on raw productivity and public well-being, not making certain that certain firms survive the bloodbath.
You know what's a great economic stimulus? You now own the house you owe a mortgage on, clear and free. "But that would bankrupt the mortgage-holding bank!" Okay.
I don't disagree with most of what you say, but one crucial point you miss in my view is that letting public trust in banks & "the economy" collapse is really "expensive" (in hard productivity, not just on paper).
This is what was allowed during the great depression and what we desperately tried to avoid in later crises.
Western democracies are not set up at all to let the government direct and compensate millions of workers on the turn of a dime; micromanagement by government in such a situation can be expected to be extremely wasteful and ineffective, and this only got worse, because we have less generic/unqualified use for human labor than in the past (construction, railroads, motorways, heavy industry), and specialists are even harder to manage.
If everyone stops even just believing in the ability of local supermarkets to provide toilet paper next week or, on the other end of the spectrum, starts distrusting the banking system/dollar entirely, then the consequences can be extensive, expensive and slow to recover.
It might even be worth it to feed taxpayer money to rich greedy capitalists because the public comes out on top still by avoiding that trust collapse.
That's fair, but I think you're again conflating trust in the overarching institution with trust in its current constituents.
This is important because it exposes the needle you have to thread: messaging that makes clear that you're intentionally throwing out the old banks and companies (or their leadership) in order to preserve their prosocial functionality without their antisocial dysfunction. People who are happy to see Goldman Sach burn still want a way to safeguard their money; people who want Mark Zuckerberg to pay the piper don't necessarily want to lose their Instagram galleries or Facebook connections.
The people who run these companies want us to believe that a collapse of the status quo is a total collapse, but it's not. And a government that facilitates transition of ownership and leadership to more capable hands doesn't have to follow the oligarch playbook; different ownership models and transition processes exist.
I'll give an example. Consider people living in a corporation-owned apartment complex. The company collapses - most such corporate landlords collapse - and maybe the bank holding the loan does too. There is no world in which the complex sells at its previous value, and there is probably a temptation to facilitate some transaction, any transaction, that would bring things back to order by designating a concrete owner. Of course, there are people living in the complex, and God knows what happens to them when God knows whoever shows up claiming rights to the units.
Or.
The government steps in. They claim eminent domain and set aside reasonable funds to pay whoever turns out to be the final previous owner. A co-op is formed and ownership is transferred to the current residents as a subsidy; they now own the units they previously rented. Their lives are not disrupted by forced eviction; the municipality is not disrupted by an explosion of homelessness. The main losers are the old owners and banks, and they're bankrupt and dissolved anyway. Life goes on.
I'm not saying that it's an easy transition. Russia showed us how to screw it up. But the successful scenario is a far better outcome for far more people than throwing our hands up, exclaiming that we don't know how to do anything without letting vulture capitalists have their way, and inviting them in to freely carry out the exact scenario (which continues to distort markets and makes the next reckoning all the worse) which is the failure mode of the above proposal anyway.
Some countries like Iceland let their banks fail (in no small part because their total debt was something like 10x their gdp), and they even successfully prosecuted a number of executives. They got moderate slaps on the wrist but did serve some token time in prison as opposed to having to pay a ground-breaking fine of 5 minutes of revenue as is more typical. It wrecked their economy in the short-term but they were back to growth by 2011, and had a larger than ever economy by 2015.
But I think more than the one-off situation is also the precedent it sets. When you can bank on the government bailing you out (pun intended I guess?), it creates a perverse incentive of just trying to get as large as you possibly can, all foundation or principles absolutely be damned - because once you get big enough you win, even if you're the biggest loser ever. And I do think that's what we're probably seeing with LLM companies.
Not that LLM's a loser - it's a revolutionary tech and will only become more so. But multi trillion dollar valuations for a product that has viable open competitors already available and whose operating requirements continue to plummet and will almost certainly continue to plummet? This is extremely amusing, but absolutely batshit insane. It's like paying millions for a pretty flower because it's novel in spite of the fact that you know, and everyone else knows, that once people start planting them there will be endless amounts available for negligible cost.
Cacao powder has been dried and fermented at least, and usually it's roasted too. There is something else done in dutch processed powder. It's probably a very different flavor. I've never thought to eat the seeds raw, but now I will try them at some point.
IoT devices typically run on MCUs and they have WiFi connections, often. The price of MCUs with WiFi has gone down dramatically. Often $5 or less for a MCU capable of WiFi and usually Bluetooth. Think, ESP32-S3 and such.
For example, the RP2350 is a $1 MCU that includes 2x ARM Cortex-M33 cores or 2x Hazard3 RISC-V cores running at 150 MHz.
The RISC-V cores have M-mode and U-mode, and a Physical Memory Protection unit.
The ARM cores have a Security Attribution Map and an Implementation-Defined Attribution Unit which tags accesses to devices like GPIO/PWM/ADC/... based on the security level of the code performing that access. It also has 2 Double-Precision Coprocessors for each ARM core, one for secure and one for non-secure code. It also has secure boot support if you run its cores in ARM mode.
8-bit parts are still around, but the cost savings often isn't worth it for smaller volume production compared to 32-bit MCUs. Easier development saves a lot of money. 32-bit parts are dirt cheap, and the varieties with built-in WiFi or Bluetooth or such are usually cheaper than separate MCU + radio + development to integrate the two. 8-bit flip-chip parts are even cheaper, but the bill of materials (BoM) savings aren't big enough to pay for the added engineering effort to use them for anything but the simplest tasks or the biggest volume products.
> This is terrifying. Who runs things like this open to the outside?
Probably the majority of people with a Plex Pass subscription and most Plex users in general.
As far as I see it, Plex's primary purpose is to allow people who have extensive collections of legally obtained digital media to conveniently access it and share access to their friends and family on pretty much any random device from anywhere in the world.
All my home media devices run Kodi, they run Jellyfin, they run all sorts of fully open stuff, but when I travel Plex wins because it runs on basically anything that can stream video and I can sign in to it in seconds without needing to connect a VPN or enter my password on someone else's device.
Plex in particular is notoriously insecure. It should never be accessible to the open internet unless via a vpn like WireGuard. Just playing with fire otherwise.
That may be true, but how do you grant non-technical family/friends access? They don't even understand what a VPN is, let alone how to toggle one on/off to access the Jellyfin instance.
Additionally, if they try to connect from an Android TV / Fire Stick, where you can't configure a VPN (and use their ISP's modem, so no wireguard client on the router to transparently route to the subnet), what are you supposed to do?
I feel it may be easier long-term to just contain the Jellyfin daemon to only r/o access to media, putting it behind a subdomain like jellyfin.example.com, and use the dns-01 challenge via LE to only provision a wildcard cert for the domain (IE *.example.com).
Then, have nginx listen on 80/443 with a default server directive that returns 444 for any requests not to the (correct) jellyfin hostname (due to bots hammering 80/443 across the internet on webserver's direct IPs).
Its the only solution I can think of to make it easy for nontechnical users (everything just described is completely invisible to a regular client) while reducing the attack surface area of the daemon.
FWIW, with the aforementioned setup, I got 0 unauthorized requests to my jellyfin server. Just a bunch of bots hammering my IP's 80/443 ports directly with exploits for old (usually wordpress) vulns, but they were all served 444 (IE an immediate TCP connection close without nginx even responding to the request).
Yes I’ve successfully explained Tailscale to anyone that has had a corporate job and has experience having to log into a work computer VPN before accessing their work intranet
At least for me the issue is that most TVs don't have a tailscale app. I resolved this for my mother in law by setting up a permanent VPN to my house but that doesn't scale to all my friends.
If the alternative is dangerous exposure on the public internet, I'll choose either setting it up for them or just not sharing with them at all. Honestly I think all this widespread "family" sharing with 200 of your closest friends stuff is going to lead to another industry crackdown. I think it might be better for this stuff to stay a little geeky.
I use a raspberry pi and nginx to forward my jellyfin over Tailscale. This works really well, Tailscale is low touch and nginx is battletested. Jellyfin appears as a local service to other devices and I manage the raspberry pi with NixOS which makes the setup easy and deployable. Just plug in the pre imaged raspberry pi.
Almost all selfhosted services are in that bucket now. Everything from Plex, Jellyfin, to nextcloud or gitea/forgejo. Few months ago I went through all my setup and moved everything to a vpn. The only service I kept public is a static directory served by nginx where I keep some html food recipes I shared with a friend before.
It's less convenient to use and pretty much impossible to share with others. I can figure out a VPN on all my devices for the most part (except for a Boox ereader). Trying to get "family and friends" to install and maintain a VPN on their devices to be able to access services I share with them is a pipe dream.
Plex Media Server has had a relatively small but consequential CVE history. There are some isolated high-severity issues from 2018–2020, a pretty bad CVE in 2025, then these latest 2026 vulnerabilities.
Did you miss the point about working on random devices? That's the key to why I use Plex at all. If I have to install and set up a VPN client on it I'd just use Jellyfin because at that point I've limited myself to only my devices.
Also of course friends/family. The most technologically useless people I know can operate Plex and can access my collection with basically no support necessary.
You have no way of knowing and also how much content is legal or not
My plex library has my entire library that I’ve been curating since iTunes was released which is now predominantly FLAC files I buy from Bleep and Bandcamp
Every movie I have ever bought is there too. I suppose technically it’s all illegal right? I copied it. In some cases I even bypassed some things the DMCA outlawed to do so.
And so what?
It’s such a quaint sentiment in 2026 to care about illegal content when the entirety of the LLM industry did this, but far worse, at scale, and nobody has even charged Meta or anyone else with infringement.
I have a cousin who has a certain fearlessness when it comes to home DIY projects. Unfortunately he could probably use a little more restraint, but on the whole it's an interesting quality that I noticed LLMs/coding agents help with quite a bit. They give me, an impostor syndrome type/overthinking type a certain confidence to move forward that really helps break into projects. I think this could probably be very effective in other domains like home improvement. And in case of my cousin, might also help avoid some missteps.
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