I picked up a new hobby of buying Linux ISOs from thrift stores. I usually get them for $1/each. Up to 300 now - all mine. Jellyfin is great to organize them
I have some Linux ISOs I ripped myself, but it can be especially hard to find older ISOs from other countries - you usually can't find them on normal websites. It's really nice to have them on my own server and not worry about them disappearing someday.
I’ve been collecting a lot of post-war Italian neorealism Linux ISOs and running a DHT indexer has made it pretty easy to find distros that may be out of print.
I used to have a substantial collection of very rare Euro/US short and performance art films on DVD that were lost to the sands of time during a period of my life where my work led me to be mostly nomadic. In retrospect, I wish I would have ripped the collection onto a hard drive as most of them are completely irreplaceable now on DVD.
$1 won't get you Linux ISOs up to modern display standards. Great if that works for you but the high end is more like $20+ (emphasis on the +, taxes and shipping not included) per Linux ISO so its understanding why many might prefer sharing them digitally. And that's before getting into cases where the Linux ISO vendors don't even want to give you the specific version you want.
Did you see the 'thrift store' part of his comment? I do the same thing as him, and depending on the location around town, an ISO on a DVD can be as little as 50 cents, and a modern Linux ISO on bluray, including 4K (though rare I see those) are rarely over maybe $3.
Blu rays aren't bad either. The glory days were back when Netflix was cheap and there was an oversupply (in that era I built up a library of hundreds), but even today you can get most things in 1080p for $10 or less.
If you don't think 2 hours of professionally produced content is worth $10, well that's why AI isn't the only thing destroying art and culture.
The issue with Blu-rays is they are costly to rip. Basically, the only software that let you do it right now is MakeMKV, and it's proprietary. I believe that the VLC team is working on some open-source solutions, but last time I checked, it was only able to read old Blu-ray (which is understandable, they have to care about potential copyright and drm issue, unlike the people behind makemkv).
So if you want to rip recent Blu-ray, you will need to buy makemkv (they do have a 1-month trial tho). But worse, if you want to rip 4k Blu-ray, you will need a specific br-drive that makemkv support (as I understand, they make custom / modified firmware for some drives, allowing to read the protected data). The issue is that there is barely anyone still making br drives and whenever makemkv support one it goes out of stock and/or become extremely expensive on the second hand market.
This is really annoying me because I know this is the end of the physical market for movie. I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years. Movie will probably only be available through streaming services, which means it will be harder and harder to get a good quality encoding.
With recent codecs (av1, h265, will see how av2 does), the quality that streaming services is okay, but we are far from what a full Blu-ray dump allows today.
MakeMKV has an effectively perpetual free trial right now. It's not like old shareware were you have to pay after a month but rahter that you have to feed it a new free activation key every month and maybe wait a couple of days for one to be posted.
That can change (and the official communication is that its only free while in beta) but my guess is that the free beta is the main thing holding back alternatives. MakeMKV does solid work but it's not rocket science and a lot of parts (like all the complementary LibreDrive / UHD firmware work) doesn't even have a paid license check at all.
> I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years.
I don't. It might continue to shrink and thereby get more expensive but the distributor market is still very healthy and has more active competition than movie production itself. The biggest danger is disc production but I don't think its impossible to shift that over to a BD-on-USBFlash or whatever else is convenient if needed.
I'm back in to collecting physical media as well. I get my wife to use her Facebook account to find stuff on marketplace. Lightly used bundles can get movies down to like a dollar per.
1080p doesn't really say much when that could be an old DVD-era master with questionable color correction crammed onto a BD25 disc with other features/extras vs a modern archival-quality master professionally encoded to 40+ GB.
I hate blueray. At least for having physical copies. Too many times I've tried watching something I own only to have it fail due to my player not having current decryption keys. Perhaps it's more of a player issue and less of a disc issue, but it's still a problem with the overall format.
The one time I actually bought a Bluray, I couldn't play it because of fricking Region Coding. Like this is the 2020s and you still have to deal with that BS?!
In France many public libraries let you rent them for free (or a ridiculously low annual subscription); you take them home, copy them, return them, and it costs nothing.
Some of ours in the US even have video games. The one I go to even has tools and all sorts of other interesting physical objects. People really need to visit their libraries, they’re already paying for it via taxes.
a few months back I opened up a streaming service that I pay for to watch a old TV show. I was _enraged_ to find out that they put ADS WHERE COMMERCIALS USED TO BE. I thought the whole point of paying was to avoid ads!
so now I visit my used Blu-Ray/DVD store about once a month. they always have buy two/get one free, and the prices are ridiculously low.
is it a better solution? I don't know, but I do know that I don't have to watch those ads anymore.
I started picking them up from the library. Goodwill wants like five bucks a disk now. Library has them for .25 to a dollar each. Or free if you just check them out.
Joking aside, a few early commercial Linux distro (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, SuSe, Corel Linux) had really nice packaging and media artworks. I'd love to collect them.
The two things that torrents are best at are downloading Linux ISOs and pirating content. So using qbittorrent to download Linux ISOs is usually code for piracy, since torrenting Linux ISOs is legal and piracy is not :)
Just yesterday I was thinking about gpt-5.6-luna. I made it my default model in Hermes during its fist week of launch. It was just as good as 5.5 which was my previous default. But over the last 2 or 3 weeks I've seen how dumb it is now. I have to be very explicit with it.
For example, I used to be able to prompt "Check the system logs on for...." and it would just figure it out. Yesterday I asked "Did on complete the overnight job" and all it said was "that service is not installed on my host"
I had to tell it to ssh into the server and run journlctl to check it
Anecdotal, I know, but they all seem to be less capable with time.
Same exact experience. I worked with both Fable and Sol foe the last two months, daily for several hours, and got used to the very bright, quick thinking, proactive even.
As of last 2 weeks or so both models are nearly on par with DeepSeek4.1 now, which I also use a lot. They're still better, but that difference is not as pronounced as before and, importantly, the frustration level is now on par.
Whatever they're doing will surely drive people to less advanced but predictable, self hosted open models. I sure would rather use DS4.1 with Qwen/GLM in adversarial mode than deal with this b/s I pay significant amount of money.
Me and my friends have been contemplating on getting an Ultra M5 256 and splitting the cost. PI harness is so good now that this is really a viable alternative.
Same experience with Sonnet on low effort. It used be when I used a "table_name/id" format to reference a db record, it knew exactly how to find it using connected mcp tools. Today it failed 4/4 times (I tried the exact same prompt in 4 separate sessions and each time it replied "I don't have access to [...]"). On medium effort it got it right the first time.
I'm fairly sure it's just luck of the draw if you get put onto a quant'd model or not. I've seen luna xhigh change intelligence fairly drastically on a day to day basis.
Really this is the base problem. You have zero idea where and how your prompt is being executed.
If for example AWS sells you a 2xLarge server there may be some variability in performance but it's going to be averaged out very well.
When it comes to AI services executing your model there is absolutely no information on what and with what settings your model is being executed. Hell, you have no idea if it even is the model you're paying for. Add that models are not deterministic so variability can be pretty large.
This leads to a common set of dynamics that induce cheating behavior in humans. For example, is there a mix of different hardware. Does lessor hardware use different settings? How do you know xhigh is what your prompt ran under. Anthropic has a proven history of running your prompt silently under different models.
This is a huge mess that needs and will be regulated or sued heavily over. Hell, with as many people out there that hate AI it might be easier than one thinks to have a state sue the providers on this and elicit a huge amount of discovery.
& the nice thing about Hermes (since its open source) is you can be reasonably sure that behavior change is coming from the model and not the harness. (probably)
100% not sarcastic. I disabled all continuity options and the annoying delay to bring up the context menu is gone. My phone is my only apple product. I don't need it.
So after disabling this I realised since I only have an iPhone (and no Mac or other Apple devices) I should disable anything and everything in the settings that syncs stuff between devices. There was also one about the Focus options (like Do Not Disturb) and some other ones. I figure this can only simplify everything and speed up the phone if it never has to check for any (non existent) device to sync settings against. Still have all my local phone settings backing up to iCloud
I’m trying to phrase this to not be “that guy” but have you used Code on large code bases? Vscode on my m2 Mac routinely crashed when doing file search. That is why I switched to zed.
The monorepo I work in has 2-5x as large (depending on how you count) and I don’t see crashes or major performance issues. Even when bloated with plugins (testing, GitHub PRs, formatters, copilot, vim emulation, codelens turned on, etc). And I have an older presumably slower Mac.
I once read that Hershey has put a calories cap of 250 on a serving of their candy. That jives with what I see on the store shelves. I wonder if Mars did the same thing and perhaps the reduction in size was due (at least in part?) to that.
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