The Iran war will go down in history as one of the biggest unforced errors in US history. To think that Iran was ready to agree to pretty much everything Trump wanted before the war, and he still chose to enter into a needless war.
Of course he campaigned on ending 'forever wars', but to his base, this is all part of some masterful 4D chess move.
> If you want to solve the budget deficit you need to go after the things that matter which is mandatory social spending these days
If we're talking about cutting waste, why not first cut the military budget which is larger than the next ten countries combined? The same military which can't stop a country whose GDP is smaller than it's budget?
But no, according to Republicans, the problem begins when you spend on people rather than showering money on corporations and billionaires.
Multiple instances are needed if you want multiple versions of a given movie or episode. For example, I have a Dolby Vision device that works great with certain files, but on some other devices the file works poorly and doesn't transcode well. Plex handles multiple files fine.
The arrs have extensive and solid capabilities for filtering for the quality you want, but they don’t really offer the ability to manage multiple qualities for one specific item.
It’s also nice to have them separated because you can set up distinct plex libraries mapped to the sonarr and radarr 4K media directories. I don’t give everyone access to 4K content because no matter how many times I explain direct play, some people just seem to love transcoding to 720p. So I can limit 4K library access on plex and disable transcoding altogether for plex content.
I also don’t want every item I add in both 4K and 1080p.
I have a setup where I tag kids friendly movies with a specific radarr and sonarr tag. It gets written to the NFO so it trickles down to Jellyfin. The kids have their own Jellyfin account that can only see assets with that tag. It’s extremely simple to setup https://blog.tiserbox.com/posts/2025-03-01-parental-control-...
+1. Many people do not see the value in storing their own adult content but mine is high quality, full length, VR, niche, and full of the stuff and actresses I like.
Given Trump's attention span and track record, it's very likely this is squarely aimed at optics before the mid terms. I'd be willing to offer good odds that this gets quietly rolled back post midterm for companies willing to bribe the administration..... er become patriots via a donation to "America First fund.
> WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?
At least a decade ago! The first TVs with Automatic Content Recognition shipped in 2013[0]. There was also a brief panic in 2024 about air fryers spying on people[1].
And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
Ah the good old days when "we kill people based on metadata"[0] was the conversation and we thought it wouldn't get more invasive. Now we just straight up extract data
...and that was before 2014... over 12 years ago... now people paste into chatbot every content and any content then scan their faces, fingerprints, and documents as a routine.
Before that. Around 2005: DVD players that require updating cryptography keys and hence want an internet connection (and consequently can send around data).
And the first store clerks at the time that shout that "all people have agreed on that, period, complaints are non appropriate because society decided".
A small step for senseless humanity, a giant leap for the beast with big promises (that we are still seeing in development).
> And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
Well yeah at the very least, that’s Google Analytics and/or similar alternatives.
Most individual websites outside of Google/Facebook/Amazon don’t get any data other than what you do on their website, so it doesn’t seem quite as creepy to me as a device on your home network port scanning and sniffing other traffic.
Google and Facebook can and do ‘spy’ a lot, of course, but otherwise the browser does protect you from most trivial spying by random sites. Not that that’s reason to feel any safer; the few people actually spying on what you do everywhere on the web are the ones with the most resources. This is all going to get way weirder with AI logs, I’m guessing.
You can check this claim for yourself by opening NetworkTools in your browser, then moving your mouse and pressing a few keys to see what data is sent to the server.
You can prob just identify some outbound reqs with like ss -tulpn then use those to set up a Wireshark packet filter and wire as needed to automate. Not sure how but I bet you could set up a hook to listen for any such reqs being made and then start the capture
I’ll keep repeating this but I used to be a technical project manager for “advance analytics” for a major media agency and we used this data in our reporting for ad reach effectiveness.
I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes. Basically any internet connected device you get is probably doing whatever it can to sniff mac addresses of your network at the least.
From a previous comment of mine:
> … my Insignia TV (best buy store brand) with fire tv built in is basically unusable. Echoing a previous comment I made too, about “smart tvs” and the “streaming sticks”: Hey, have you ever thought of why even the $149 Black Friday loss-leader no-name-brand TVs all have Amazon Fire, Roku, or are now "Smart" in some way? Certainly isn't because they need to incentivise you to connect it to the internet so it acts as a Nielsen-esq measurement device of all media you view on the screen via digital fingerprints that exist in all commercial media and advertisements. [1][2]
A 55" Walmart store brand TV is $200. That's the regular price.
And yes, it's for the reasons those of us who have been in the tech field for a while would guess: it's "smart". It comes preloaded with apps for several streaming services, from which it surely gets a cut. It probably displays ads if allowed to connect to the internet. No doubt it reports what you watch.
I despise the ones that then, after you decline, tell you the app doesn’t work without Bluetooth enabled although the functionality does not need Bluetooth for anything
Do you remember how a series of crazy coincidences and freak accidents kept preventing the LHC from being turned on? What if the LHC was causing world-ending or life-ending events, and we simply kept surviving only in thinner and thinner slices of amplitude (timelines) where those freak accidents happened, but where also more improbable world conditions took place?
LHC is a pea shooter compared to the absolute ion cannons that are cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere, which are pea shooters compared to acretion disk collisions or particle collisions about a magnetar. Sorry to ruin the fun! :^)
The center of mass of these natural collisions is a huge Lorentz transformation away from Earth's center of mass, which could explain why some unwanted effects are harmless to us. To put a paranoid person at ease you'd need to go a bit further. It's all covered in detail here: https://cds.cern.ch/record/1111112?ln=en
Started sliding down this slope back when the DMCA was introduced and made tinkering with software or firmware protected by any form of encryption incredibly illegal. That's effectively made it so that any hardware you buy isn't really acting in your best interest, but that of their manufacturers.
The EFF, Doctorow, et. al. were warning us that this was going to happen, over and over again for a really long time. Then they were saying it was beginning to happen for a really long time. Well guess what, the thing they were saying was going to happen happened!
No one cares. There’s little serious pushback to privacy invasions by big tech. Flock cameras have been a rare exception. Half the people “have nothing to hide” and half aren’t willing to give up the convenience that the popular app or gadget gives them.
I'm convinced this is the state because people don't know the implications and scale of the privacy invasion. The flock camera incident shows that when people can sense, understand and feel the impact they don't like it. If we pose it as they are selling network data, nobody minds, if we pose it as they are selling your identity on the internet people get uncomfortable. But its hard to convince people of the latter. Mostly because nothing big happens due to big data breaches as someone on HN was remarking recently. Additionally, I think people have resigned to the status quo as they think that is the only way they can get their gadgets for cheap. That is just not true, companies can still make a profit without being predatory. Its just that it will not be the maximum profit.
Part of the problem is most people don't have an idea of what's being collected.
With just a little bit of interaction with the modern internet, the profiles created are stunningly accurate. Age, gender, political ideology, favorite food, relationship status, how many kids you have.
All this stuff gets slowly collected, aggregated and shared amongst data brokers.
People would care so much more if they knew just how invasive advertising actually is. All to try and convince you to drink one more coke or grab one more cheeseburger.
You don't need a new toilet seat? But you just looked at toilet seats and then bought one. Are you sure you don't need another? Don't you like toilet seats?
I see this as a failure of news media. Specially tragic as they don't even recognize this as their duty. Their reporting is almost always single data points. They don't make the overall picture clear when reporting this stuff. Imagine if the financial crisis was reported as individual shares crashing and not a market trend.
What are they going to say? "Trackers, like these 300 we have on our site, are monitoring all this stuff and our NDA doesn't let us tell you what they are doing."
You can’t realistically stop this. The industry is international and any interaction being shared across companies allows you to build this profile. It’s impossible to be fully private while having the openness of our internet interactions. You can try to limit the implications but that’s it
I don't truly understand what you are suggesting here. None of these interactions need to be recorded by anyone. You definitely don't need to sell that data.
It cannot be outlawed 100%, no problem can truly be solved by legislation. But that doesn't mean we can't start by banning sale of user data. I don't understand how it is legal to do even today.
330M people in the country, you can run that entirely though a remote FBI office.
and the people using the data are gonna be the local cops; FBI ain't flying out to chase a couple of basic-ass assault charges or thefts.
email snooping, hand full of highway cameras at known bottlenecks, border crossings -- these are abstractions to most people. the flock cameras in their neighborhood are not, and cannot be absractions.
Seriously? Literally every appliance that demands an internet connection and use of an app does this. That's why the cheapest products on the market are designed to need apps and connectivity, the prices are subsidized by the assumption of ad data to sell. Been like this for years.
> I'm half convinced the first run of the LHC split the timeline and we've landed in the evil one.
Sadly the real answer is much less dramatic: we did this entirely to ourselves, voluntarily, purely out of lazily taking the path of least resistance offered us by companies that don't have our best interests in mind.
when? It started when we accepted a world where companies could shovel T&Cs at us and pretend it means anything. It worsend when we accepted that companies could change those terms at any time.
We really need laws protecting consumers from "data collection for advertising". It should be a default no with a requirement for explicit opt-in /and with no legal way for companies to charge less for the advertising model/. In fact, customers who agree to the advertising model should be able to get profit sharing revenue.
Well it's completely voluntary since no sane person would ever need a "smart" coffee machine connected to the internet. So IMHO it's more Idiocracy than Black Mirror
We were living in a "simulated" reality, where tech corporations produced amazing things a ran services practically for free asking very little in return, because it was all being funded by "stimulus" money - effectively the country getting into debt and creating money out of thin air. Once we reached the limit of this we had to face the reality of these companies actually having to pay their own way.
If the remaining deficit is around a trillion dollars, and we spend more than that on needless wars in the middle east, it's easy to see what to cut to balance the budget....
Ideally, but failing that raise the estate tax to 90% for estates over the current exemption limit of $15 million and eliminate all trust loopholes.
The billionaires would be able to enjoy their money in their lifetimes and still ensure that their children are taken care of in their lifetimes all while paying their fair share to society upon death.
Defense might not be a cure all for the deficit, but reducing expenses to the tune of 12% sure is a heck of a start. Clearly defense spending isn't buying us that much if the our armed forces can't deal with a middle income country (Hormuz blockage) and a group of rebels (Bab al Mandeb blockage).
Cutting defense doesn't even need to be complicated. Just stop forever wars in the middle east. It won't hurt our actual defense capabilities and will raise America's stature in the world. Heck, we have the best defense imaginable given to us for free (the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans), to the extent that two world wars combined didn't see a major attack on the US mainland.
Cutting (or better still privatizing) social security, medicare and medicaid, while being the Republican wet dream, actually translates to direct harm to millions of citizens.
Of course he campaigned on ending 'forever wars', but to his base, this is all part of some masterful 4D chess move.
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