Because it compliments existential dread quite fittingly. Check out exurb1a if you want more [very poetically narrated] existential dread [with a few bong rips or bottles of alcohol in between]. His last video, published hours before I wrote that, sort of touches on some of the ideas I wrote about (I watched the video afterwards, idk), but a lot more beautifully.

Right? I feel it’s really snobby and disingenuous to just snap back and say “just ditch that and use so and so messaging app”, as if messaging platforms didn’t require your direct peers to also use them. As long as messaging platforms operate as walled gardens, we have little say on what apps we use. We’re at the mercy of the general populace and that’s all there is to it, at least until the DMA changes things. I really tried to make people jump ship from WhatsApp to telegram during what seemed like a mass exodus from even businesses (yeah bad choice but I didn’t know back then), ended up back on WhatsApp some 3 months later with my tail between my legs, nobody stayed on telegram even though a ton of people downloaded it and jumped in. Now imagine trying to get them all to use a privacy-focused app that gives them a hard time using it in multiple devices. Convenience is the reason why Meta, Apple, Google, MSFT, etc. are on top. You can’t expect the general populace to sacrifice it for privacy, not after continuously giving up freedom and privacy for the sake of convenience for decades in the digital space.

“then what” is also essentially our question. We can hypothesize about AGI taking over and having to deal with these existential questions. We could also theorize that we fend off aging and start living forever. What then? But why go so deep into hypotheticals when this exact scenario is what’s being played off by life itself in this world. Every single organism, Going back all the way when we were all the same thing, we’ve all been just replicating and fighting to stay alive to replicate some more. Plants, fungi, bacteria, even viruses, mammals, reptiles, birds, water bears and hydras, fishes and crustaceans, from intelligent all the way to not even recognized as life by us. All of it is just patterned noise trying to keep staying recognizable through time immemorial. Why? What’s the “what then” for life itself? What’s the endgame? Is there even an endgame, or does it just not matter?

Now life is no miracle, magical thing. It follows rules, the rules of the universe. If it exists, it’s because it’s possible for it to exist due to the very laws of the universe. Hence, it’s all just another complex process, just like every other complex thing that’s happened in this universe. So, why? Why does a universe exist, and why does life exist within it? Is it that the process we call life is just the universe trying to wake up and look in a mirror? Even if we argue that it’s a ridiculous and egotistical take, we are all still matter that understands what it is, we understand we are energy, we are matter, we are atoms, we are processes, we are a dance with death, we are the dancers, the living and the blueprint for more living, the experience of living, and the continuation of this in other copies of us. We’re the cells in our body, and the organelles within those cells. We’re the proteins, the fats, the DNA, we’re each neuron firing based on electrical impulses, we’re the synapses between the neurons, we’re the energy that courses through those synapses, and we’re the pattern that emerges from it. We’re the emergence of it all, and we’re the emergence of our society as well. We’re the person, and we’re the society, and we’re also the entire ecosystem. We’re the planet, as well as the solar system, and the galaxy it’s in, and the galactic neighborhood it belongs to, and the group, supergroup, cluster, and the supercluster. We go all the way down to the smallest things, and yet it wouldn’t be possible without the biggest things. We are built as individuals, and yet we emerge as something bigger than all of us, and something bigger than that, and that, and that too.

We’re made of universe, so we are universe, and when we look into ourselves, the universe does so too. So why? What’s the point? Does God wake up eventually after staring long enough in the mirror, and if so, what does he do about it? Why do we fight tooth and nail to be alive, to stay alive, when we don’t really know what to do next? Will our next versions know what to do? Will God know what to do, once he awakens and the egg breaks? Why is any of this… Even here?

So yeah, edibles are pretty good today.

You honestly got me thinking about the viability of throwing android TV on an RP4. I have one that I was going to use for a magic mirror, but I never got around to building it. I’m guessing I could find a remote and an IR module for the RP4, then just load android TV to it? Time to go down the rabbit hole…

And once he got sat the fuck down, he wanted to continue discussing the topic “privately, away from the toxicity”, going full out Wormtongue. Fuck him.

I love how dense OP was that he didn’t even acknowledge the white-list and was acting like he was the authority (or the sheriff) on this topic, with nothing to back him up whatsoever.

He’s such a manchild, it’s unbelievable. Won’t budge when talked to in a friendly manner, will lash out if someone else calls him out, and will continue to complain in responses to civil people, saying nobody is being civil and whatnot, just for the sake of adding fuel to the fire. He got sat the fuck down by the repo owner, and the schadenfreude is fucking delicious.

OK what the hell. This is the platform I was considering jumping into. Is nothing sacred anymore? That thing costs a fortune by TV stick standards.

I was often sent flying with no way to come back down. Went up fast. Not great for anxiety. The “focusing on stuff” trick does work, though if I overdid it I also woke up because I tried engaging my senses too much.

Fuck it, I’m joining you. That sounds like a mentally healthy choice.

Should’ve given us an entire season for him alone. Fuck D&D.

Crossing the snacks aisle and resisting the temptation to grab shit, like we’re legit ass adults and we ain’t going out to buy a whole ass cake to eat in a single seating. WHY.

Third comment in this post about this from me, but I’ve done university work while lucid dreaming, solved bugs we didn’t even know existed, stuff like that. I don’t think you rest as much while lucid dreaming, I’m pretty sure I built up fatigue at many points in my life just due to how much lucid dreaming I was doing. I now avoid lucid dreaming, and have started losing the ability to do it frequently (which frankly is a blessing). I feel more well rested now than I did when I lucid dreamt a lot. No way this idea doesn’t just leave you completely tired after a while.

I posted this in another comment, but during uni I did in fact write code in lucid dreams. A friend can vouch for a specific time when I woke up from sleep during an all nighter, to fix a very specific bug (which I just remembered, we didn’t even know it existed), then went back to sleep. On another occasion, I designed a recursive path-finding algorithm to replace djikstra’s algorithm, all in my sleep.

It definitely can be done (though I doubt it could be done consistently and without actually imagining shit up), but it really shouldn’t be done, I really doubt I was really resting while doing that.

Well FWIW there are somewhat reproducible techniques, I’ve used them, but I couldn’t tell you how I’ve used them if my life depended on it (honestly, brain chemical imbalances or fatigue might be a prerequisite). I actually got tired of lucid dreaming and started avoiding certain positions in bed, and started shifting around if I felt myself getting close to jumping into a lucid dream during hypnagogia.

I also worked on university assignments during lucid dreams, solved countless bugs in my code while asleep, a friend can even attest to it since one time I instantly woke up to solve a specific bug and then went back to sleep, with him right next to me (all nighters woo hoo).

It can be done. It really shouldn’t be done. The reason why I grew tired of lucid dreaming is because I didn’t feel like I was actually resting at all. That disconnect and peace that falling asleep gives you, it’s not there for me while lucid dreaming (at least not if I jumped in through hypnagogia).

Ah yes, the 39 women and children released on Friday definitely stabbed schoolchildren. The list of 300 people Israel plans on releasing, most of which are underage or teenage boys, definitely stab schoolchildren.

This whole “associating a group of people with a government/country” thing is kinda fucking whack. Your everyday jew is not going to be celebrating the shit Israel does any more than your average Palestinian will celebrate Hamas’ doings. Why the fuck would you imply antisemitism on the very notion of criticizing a government that oppresses its neighbors and steals their land? OP didn’t even mention jewish people, they mentioned Israel specifically. Israel doesn’t speak for all Jewish people, just like Hamas doesn’t speak for all Palestinians.

I was also on the fence. Ended up jumping into it all a few months agk, and my plex server went from a very small and informal media repository that a few friends kept nagging me about because I always procrastinated downloading, categorizing, and adding media to it, to now a vast collection of thousands of movies and hundreds of shows, spanning about 50 users, around 40TB+ of content (which reminds me I need more drives soon…) and everyone requests whatever they want. There’s still work to be done, there always is, especially if your server grows and your peers start using it (wait to see that one person start requesting Korean stuff that never gets found automatically), but it’s a night and day difference for me, and the organization of it all helps me concentrate and tackle stuff quicker.

So the stack usually goes like this:

-sonarr, radarr, readarr, lidarr, etc. : they each specialize in a media format (series, movies, books, music, respectively), they will fetch Metadata from known Metadata sources, and will perform searches on whichever indexer you like (think piratebay for torrents, or nzbgeek for NZBs from usenet). They’ll connect to your download client and send torrents and NZBs to be downloaded, will know if a download fails and search again, and will import completed items automatically. They’ll organize everything, rename everything, and keep track of quality with constant upgrades to your media by parsing RSS feeds from said indexers. They won’t go out of their way to downloading things you didn’t ask for, you have to ask for everything. You can monitor collections for movies on radarr if you want future movies, but that’s about it as far as waiting for new content not explicitly requested.

-overseerr, requestrr, etc. : these are front ends that you can share with your friends and family. You only need one. They’ll be able to search for content as well as browse trending or new contenr, see if it’s in your library, request content, and follow the progress of the requested content. No need to tell anyone “this isn’t done yet”, they can just check what’s available and whatnot, and you can designate request quotas per user and decline requests.

-jackett, prowlarr, etc. : these helper services will make it easier for you to keep track of your indexers. They’ll communicate with the content handling arr services to provide them all the indexers they need. You only need one. You set them up once on these services rather than once for each arr service. They also have the ability to perform better manual indexer searches than the main arr stack services.

-honorable mention, bazarr: this little fella will integrate with your arr services to monitor all media and download subtitles for it all, set to your standards. It even has the ability to use a WhisperAI server (speech to text LLM developed by openai) as a source for subtitles, so you could create your own subtitles if you don’t find any. Of all of them, I find this one to feel the jankiest, but it does a decent enough job, even if not perfect by a long shot.

There’s other services that I haven’t messed with. For instance, there’s Tdarr which is used for automatic remuxing and conversion of media files to whichever format you prefer, in order to standardize your entire library. I feel like this is a destructive service that could easily backfire if I’m not careful (say, HDR H265 conversion to H264, buhbye dynamic range and color accuracy forever on that file if you don’t provide an accurate tone mapping which is usually not a one size fits all thing, so a lot of intervention anyway) , so I’d rather not even risk it.

Almost everything can be thrown into docker containers, and you can find some pretty decent guides on YouTube by searching for these services one by one. After the first one, you’ll get the gist of it all I think. Bazarr runs as a service (at least on windows) and has some bug with its front-end sometimes, which requires you to restart the service to get into the page at all, though apparently setting the service to delayed start fixes the issue, which I did and haven’t run into this bug since, so something to keep in mind.

As others mentioned, there’s guides to setting up qualities, filters, exclusions, and priorities on your content, and trash guides are usually where you go for that. I find that trash has a high standard for quality, which will eat through your storage like a bodybuilder eating 20 eggs for breakfast in a single seating, so you will always have to play around with your preferences and it will take some time to get things just right (some edge case scenarios on content are hard to spot at first, but you’ll get that one download of a very questionable release that will make you tear your hair off for a bit), but it will get better as you tinker around.

So to summarize, if you have even a little bit of trouble maintaining your media repository, these are a must. Even if you don’t, the process of searching stuff, downloading stuff, renaming and categorizing stuff, and then checking that everything is OK on plex by comparing stuff on thetvdb and whatnot, its a lot of time-consuming work even if you don’t notice it, and all of it can be automated by the arr stack easily. I have a couple of friends helping as admins of it all, and they’re just as freaky on management as I am, so we all just work together to get everything right, and it’s really helpful and easy to go down this route. Good luck and have fun!

Ah, final tidbit, if you don’t yet use the usenet, this is the moment where you will realize you have to spend money on it because it’ll help that much more than torrents once your arr stack is going at it. I’m at two usenet indexers and I think two usenet content providers. I want more. Help.

I feel like I don’t really care what my peers use, or what people in general use, but the more adoption linux desktop gets, the more people getting involved in community projects there are, as well as more bug reports and the like, so the sooner things get improved upon and the better they become.

I mean I’ve been a pirate for a WHILE and you generally do see ads on opensubtitles subs. Generally it’s opensubtitles saying you can advertise with them, or credits for subtitles that stay on the screen for way too long, but this has been a thing forever now, I don’t recall a time when this wasn’t done.

I don’t think I can take the moral high ground on it seeing as…well, I am a pirate lol. We out here doing our best to stay afloat, opensubtitles included.