Looked at that. Seems like it would have worked back back when ?single=1 didn’t break all images. But since the guides are broken up into multiple pages, the automated scraping tends to lose its mind because it will try to get the entire site. Rather than a subset of pages.

Thanks though

A few years back, CBS sold CNET (CNET, Gamespot, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, and probably one or two others) to Red Ventures who then sold basically everything but CNET proper to Fandom. If people aren’t aware of what Fandom is, just go to basically any video game wiki and see how many pop ups you need to close just to see some misinformation.

Anywho, Fandom have a decent record of killing every property they buy in the interest of monetization. And they can do that because they buy EVERYTHING. And as of a few days ago, one of the long standing admins at GameFAQs announced they were stepping down. Which… suggests Fandom realized they own GameFAQs and are likely about to start gutting it to add as many ads and autoplay twitch pages as possible.

Again, are you paying every single creator you watch?

I keep referencing the helpful home improvement videos but… those are the kind of people who get the most screwed over. Because maybe you rotate between your primary channels. I do too. But maybe I am watching a climbing video and get confused by how that weird bar thing the caver is using actually works. So I search and find a genuinely useful video by some firefighter who was bored. I will probably never watch another video by that person, but I got a lot of value from that. Similarly, maybe I am fixing my dishwasher and can’t for the life of me figure out how to seat the sprayer and need to catch a similar one off video on that.

Ad revenue (or youtube premium money) is how those creators get paid and what encourages people to just do the one off videos. Otherwise, every appliance repair video is 90% an ad for the site that sells replacement parts and so forth.

And that also ignores the other elephant in the room that always comes up when these models are discussed. I have no problem sending William Osman a few bucks every couple months because he usually puts out one or two good videos a month. But what about Not an Engineer? New(-ish) channel. I’ve liked his videos a lot so far but he doesn’t really have a defined upload schedule and is only three videos in. So does he get to be part of the patreon rotation? And should he be less frequent than someone like Michael Reeves who posts one video a year but they are all bangers? Also, I don’t think Not an Engineer HAS a patreon yet so I guess he is just up shit creek for not doing sponsored segments or begging for money in the video about building a mill?

Again, I am not saying you need to throw money at them. I am just saying it is a real asshole move to pretend this is all about supporting creators while actively finding ways not to. Like, I don’t say that me downloading a movie that is only on netflix is about supporting the film industry. It is about me saying that I am not willing to pay 20 bucks a month on the off chance I want to watch The Night Comes For Us again.

If you already have the VPN then yeah, it is like anything else: What are the risks if you “get caught”

But I will just say: The “I pay for patreons” is largely bullshit. Don’t get me wrong, the big creators get paid. But the smaller creators, like the lady who ACTUALLY made a useful video that prevented your kitchen from flooding, get screwed over. Because I have no real problems throwing a few bucks a month at the Remap crew. I watch most of their streams and listen to most of their podcasts and it is awesome. But someone like Allen Pan who MIGHT have one video a month… it is REALLY hard to justify throwing enough to overcome the credit card fee at him. Even if I love his videos. And I have known quite a few people over the years who aren’t even “A Failed Mythbuster” and do it all for the couple bucks a month they get to “justify” the hundred hours or so it takes to make a funny video or to set up a camera to actually make a useful “how to” video.

I dunno. This is just one of those things where: If you wanna steal/“steal”, just do it. You do you. But when people talk about how they want to support creators… and then actively screw over creators? It is downright insulting.

Not really, actually.

At an intentionally vague high level: The main components of a firearm are:

1. The frame
2. Levers/internal bits
3. The barrel
4. Metal springs and wires to connect the internal bits and make semi/full automatic fire possible
5. The firing pin

1 and 2 are 100% able to be made with plastic. And that is increasingly becoming a selling point for a lot of firearms because of “weight”

4 is trivial to pick up at any hardware store and isn’t even conspicuous.

Which leaves 3 and 5. Plastic/polymer barrels are not an issue for small caliber ammunition (e.g. pistol rounds). You just don’t want to use dirt cheap PLA for that. And probably futz with the infill settings a bit.

The firing pin: Most engineering analyses I have seen say that is the one part that needs to be “real” (and, thus, is a traceable purchase). But I’ve seen a few resources tiptoe around how this could be easily improvised from stuff you buy at the local hardware store. And if I cared enough to check The Dark Web, I am certain I could find step by step instructions on how to do exactly that.

And there are youtubers like Emily the Engineer who have made it a point to show how ridiculously strong 3d printed stuff is. She doesn’t do firearms (mostly because it would get her demonetized…) but 3d printed machetes, lawnmower blades, jacks for pick up trucks, etc are pretty trivial. And I would be pretty shocked if someone who was had a particularly well configured printer and some of the good plastic couldn’t make a (mostly, if not entirely) polymer firing pin (I actually have no idea how modern ammunition works. I THINK it is just compression of the charge which means no metal needed. But if you still need a spark of some form, that is a metal tip instead of a metal pin).

I would assume most free vpns will be blocked period (either intentionally or for triggering the adblock ban).

And if you are going to pay for a VPN to watch youtube… youtube premium actually IS a really good deal for the creators. The specifics are obviously unknown, but most creators have come out that it is incredibly favorable and a lot better than what they get for ad revenue. And that automatically goes to whoever you watch rather than forcing you to decide if you REALLY need to throw a buck or two at the lady who actually showed how to install a sharkbite rather than glossing over it.

Aside from that: Like with anything, just question how much it would impact you to lose a google account… or all your google accounts. If you can eat that loss, yolo. If not, maybe avoid getting into an arms race with John Google.

I would recommend watching a few videos/documentaries on “Ghost Guns”. Vice had a really good one, if memory serves.

It isn’t JUST “hit print, rack the slide, bust a cap”. But with a properly calibrated printer and filament other than cheap PLA, it is real close. Download the STLs, start the build, and then head to the local hardware store for a few small springs and the (REDACTED) that becomes a firing pin. Then spend an hour or two screwing stuff together and filing down a few defects.

But also? Additive manufacturing is a vital part of so many industries at this point that I would not expect a crackdown on the STL files. Probably something similar to how DMCA is used with media files (which artists and engineers would generally tolerate, if not prefer, due to threads like this…). But all the drill bit holders and gunpla mods and the like aren’t going to go away.

Whether we start needing background checks/licenses for the printers themselves is still up in the air. But expect massive lobbying against that since “maker spaces” and even just a printer at the library are a big part of the industry and this is something where The West already do not have any meaningful advantage.

To put it in context. With a decent CNC mill, you can make a straight up “real” gun in a few days for probably less than 500 bucks worth of stock (although, I would not be surprised if aluminum block prices have skyrocketed). But those cost thousands of dollars. A decent 3d printer costs less than 500 for the tool and you need less than 100 dollars of filament for the gun. We don’t ban mills and lathes from private ownership. But I can definitely see something similar to medium sized drones where you need to fill out a form to legally own 3d printers of a certain size/quality

A lot of those points are more or less unrelated.

You can set up a samba share with a bare metal ubuntu/fedora/gentoo/whatever machine. Similarly, you can run nextcloud on whatever (I like the containerized version but…). And you can (probably) do both on a freenas box.

As for my personal setup: most of my NAS I just access via smb or scp/rsync. But for stuff that I do need synchronized, I use nextcloud… with said smb share('s directory) mounted into the container. It is far from the most secure approach (seriously, how the hell is nextcloud a commercial product when it is so feature bare and prone to breaking in containers!!!), but these are files where the goal is mostly convenience (game saves, etc) rather than privacy.

Nope. And I doubt I ever will.

But it is pennies a month in terms of power loss having a smart plug and gives me peace of mind for a big ass potential vulnerability.

I have a bit of a mess that detects active processes and traffic and sends a signal to homeassistant which then informs me the same way it does when my garage door opens or whatever.

But mostly, the key is to put it into a system that will actually alert you. Like with any alert

1. Dynamic DNS hooked in to one of my spare domains
2. Wireguard running on my firewall
3. An alert set up to inform me any time ANY client connects to said VPN
4. Smart plug between my firewall and the UPS

Connect on my device or my travel router to get onto my home network and then access additional services as though I were local. And on the off chance I get an alert that something is connected and it is not me? I kill my network and deal with it when I get home. Not perfect (since I could be asleep) but gives me peace of mind on the off chance my VPN somehow becomes compromised.

Its one of those things that is incredibly obvious in hindsight. The actual “incident” was the same as any “hot take” over the years: Someone calls out Linus’s bullshit. He takes it as a personal insult, goes full Influencer to get the audience on his side, and does a “not really but really” call for action against whoever wronged him. Like, there are still some tech youtubers who “catch strays” any time the LMG community remember that they had the audacity to talk about how interacting with Linus was incredibly uncomfortable and unprofessional and so forth.

This was just extra “interesting” since it was a call to action against the people being called.

And I think it was this particular debacle that made people realize that the unofficial LTT subreddit… has a lot of LTT staff as mods. And that came up as an argument that LMG require staff running their subreddit in case someone tries to dox them at 2 am. Which… ignores that reddit has other message boards AND has really bad implications on work/life balance expectations.

But yeah. I still skim the occasional LTT video because… their bullshit six figure house mods are solving similar problems that I have and I can find a way to get that down to three figures. But I am definitely glad that the big computer companies are broadening to work more with the “b tier” computer youtubers like GN and Jay and the like. Nice to be able to get a fab tour without it needing to be a travel vlog by a millionaire.

The gist of it is that LMG released their (massively overpriced, heavy, poorly engineered, and low capacity) “tech” backpack. And the first wave of buyers realized there was no warranty and questioned that. For context, it is incredibly common for any backpack in that price tier or above to have basically a no questions asked lifetime warranty (with the general idea that if you care enough to file a claim with Osprey or whatever, you are a big enough fan that you’ll probably buy another one anyway).

On the WAN show (I am not sure if it was that week or the next one), Linus spun up some sob story about how warranties aren’t fair because if he dies then his family will suffer for having to deal with that. And then he (and to a lesser extent Luke) started rambling about how written warranties aren’t worth anything anyway and you should just trust individuals… who were telling you to not trust them a few weeks back and are now talking about how they can’t commit to any written policy because they might die some day.

This went on for a few weeks and led to the infamous “Trust me, bro” meme/middle finger. Eventually led to (Computer Jesus at) Gamers Nexus dedicating a large part of a news update to explain why consumers SHOULD want a written warranty and that, going forward, they would be treating LMG as just another company even though they were friendly with Linus and the staff because they weren’t satisfied with how much they felt they needed to tiptoe around the bullshir. And GN even explained why they initially didn’t have a warranty on their screw drivers (?) but that they are now extending all existing purchases to have the same coverage as their mod mats and the like. I assume Rossman also went to town in between ranting about libertarian bullshit and how mean New York is and it is probably worth a listen. When he stays in his lane, Rossman is awesome for consumer rights.

And, for what it is worth, LMG did eventually do a written warranty for the backpack (and I think screwdriver?). But it was very much a “kicking and screaming” situation that highlighted that LTT will pretend they are pro consumer and “fighting for your rights” right up until it affects their bottom line. At which point they will spin sob stories and try to convince fans to actively not want what few consumer protections there are.

Can’t be arsed to look up which WAN shows involved Linus ranting but here are the GN videos. Obviously I am inherently biased toward those because… I care more about my rights as a consumer than what some whiny millionaire wants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdxVtAiYeL0&t=95s is the GN summary and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsX3tUA-wJk&t=71s is their follow up that also includes a discussion of how they will be handling LMG different (as in, like every other company) going forward.

I haven’t been following monero too much but… I would not count on their protections to matter all that much. Because you can bet the FBI/CIA/NSA equivalents around the world have put in the effort to de-obfuscate that. Because this is a relatively low cost grant to a few grad students that means they can do whatever investigations they want without needing the equivalent of a warrant and cooperation from other orgs.

I am an old fart. But I definitely remember getting some DOD grants to work on a specific architecture (that never had widespread release) with mysterious instructions that I now understand map to common operations in cryptography (of the era). I got some nice papers about graph analysis and they got some very valuable ability to handle complex networks of interactions.

Tangential, but Real Genius is probably still the greatest media portrayal of STEM grad school in existence. You have those weird social interactions (because people with people skills already have real jobs) and those fucked up relationships (… hopefully not statutory rape…). But you are either a dumbass Believer or you rapidly grow to understand the inherent ethical concerns of your field of study. And as much as you wish you could take the weapon you accidentally made for the military and blow up a prop house with popcorn… the reality is that you end up closer to Lazlo and live with the realization that people are probably suffering and dying for your work for the rest of your life. And it is up to you on whether that manifests as alcoholism or activism.

LMG (the parent company) are pretty shameless about advertising and their former CEO (currently CCO with a controlling share of the company) outright tried to weaponize his community to actively advocate against their own consumer rights. Personally? I “ethically” think they are fair game. They actively fuck over consumers so… fuck them.

But also? Who cares. This is not stealing a loaf of bread to survive. This is grabbing content to entertain ourselves. From an ethical standpoint, it is REALLY hard to argue that theft (because piracy IS theft) is the ethical choice in this case but not any other… unless your personal ethics boil down to “I don’t like this person so fuck them. But I like that person so it is not right”

And… who gives a shit? If you want to pirate, pirate. Just don’t pretend one choice is “ethical” when another isn’t.

So would linux.txt if you did a chmod +x

Heads up, that joke actually makes no sense.

File extensions for executable binaries is very much a windows thing. For Linux/Unix it would either be linux.sh (a script file) or just Linux

Yeah. Unless you use a tumbler (and even then) crypto is actually less anonymous than traditional banking due to all being public record.

Mentioned above “Why Matlab” but to add on:

It depends on what the goal of the course is. If it is to teach you how to write a filter or do some numerics, it doesn’t matter what toolset you use because it is the end result that matters (within reason). If it is to teach you a workflow? The workflow is “matlab”

Not if it is for a course.

There is a reason basically every non-software engineering discipline ends up using matlab at one point or another. Many companies love matlab and consider it the industry standard.

The rest? They know matlab is shitty. Because matlab is Fortran. Most of the same concepts and even a not too dissimilar syntax from some of the more modern standards. Teach a kid fortran and they will set your car on fire. Teach them matlab and they will grumble but at least it is a tool from this millennium. But when they get a real job and suddenly have to port or fix some legacy code? They are going to be REAL pissed when they realize they can follow said legacy code.

Using octave or numpy+scipy or whatever is better if you are doing hobbyist work. If you are training to do this for a career? Knowing the baseline tool is the actual value of that course.

Double check the numbers (I checked these maybe a year and a half ago?) but for 4 bays/drives or less, just get a Synology. Amazing price to performance ratio and synology make a good OS

If you want more than four drives? Do you “love linux”? If so, go with a Truenas or a Ceph build. Do you want it to “just work”? Unraid.

So based on your use case and comments: Just get them a synology. Then either use the Synology Drive Client software, set it up as a smb share/network drive and have them manually copy files in, or go semi-crazy and run Nextcloud.

That said: if the focus is on photos and videos, you may just want to look into google drive or one of the other user oriented cloud services. Fairly inexpensive and, unless you are filming a lot of Those Kind of Movies, the loss of privacy knowing that your birthday pictures will probably be used for an internal training set are offset by having firm backups and one less thing to worry about in an emergency.

People ask for a lot of things. But it boils down to what they are actually trying to do.

The nuc was… a bad product. Power wise, the moment you do anything you start running into thermal issues. Getting a used one cheap is great for home automation and lightweight server work (hell, my router/firewall is more nuc than not). But in terms of actual user computing? A laptop is better in almost every possible way. If only because you aren’t mounting it to the back of a monitor: it IS the monitor. Similar (often much better) performance, similar thermal savings in a crowded office, and you can take your laptop into meetings or even home because 9 to 5 is just a suggestion when you are salaried.

In a lot of ways, nucs felt like a pretty big misstep even at the time. We already had thin(nish) clients in the form of the Solaris Sun ray and the like. Which, to a corporate environment, provides pretty much all the benefits AND a much more centralized security model (we see a shift back to that with the push for VDI solutions).

And from the conversation with that user: They want a computer for gaming. A nuc was never going to be that. A low-ish tier gaming laptop (I have a Razer Blade Stealth that I love) might do that. But they have their heart set on a “real computer”. MAYBE a nuc-like with a good APU could do that but… thermals. Which means, a desktop of some form. Whether it is an HTPC or a tower or whatever.

Then yeah. Steam Deck. GDP Win whatever the hell, Aya Neo, or (if you don’t expect to ever need any customer support) the asus one.

Bang for your buck? Those rival (arguably beat if you aren’t a youtuber with a warehouse full of free parts) desktop builds, tend to have okay-ish thermals, and don’t have many battery issues when docked. And most of them double as mediocre “normal” computing experiences on top.

Again, it really depends on what you are using it for.

“Gaming laptops” are often fairly horrible for temperature control. But otherwise? Most modern laptops have performance comparable to the average desktop that has poorly applied thermal paste and was never maintenanced in its existence.

Really depends on what you are using it for

• Internet browsing and media consumption on a big monitor? Light code development and/or office work? Just get a semi-modern laptop with USB c (preferably thunderbolt) out and a hub.
• Gaming: Honestly? The Steam Deck or one of the other vita form factor PCs are surprisingly good bang for your buck gaming wise. Same rules regarding a hub and monitors. And some gaming laptops are pretty affordable too.
• “Power user”: Build an htpc/mini-itx build and learn to hate everything about cable management

I love my big ass full sized tower. But the vast majority of computer users would be fine with a laptop and a dock/hub.

I mean, that is just another way of checking your dashboards. So is just futzing around semi-regularly.

Unless you are dealing with a high availability setup, it matters a lot less whether you do a push/pull model for notifications so long as you are regularly checking then. The issue is when you have people who just buy a synology or a qnap, shove it in the attic for two years, and then realize they lost three drives AND are infected by ransomware.

Honestly? You already hit it. The pihole. Maybe a firewall/router so that they can switch away from the comcast “modem” to a small computer running opnsense and then either ubiquity or omada for easily upgraded wifi support.

For just about anything else? I would honestly say “no” to the “average joe”. Unless you are running a backup solution, it is just a liability. And a backup solution involves offsite backups of the important stuff. Just having a NAS is worse than worthless unless it is solely used for data you don’t want to keep at which point… why do you have it? Because hardware failures will happen and, unless you are regularly checking your dashboards, they will happen in rapid succession.