If I am murdered please don’t do this. I do not care if you feel like it will help you process the events

gonna be wild to see what this thing costs with tariffs

My dad used one of these for work when I was a a kid and I used to play with it all the time. He hated technology so he kept using it far beyond its reasonable lifespan. I remember I was in college and he was still using it, so it was like 2006 at that point?

Eventually the something got messed up somehow (image sensor?) and every picture was written to the disk incorrectly in a way that the right half would have fucked up color data. He finally got a normal point and shoot that took significantly higher quality images and could now store more than like 20 images without having to drag around 20 delicate floppy disks through sites filled with things very hostile to floppy disks

For now. Their most recent round of venture capital was 40 million and that was like the 7th one. Those investors are gonna be demanding returns if they haven’t already and they will eventually push to monetize as much as possible

If plex works for you now then sure, don’t fix what isn’t broken. Jellyfin isn’t going anywhere and is just getting better, if anything holding off on migrating just increases the chances that migrating will be smoother. But guarantee you that in a certain amount of time plex will fuck over their customers

I’ve never done a cutter but I mounted a pen to my printer to make into an plotter

You pretty much just have to make a carriage that can hold whatever the thing is and then dial in z depth. I would imagine the hard part for a cutter is getting enough force to cut but not so much that you mangle shit, but that’s probably just experimenting a bit. You’ll need some kind of cutting mat to put on the bed I would think

I knew someone that had a cricut and that was just a xy cutter that used a few different tool heads. It had one that looked like an exacto knife and one that looked like a pizza cutter but I don’t know what their functions were, I think vinyl vs fabric?

I was considering purchase a Japanese switch 2 because my Japanese is decent enough for most gaming but then I saw it was region locked pretty hard so I can’t use any of my us e shop purchases. Plus fuck Nintendo, even without the tariffs the price on this thing is a bit much and their behavior is garbage

If I ever do get one it’ll be because someone broke theirs and I got it cheap as fuck and fixed it. That’s how I got my switch, had a busted battery management IC and a fucked usb C port. I think in total I paid like $90 for it with parts. It would also help if the console was exploited for piracy

No need to be sorry, I did not take it that way, we are best friends forever. More to clarify that there are a ton of old server parts out there for dirt cheap if you’re okay with saving e waste from the trash heap.

You are absolutely right that homelabs are totally fine on consumer grade hardware but check server parts too, you might be surprised at the deals you find, especially locally. My build was a 10th gen intel build and cpu/mobo/32gb ecc ram/heatsink missing fan was $125. That was several years ago though and now we got tarrrrriiifffsss

The only reason I even have “server” parts is because they were dirt cheap at the recycling center. Before I used this my rig was an old pc from a doctors office I worked at they were going to throw away from like 2009. It was awful spec wise but it did the job. My current build is overkill but I wanted to play with vms and local LLM stuff and the hardware was cheap, so why not?

low power is definitely something to consider though. That said there are some people that have made impressive builds out there. There are some low power builds on the unraid forums that use even less power than one of these things. It’s a bit more up front because it relies on some niche hardware but the power usage is so low it’s maybe worthwhile if you use it for years

I just fail to see the benefit of these. Ease of use for sure but assembling a pc is really not difficult and installing an OS is not hard either. And an os like unraid or truenas is pretty simple to use, they hold your hand a lot. Like I get that running Debian is something not everyone wants to do but then it’s like, just don’t do that then?

Frankly if you’re capable enough to configure the dockers you’d run on one of these, like plex or Jellyfin, I would think you could handle those things??

I remember arguing with some nerd that this overpriced shit was not fucking worth it and my build based on old server parts I got from a local computer recycler was infinitely superior in every way

I wish I saved that post so I could reply with this link. I feel so validated. Never trust companies. It’s why I say you should never fuck with plex, even if it is a bit easier to deploy than Jellyfin.

Like I said my industry (outpatient healthcare) is and has largely transitioned to 1099 workers. Independent contractors aren’t covered under workers comp laws. This also applies to many other 1099 positions which is far more common under the gig economy.

This extremely inequitable treatment is why some companies like doordash have volunteered to provide a minor amount coverage:

Medical Expenses: Up to $1,000,000 with no deductible or co-pay. Disability Payments: 50% of average weekly wage, up to a maximum of $500 per week, minus other income.

They likely do this to avoid the potential of scrutiny and regulation that would increase the likelihood that the government mandates they provide more substantial workers comp or other benefits

Contracting is the loophole here and it’s why I guarantee more and more industries will transition to 1099 positions over the next decade barring regulation. It’s the easiest and fastest way to erode the bare minimum worker protections that the USA has

“The workweek was known colloquially as 996, which was shorthand for a week that went 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Not only did these hours exceed standard maximums, but employees also were rarely compensated for the overtime work. As TechCrunch notes: “Though technically mandating overtime pay for anything surpassing a standard five-day/40-hour work week, employers are known to avail themselves of a plethora of formal and informal methods for evading their legal obligations.” In August 2021, the Supreme Court and Ministry of Human Resources issued guidance that imposed limitations on this common work practice. Now, the legal workweek in China is supposed to be 40 hours a week and eight hours a day, with a cap of 44 hours in a week. According to China labor laws, employers may extend employees’ work hours by an hour per day, if agreed upon by the applicable trade union. That said, the China labor law also states that the maximum number of extra hours can’t exceed three hours per day or 36 hours in a month. And employees must be given at least one rest day for every week of work.

That said, it’s still too early to see whether the changes to the law will be upheld and enforced by Chinese authorities.

Employees are expected to receive salaries at least once a month. And that salary cannot be less than the minimum wage set by one of the 22 provincial governments. These wages are updated every few years and are adjusted to account for the region’s cost of living, level of development and local conditions.

In addition to salaries, employers are expected to provide social contributions to: Employee pension Medical expenses Housing fund Unemployment Maternity benefits Work-related accidents or injuries”

https://www.safeguardglobal.com/resources/blog/china-labor-laws/

And that’s coming from a western based company; western sources are generally skeptical of China and repeat dumb propaganda like what you’ve said. Why do you think companies are moving manufacturing of ultra cheap goods like clothing to Bangladesh and Vietnam? They need new places to exploit slave labor. China has the major bargaining chip in skilled labor and machinery for more advanced manufacturing though. Companies are still looking to move that but it takes significantly longer to do that and maintain quality (plus it’s very costly to do).

Chinese labor practices have been evolving for years. You may not agree with their government because it is spoooky communism but it is run in a goal oriented fashion that does intend to bring prosperity to its people.

Are you American? I am. And my job does not provide a pension, medical expenses, unemployment, maternity leave, housing, or workers comp. I have a masters degree and am licensed to provide healthcare but like many of my peers my industry has largely been converted to 1099 workers. Many of the people I serve are workers that work jobs like customer service and they also get none of these benefits because our government has failed us miserably. Also when’s the last time a cost of living adjustment occurred in the USA?

China has the disadvantage of having to industrialize much later than the United States. Further, their industrialization period was marked by being exploited for labor by the United States (much like how the rich upper class of the United States exploited children and the poor during its own Industrial Revolution). But coming out of their industrialization they are making strides to set up a more equitable society while we fall to constant political gridlock, increased wealth inequality and discrimination, violence, and now literally watching the few social support programs we have become dismantled in front of our eyes as fascism rises

competition is the best thing for market forces except when the competition is from a country that makes a competitive model that runs significantly cheaper or electric cars that are much better than any of Americas offerings

We have become so normalized to anti consumer behavior it doesn’t even matter anymore

Like it used to be that a videogame manufacturer charged for a dlc that was already on the game disc, you had to pay to unlock data that you technically had purchased but not licensed, and people threw a fucking fit. Now it’s like “this new tech device will only work if you insert $20 bills every 30 minutes” and people are like “oh well that sucks but what are you gonna do? I need a toaster that can send me a notification when my toast is done”

Fuck the companies that do anti consumer bullshit, fuck the youtuber dummies that normalize it because they got $50 and a free shitty printer, fuck the government that has completely failed to regulate anything, and fuck the dummies who constantly enable this nonsense because they refuse to spend 10 minutes researching their purchases and instead spend the rest of their life in credit card debt because they have $1100 in monthly subscriptions to stupid bullshit that makes their stuff work for 18 months until the company goes bankrupt, their device is bricked, and they replace it with another piece of shit that has the same anticonsumer bullshit