Or head scale if you don’t want something you don’t control that requires an account with google/apple/microsoft

4chan is a cia honeypot which is part of why it became super right wing and why /pol/ started after moot met with Epstein. At a minimum they keep logs for weeks and in certain cases indefinitely

Basically all commercial dvds with the exception of stuff like some independent releases and essentially all blurays have copy protection (CSS for dvd and AACS for bluray, for bluray it’s built into the spec)

They’re both fairly trivially defeated (for dvd extremely so because CSS is completely broken, whereas br has key revocation so it’s technically a bit more complex though practically this doesn’t mean much)

I don’t know much about Germanys laws but iirc they are one of the places that takes piracy and torrenting more seriously, no?

Interactive media like menus is a nightmare to support. Kodi has some support but only on pc. Also to your last sentence it’s a grey area, if you rip the disk to any format you’re essentially violating copyright because making a copy requires circumventing encryption, which violates the dmca (assuming USA). Might as well just use makemkv then, unless you’re real serious about archiving literally everything

Why not both? I use kodi when possible because it runs circles around the mostly dogshit Jellyfin apps for various platforms. Jellyfin for kodi and the kodi queue sync plugin import my library and watch status. I still have the option to use Jellyfin apps or web on devices that can’t run kodi (or when remote) and as a result can have all of my media accessible from all my devices without needing multiple copies and centralized metadata administration

5 felt like they half wrote 3 different games, realized they were running out of time, and then smushed them all together. Finishing the campaign becomes a chore long before the ending. Speaking of the ending if you do manage to chug through your reward is an abrupt and extremely weak ending that again feels like they just ran out of time

It’s crazy because then they plopped out red dead 2 which was a tremendously excellent narrative by comparison. They clearly have the means to make something fantastic.

It will shift to streaming that can run on anything and things like mods, running older clients, and cheats will essentially be impossible. Unless of course you pay for them with in app purchases, which publishers love

Short sighted consumers will eat it up because “oh now I don’t need an expensive console, I can just run an app on my tv!”

Then comes the death of all the above, as well as a generation of kids having access to not just gaming, but 3d modeling and serious digital art, programming (as well as learning through modding and finding ways to cheat), music production, video editing, etc. how many of those things were only available to kids via piracy? Capitalists don’t give a shit about this. They’re salivating at everything become a streaming client which both essentially eliminates piracy as well as turning a one time software purchase into perpetual subscription hell.

The crazy part is everyone but the tiniest sliver of people will be fucked by this. You know how musicians have shifted to basically making dick from streaming, and view it essentially as advertisement to funnel people into physical merch and concert ticket purchases, their only remaining revenue streams? Developers will be in the same place. It’s arguably advantageous now to be on something like gamepass but that’s because Microsoft is purposefully taking a small percentage barely above costs (10.5%). Once it’s dominant do you think they won’t shift to 30% like apple, steam, and google? And probably even more once distribution outside of their platform is unfeasible?

And for the short sighted consumer saving $3-500 on a console once every 5-10 years becomes another $30 subscription, which outpaces the cost of a console in 2 years and also robs you of the shred of autonomy you did have

ram is a volatile commodity that, while difficult to manufacture, is not as difficult as say a gpu or cpu. As a result in the past manufacturers have been pushed to sell supplies at or even below cost. It seems like a no brainer to start up a new fab right now but the reality is that would take years to get to a point where it’s outputting any kind of reasonable supply and in that time prices could (and hopefully will) return to a much thinner margin

Apple could, for example, start up a fab. They have the cash. But it’s a lot of cash, it doesn’t stop (the fab needs continual significant investment to stay competitive), and when ram prices dive they are stuck holding the bag for this 15-20 billion dollar fab that needs several billion dollars a year to keep playing the game. This is why they stick to fabrication of things where they can differentiate (eg m series processors) and control the market. And then they can do what they’re doing right now: leverage their huge position to get far better prices than someone like valve, who’s barely a player in the hardware game, and ensure the architecture of their custom silicon maximizes ram performance (uma) and even use that influence to codesign new types of ram that align with their interests (lpddr5x)

Is plex an acronym?

If your device doesn’t have a client it probably has a kodi port. Jellyfin libraries can be imported in kodi with plugins (and plex and emby for that matter). Then you get the benefits of kodi (better skin support, more robust plugins, better subtitle rendering, etc) with the centralized metadata administration of Jellyfin and retain the option to use Jellyfin clients on devices with locked ecosystems (eg ios) or where you don’t feel like setting up kodi

valves Linux support is objectively good but it doesn’t magically undo establishing the anti consumer guidelines that now dominate the industry

Piracy also existed before (and after) steam, what’s your point?

You’re not wrong that physical media was essentially doomed, and arguably it should have been as digital distribution is faster, easier, and objectively better for the planet (look into the environmental cost of manufacturing vinyl records, for example)

But who popularized the current dominant model of “you’re only buying access, not the game itself”? And before you go on about how it would be impossible to make a digital equivalent to distribution equivalent to purchasing physical media, remember gog exists and has been around and successful for almost 2 decades now

I worked in a community mental health hospital as a therapist in the run up to Trump one and and there was a small but vocal minority of pro Trump therapists

It was really strange. Our hospital was contingent on Medicaid for like 80% of the budget. Talking with them more revealed a pretty sharp disdain for the clients we had and poor people in general. This was extra weird bc we generally made 20-30k there despite having masters degrees and phds

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1588892/

“The cumulative impact of excess medical care required by smokers at all ages while alive outweighs shorter life expectancy, and smokers incur higher expenditures for medical care over their lifetimes than never-smokers. This accords with the findings by Manning et al. (1989) of positive lifetime medical care costs per pack of cigarettes, but disagrees with the results found by Leu and Schaub (1983, 1985) for Swiss males. The contradictory conclusions of the analyses are undoubtedly due to a large difference in the amount of medical care used by smokers relative to neversmokers in the United States and Swiss data”

The only studies I can find that confirm shortened longevity incurs lower costs occur outside of America, which shifts things greatly due to cultural differences in receiving medical care and Americas totally fucked healthcare billing

Also I’ll point out that I said I don’t agree with the original poster, that I don’t care if you smoke, and now I will say that you’re a fucking moron with poor reading comprehension. Sorry that I won’t confirm your bias so you don’t feel worse about smoking, idiot. But again, smoke all you want, I don’t care, but don’t act like it doesn’t increase the cost burden on public health (as do your other examples but I also don’t care if you eat cheeseburgers every day and drink yourself to death)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12474721/

“873 studies identified, 11 were included in quantitative synthesis, which compared 19,759,529 smokers with 206,913,108 non-smokers for direct health care costs. Mean age ranged from 34.5–60.6 years for smokers and 34.3–65.1 years for non-smokers. Mean annual health care costs ranged from $65,640–$1297.1 for smokers and $54,564–$724.4 for non-smokers. Annual incremental direct health care costs for smokers versus non-smokers ranged from –$458 (95% CI [confidence interval]: –2011.0 to 1,095.0) to $11,076 (95% CI: 10,211.9 to 11,940.1) in 2025 US dollars. Meta-analysis revealed smoking generally incurred greater health care costs than non-smoking, with a mean annual incremental cost of $1916.5 (95% CI: –439.9 to 4,272.9). The result was not statistically significant (MD = 1,916.5; p = 0.111). Substantial heterogeneity was observed (I2 = 99.9%). Sensitivity analysis excluding studies of chronic disease yielded a reduced incremental cost for the general population, with a statistically significant difference (MD = 583.9, p = 0.02), although heterogeneity remained high (I2 = 98.0%).”

Literally the first recent meta I found. If you want to smoke I don’t care but suggesting it isn’t a public health burden is asinine

Not that I agree with that person but smokers objectively cost more than non smokers even with a shortened lifespan. Smoking increases the risk of and worsens basically every chronic condition as well as being a well linked factor to critical loss of lung function and several cancers. Unless you like, just let someone die if they get a smoking related illness (which is basically all of them depending on how liberal you are with the word “related”)

I will just give yoko taro my money if he does something, basically

Although imo replicant was better, albeit more tedious to get to the end. He really has a disdain for the people that consume his media and I love it

In some cases the ps5 can as well but only older firmwares have the full chain of exploits. That said you can run game backups and if you get an old enough firmware you can even install Linux and run steam games

I have a friend who had a c section birth that otherwise had no complications (other than requiring a c section. They were in the hospital 4 days iirc, way less than a week. Insurance was billed for 98,000. They had a 10k out of pocket max, thankfully

School lunches, hospital food, nursing homes, rehabs, etc though many of those will quietly break from the pyramid and just go with a nutritionists guidance. But that’s a big part of why these industries bribe people like rfk. It gets them huge amounts of locked in buyers eating their product because they have to