If you are capable of setting up your own personal VPN, you don’t need Tailscale. You still may want to use it though, depending on how much of a novelty Network Fun is for you in your spare time.

For me, the main advantage to Tailscale et al is that it is on a per device basis. So I can access my SMB shares or Frigate setup remotely while still keeping the rest of my internal network isolated( to the degree I trust the software and network setup). You CAN accomplish that with some fancy firewall rules and vlanning but… yeah.

Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much “open source projects” in terms of UI/UX and it is still “missing” so many features.

For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:

1. Maybe 80% of the time, I can cache an episode or a movie locally on my tablet when I am going on travel. This is great if I am doing a rewatch of something or don’t super care about The Experience and just want to watch the next few episodes of a show in the evening. With Plex, this is trivial. With SOME of the third party jellyfin apps, this can be sort of worked around but then becomes a hassle to sync watch statistics (which episodes were watched or even where I left off because a buddy wanted to go out for drinks).
2. Remote watching is similarly a mess. Plex has pretty okay-good systems to treat my home server as a “cloud” resource with a single forwarded port. While even that is very questionable security wise, Jellyfin is still “figure it out yourself”. Which can be done with setting up a vpn or using Tailscale but adds additional complexities.
3. Plenty of other “quirks” along similar lines

My personal opinion? For something that only “tech savvy” people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that “just works”? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being “just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC”… why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).

To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But… Jellyfin ain’t it.

Which… is basically worthless because of just how many cameras there are out there.

A “fun” exercise a couple buddies and I did a few years (… decade?) back was to just use an afternoon of plugging python packages together and scraping county traffic cam feeds to track someone, with their consent, over a few days. And it was ridiculously easy to get their schedule down basically day one and even get a LOT of data on who they were seeing or where they went after parking just based on when and where the car “disappeared”.

And that is just publicly available traffic cameras. Not the giant mess of speed and red light cameras and all the other crap we have in a modern surveillance state.

So even if people are climbing traffic poles and midlining over to the actual boxes to smash them? Those are even less of an issue than normal outages from rain on a windy day.

Bingo. Just make sure you are masked up and know WHERE you are masking up.

Which is not an “ai poison pill”

While they’re at it, why not just hack the government to reverse last year’s election, amirite?

I know most of us loved Mr Robot and watching dinozzo and abby double team a keyboard and Wolverine getting a blowy and all that fun stuff, but that really isn’t how things work.

These aren’t off the shelf pre-trained models. The model is a big part of the company’s product and, increasingly, the cost of training is being partially offloaded to customers under the guise of “tune the model to your data”.

And IF we have a Bones situation where someone has inscribed a virus onto human remains to destroy a one of a kind machine or whatever: That is what version control is for. “Hmm. The May 2025 model isn’t working. Okay, switch back to April”

Also, these “models” are a lot closer to just running OCR on a feed and logging which traffic camera saw one of the flagged license plates.

deleted by creator

nVidia cares less and less about the consumer market every year. We basically only exist to buy the factory fourths so that the overall yield of any given wafer can be maximized.

2400 for a single component is still rather insane even by server room standards. But 12 or even 18 load balanced? That starts to “make sense” for higher end data centers or even on-prem server rooms at the more tech oriented companies.

This isn’t piracy since you are legitimately-ish getting stuff but:

If you are actually in the US, check out your local community colleges. Depending on the college (and state), that may range from free to “you only need to sell a kidney once every four years”.

A scumbag cousin of mine has been doing that for probably coming on 20 years now. He signs up for a course every other year, never attends it, and then drops it. Keeps his dot edu email active for “free” software and I think he also flips laptops and the like.

That said, also consider actually attending the course. One night a week to learn a new skill or just keep the (questionable science of) neuroplasticity going.