Of the lines I draw in my gun purchasing decisions (you’re right they’re all war profitiers), IWI and the like is the only one that I actively disuade people from.

That being said, the engineering history nerd in me is easily compelled to learn about design philosophies

My avatar is also partially AI generated. I GIMPed the Zizek face from one of his movie posters though.

I’m used to people calling me out for the Zizek part and that hasn’t happened on Lemmy ever lol.

Lots of places do a better job providing DRM free or DRM Lite ebooks (Chicago press only ties your name to the files so you’d have to doxx yourself to share it, but you can share it), but the sheer library of self published books on Amazon is hard to find.

There’s an author I’ve become good friends with who I pay him (in coffee) for his books because I disagree with giving Amazon a cent. But he noted that’s just where the masses are still and it’s hard to break that momentum.

I’m sure the people of Gaza are always excited to play the “counter terrorists” on Dust 2 as well.

It took watching a bunch of videos on Israeli weapons development before I learned who uses the fucking Negev

Makes sense. The government probably didn’t want to fund 2 games studios when 1 is fine.

There are so many pieces of media that need much slower pacing. The Sequel Star wars movies for one.

Myself and Sasquatch.

I wonder if steam considers this can evasion.

TBH, if it’s free I don’t care if the reviews are rigged so long as it’s not to hide that it’s a crypto miner or something. But when money is involved I care a lot.

I could see that as a privacy measure.

Everything on Lemmy is open anyways but maybe the maintainer didn’t want to be the guy to make Lemmy data that accessible. So it’s a limitation. You can only have Lemmy data if you are hosting the server and the community.

Falls in line with the ethics of basically all known gods.

Well they wouldn’t be middle fingers anymore but we understand the sentiment

I wouldn’t hate that. I’ve been meaning to try some AI extension to add to my VSCodium install to talk to my self hosted AI instance.

It would be fun to compare it to a de-microsoted extension

Personally I’m a huge fan of the Alcoholics Anonymous understanding of “god” and I think it applies more widely.

In AA it is supposed to be A-religious so as to accommodate as many people as possible. To them, god is whatever higher power you need to put your faith into to do better. An entity who you are striving to make proud or you are asking for guidance or help, etc.

This genericized god idea kinda gives up the game to me as an atheist, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact it’s made me believe in god as an idea.

There are plenty of studies on “manifesting” goals and how saying out loud to yourself or to someone at all substantially increases your chance of succeeding in your goal. This is just prayer or a magic spell or whatever else you wanna call it. I call it a ritual.

The fact that god is a made up idea has been uncontested in my mind for eons, however the psychological power of a belief in god is new to me and makes me appreciate the systems of religion more (doesn’t excuse a lot of their bullshit).

A plug-in for what?

And why isn’t a normal video generation app/site fine?

I also just swapped my monitor out after nearly 12 years with it.

I think ANYTHING you would have bought new would have looked awesome. Panel tech has advanced.

I wanted an apartment with a balcony but they’re all $500+ more a month in rent then I’m already paying.

How much did you eventually spend for everything combined?

Hard question to answer because it’s the server of Theseus at this point. My first NaS/Homelab was probably about $300 in cheap parts. It had 3 TB of SSD storage in a 6 bay 2.5 in SSD caddy that fit in a 5.25 bay of a Optiplex. It booted from a single NVMe drive and had 2x 4tb spinning disk drives.

My current server is a little over $1500 I think. It has 2 gpus (5060ti 16GB and 3060 12 GB for AI and hashcat stuff), 8x 4tbHDDs, 8x 500gb SSDs, an EPYC 7302p CPU, all noctua fans (3 case 2 CPU).

What are the running costs?

Electricity is cheap in Kentucky. I think this might cost $10-$20/month to run. Jellyfin is my most used service so I moved it and the production nas that fuels it onto a much more power efficient setup (Optiplex 3000 with a single 12tb HDD) and that probably costs a couple bucks at most a month. I have all the data backups on my big server so if the second hand HDD dies I can just point there server at my big server while I reload a new 12tb HDD.

How much space does it gobble up?

Not much more than a normal gaming PC. It fits in a Gamemax Titan or any other E-ATX case really.

How loud is it?

Not very. The stock fans of the Gamemax were fine but the Noctua flex is always funny. I keep my server right next to my gaming PC which is right next to where I game (duh) and work from home. It’s only noticeable when one of the HDDs is dying and trying its best. This is why I went with consumer components in a consumer case as opposed to a rack mount solution. I worked in a data center and so I have some rack mount servers but they’re loud as shit.

Backup/redundancy plan?

I pay for 500gb of Proton drive. All my important documents are backed up there. Most of my TBs of data are movies and shows. It would suck to lose the collection but it’s not worth setting up an off site backup for terabytes of meaningless things like that. Honestly, I only really need sub 100 GB of cloud storage for photos and tax documents. It was just a good deal to get the 500 from Proton.

Internet connection good enough (upload speed)?

My internet connection is dog shit. That’s why I started my NaS. I got sick of the show I was streaming being interrupted by Spectrum shitting the bed again. Websites I run are hosted on GitHub or a VPS until I can get something less bad.

How many hours did it take you to set everything up?

Well, I’m very cheap. I mean VERY cheap. My HDDs in my big server were pulled from some NetApp appliance that used a weird blocking format for HDD data which don’t feel bad if you didn’t know that cause I didn’t either. Took a few days to figure that out and then a few weeks to run a auto reformat on Truenas to put them in the right blocking format for anything other than a NetApp appliance to use.

And that kinda stuff is what you deal with when you want a beefy server but you don’t want to buy new. If I had bought this server new in 2018/17 when most of the parts were new, this would probably be a $10k-$15k server.

Can I recommend doing this? Only if you want to learn. I’ve dealt with so much weird shit. I have a memory leak that eats up 70% of my usable ram. I can’t get the 5060 to run properly and the AI I have running on the 3060 is too stupid to help. Everything is virtualized which was a weird call, I virtualized Truenas and passed through a SAS controller to use my NetApp drives. Why? I got convinced by a Homelab YouTuber and it seemed fun.

But that’s what what I wanted. Weird and jank to play with. I’ve probably put in a couple hundred hours of work into it. I put 5-6 more just today trying to learn Cloudflared tunnels to open my Jellyfin server to the web. But I might try my AI server next.

“Drive backwards on the track”

That’s literally the first thing people do in racing videogames. That would have been SECONDS

Yes it was way better than watching him play Atari Joust for 30 minutes but still!

I wanna see the flight scene in one of those shops now where someone gets embroidered during the fight.

I also work with industrial embroidery machines (not directly, we just have them at work) so I know the like 10 seconds under a needle wouldn’t be enough time to do anything really, but I’m imagining a room full of machines making military name strips, hero blocks a goons punch and shoves his hand under a needle while the goon yells in agony. Camera focuses on how horrified face as he lifts his hand to reveal “Maj. Payne” embroidered across his hand. The goon then faints.

Not that guy, but I bought a bulk order of used hard drives on eBay for about $1/TB

Granted, a lot of those drives died on the way so it was more like $1.50/TB after I sifted through it. I’ve only had one more die in 3 years