> RDS is a particular racket that will cost you hundreds of dollars for a rock bottom tier. Again, Digital Ocean is below $20 per month that will serve many a small business. And yet, AWS is the default goto at this point because the lockin is real.
This is a little disingenuous though. Yeah you can run a database server on DO cheaper than using RDS, but you’ll have to roll all that stuff that RDS does yourself: automatic backups/restores, tuning, monitoring, failover, etc. etc. I’m confident that the engineers who’ve set up those RDS servers and the associated plumbing/automation have done a far better job of all that stuff than I ever could unless I spent a lot of time and effort on it. That’s worth a premium.
For me it wasn't even about cost, it was the fact that logging into my self-hosted Plex server required an auth flow that went to Plex's servers for some reason.
'For some reason'? You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use ...?
People like you are why I hate these plex discussions, because motivations and reasoning for functionality are quite clear and obvious but I have to play a game where I have to to discern whether comments like this are just being intentionally obtuse, or are genuinely unaware of what architecture and scale of services they provide, or are aware and are simply opine-ing about functionality you dont like ("bloated").
Jellyfin is a cool alternative to plex, keyword alternative. Its kind of a joke that all the capability it provides is even 30% matched by these other clients but what people are doing unconsciously is just admitting they dont know what they want out of a media server or HTPC. If your needs are met by providing an NFS share and using a vanilla media player to handle buffering, then I dont even see why you're in threads like this.
Also a strange technical ineptitude / fake "blindness" is accepted around here while talking about plex for some reason. Plex offered a free 5mbps reverse tunnel service that allowed you to use THEIR SERVERS to stream to others in a secure and anonymous way if you were unable to open ports. This is the functionality they put behind a paygate, the functionality that had a cost they were floating for free... youve never been restricted from sharing your media to yourself internally or externally, but I still have to pretend that comments from supposedly tech minded people who intentionally misrepresent reality are worth respecting. It really makes browsing ANY jellyfin thread unpleasant.
Can you please refrain from personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? and also please avoid denunciatory rhetoric? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You obviously know a lot about this, and your comment contains fine information, but unfortunately the negative elements do more harm than the fine ones do good.
> You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use
Plex is for streaming my media from my server to my clients. I know a decent number of people who use (or used) Plex and I don’t think any of them would ever use it to access streaming services.
I have no problem with charging for functionality that needs their servers, or introducing streaming. But the way their authentication, “services”, and streaming features hae been shoved in our faces in the UI over time feels like a rug pull to those of us who paid for something else.
Your response is both unnecessarily aggressive and plainly wrong.
Yes, Plex _should_ work without an internet gateway. Why? Because it’s a client/server media application; it transcodes media to clients/players over the network.
Plex used to work like this. Actually, it was exclusively unauthenticated. Then early 10s they added optional auth, and eventually allowed you to reserve “server names”, and finally enforced with for running their server. But you can still use a client without auth today. Just read their docs: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...
> 'For some reason'? You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use ...?
All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
And to be clear, the devices using Infuse didn't have to do that, but accessing the dashboard (for admin) did require an external hop. There's no reason IMO for that to be necessary.
> All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
Cool, a real discussion. Plex has the weakness of requiring a first time online auth because they didnt implement a local ldap/oauth/sso pathway. After that point, Settings > Network > "List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth", use a generous netmask. Entirely local after that point if desired.
You're being a bit obtuse here yourself. The original premise of Plex was to stream your own media on your own network. I was a very early user of it, before these additional "features" that were pushed more by the Plex team than by user demand were added. They made it so you had to hack the xml config file to be able to use it in the traditional no login way, that was a pretty hostile move in my opinion and was the first eyebrow raiser for me. They also made it so you had to have a paid account to use any of the mobile clients in a clear monetization move there is no technical reason why you can't open your plex server to the internet and connect a mobile app that way, that's what jellyfin allows. I worked around this for a while by connecting to my home network on a VPN and just using chrome mobile to stream but it was less than ideal, obviously. Yes then they offered the proxying service with dynamic TLS cert generation as another paid for service, I remember it, but having never had a plex account let alone a paid one it was no interest to me. Do you work for Plex? Because your post reads like you do, especially the attitude of people not knowing what features they want and needing Plex to tell (sell) them.
IMO Mockito is fine, the problem I’ve encountered is people taking the easy way out and trying to test something that needs a real integration test with a convoluted series of mocks.
I agree. I mostly only use mocks for external service dependencies (apart from primary application database), or library features that are very problematic to use in test. A lot of code simply should not be unit tested - if an integration test can cover the same paths its far better in the long run. Performance can become an issue but it is easier to deal with that than to spend so much time maintaining and debugging mock constructs.
I’ve been on projects where mocking _literally made the project less reliable_ because people ended up “testing” against mocks that didn’t accurately reflect the behavior of the real APIs.
It left us with functionality that wasn’t actually tested and resulted in real bugs and regressions that shipped.
Mocking is one of these weird programmer pop-culture memetic viruses that spread in the early 2000s and achieved complete victory in the 2010s, like Agile and OOP, and now there are entire generations of devs who it’s not that they’re making a bad or a poorly argued choice, it’s that they literally don’t even know there are other ways of thinking about these problems because these ideas have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
I think there's room to argue "Agile" is a popular bastardisation of what's meant by "agile software development", and with "OOP" we got the lame Java interpretation rather than the sophisticated Smalltalk interpretation. -- Or I might think that these ideas aren't that good if their poor imitations win out over the "proper" ideas.
With mocking.. I'm willing to be curious that there's some good/effective way of doing it. But the idea of "you're just testing that the compiler works" comes to mind.
For OOP, I'd say the issue isn't so much that it's not useful (it is very useful), but rather that it was treated as "common sense, the only way to do it".
Sometimes the right tool for the job is objects, sometimes it's functional, sometimes you do want encapsulation but it's better as structs and using composition over inheritance. When everything looks like a `class Hammer extends Tool`…
Agreed - I like your phrasing of it. There are some good ideas in OOP. I don't know that I'd go as far as to credit OOP for those ideas, but things like polymorphism and encapsulation can be very useful. What I objected to was, as you said, OOP became "the only way to do it". It became a dogma. I was very happy when functional programming started to break through and show that there were other ways that were not only viable, but often better.
Mocking and integration tests are not mutually exclusive. I often use mocks in my integration tests. Some things can be integration tested, some things can't. Sone things you just need to mock.
I don't see how "oh third parties can get a bit for it" is really an acceptable answer. Lightning cables are readily available but that wasn't consumer-friendly enough for the EU. I think the parent is right, let Ford try this and see how quickly the EU goes after them, because this is quite frankly very anti-consumer.
Ford in the EU is a european car manufacturer with around 100 years of history, so yeah, I think the answer will be the same as for BMW. And sure, car makers have special status - they have just recently secured a huge win in reducing the scope of emmission-related fines, which will now be charged from 10g/km instead of 0g/km from 2035. But this too applies to every manufacturer.
I understand the legislation is different, but the anti-consumer sentiment is the same, but worse in this case since I have a feeling the screw bit won't be nearly as available and cheap as Lightning cables are.
> Ford in the EU is a european car manufacturer
An American company with factories in the EU. I don't think it's the same as a company headquartered in the EU.
> No, anti-consumer sentiment is "you have to buy a different charger for each device and it becomes obsolete with the device".
But you don't? The other end of any Lightning connector is USB-A or USB-C. Works just fine anywhere.
> Factories in the EU means workers employed and taxes paid in the EU. It means a lot here.
So I guess going back to the original parent's point: if your company is producing stuff in Europe, proprietary screws are just fine from a consumer point of view. Which kind of confirms everyone's suspicions about EU regulations... they're just foreign company shakedowns under the guise of "protecting the consumer."
> Which kind of confirms everyone's suspicions about EU regulations...
they're just foreign company shakedowns under the guise of "protecting the consumer."
Zero evidence was provided to support this, but I guess facts don't matter anymore.
> Zero evidence was provided to support this, but I guess facts don't matter anymore.
What do you think the whole thread was about?
Apple makes a proprietary connector: anti-consumer behavior according to the EU. Use a standard connector or get fined to oblivion.
BMW makes a proprietary, patented _screw_: perfectly acceptable according to the EU.
Are you being intentionally obtuse here or what? The proof is that you have an instance of the same behavior in two different domains, with the main difference being one company is American and one is European.
> Apple makes a proprietary connector: anti-consumer behavior according to the EU. Use a standard connector or get fined to oblivion.
This was not reactive behavior to Apple on the part of the EU, the legislation was agreed long time ago and there was a period until which all manufacturers had to adapt. Zero evidence.
> BMW makes a proprietary, patented _screw_: perfectly acceptable according to the EU.
Car (parts) market is a different one, different rules apply. Additionally it was not proven there will be no aftermarket availability of the parts. There is no proof, I am sorry.
The article is not saying 40% of all drivers tested positive, it’s stating that 40% of people who died in a car accident tested positive, at pretty high levels too.
The levels described are actually pretty low. The "legal limit" is so low for THC that anyone who's had THC in the previous days could test positive, even if they aren't "high" at the time of driving. It isn't quite the same as the BAC legal limits for alcohol. And it doesn't account for body weight, tolerance, and other factors that definitely contribute to how a driver reacts no matter how long it's been since they consumed THC.
And the study doesn't seem to differentiate between the different types of THC either, some of which are not psychoactive at all and which people use to relieve pain and anxiety. There's quite a lot of people using non-psychoactive THC which wouldn't impair driving.
> It’s stating that 40% of people who died in a car accident tested positive, at pretty high levels too.
It doesn't say anything about the distribution, only that the "average" (presumably, the arithmetic mean, a measure particularly sensitive to distortion by outliers) was at a particularly high level.
> So until we have a valid method of testing if someone is “too stoned to drive” we have to push back on any attempt to classify marijuana users as ineligible to drive.
You’re not really going to win anybody over to the legalization side when you basically say that people can consume as much THC as they want and drive without any penalties because of testing limitations.
Then develop more empirical measures of impairment. A device that tests response time, etc. Doctors have been doing that with a hammer to the knee for decades, optometrists do it with a headset that flashes lights where you have to press a clicker, etc. - we have the tools.
Impairment is somewhat orthogonal to drug or alcohol intoxication. It's not safe to drive if you've been awake for 24+ hours, for example, or have some other medical condition (hypoglycemia, whatever) that impairs your ability to drive safely.
This has nothing to do with "intoxication" or sleep deprivation, or medical conditions. Some police will lie and charge people with "DUI" when there is zero justification, and they ruin lives because too many of them are sadistic assholes. It's in epidemic in Tennessee and other parts of the country, but it really could happen anywhere to anyone. Police unions are a problem, and taxpayers pay for the litigation when someone actually fights back against false charges.
So what? This line of argument can be used to dismiss essentially any crime, because police can always lie about whatever the particular crime is. It's not a principled reason not to have laws or enforce them.
And field sobriety tests are routinely challenged in court because they aren’t objective and at best, they’re taken into consideration with other things like BAC.
my ex-girlfriend challenged this in court last year and lost. She was pulled over coming home and forced to take a field sobriety test. She was angry and was refusing, trying to explain that she just got off work. They arrested her for DUI. Called me to get the vehicle with her crying in the squad car. I bailed her out of jail for $500 two days later. Her BAC was 0.
Her attitude when asked to perform the field sobriety test was taken as a refusal and she lost her license, now with a DUI on her record.
We all like to think that these methods work, and they do most of the time, and yet there still are cases where a normal person is subjected to them and they deem them "unworthy" to pass.
That link doesn't appear to say that blood tests are reliable
Literally in the summary
> While blood alcohol content (BAC) level represents an accurate measurement of alcohol impairment, the presence of THC in a driver’s body has not been shown to be a predictable measure of cannabis impairment.
But further on
> Because THC in the blood can result from both recent as well as past use, impairment cannot be inferred from blood levels.
It is not a reliable indicator of recent use though, since it can also indicate past use.
I agree we need to set a threshold for impairment. I just want that to be measured reliably so that people who had a brownie last weekend aren't getting in trouble.
Driving isn’t a right. No matter how steeped the US is in car culture, it’s important not to lose sight of this.
Now blood tests show a 12-24 hour window of usage. Much tighter than the 2 to 30 days of other tests. In terms of window of time, that’s essentially good-enough.
Of course anyone who consumes cannabis has a strong desire for a tighter and more accurate test, but you’re really fighting against growing masses of irresponsible users.
If the problem is truly wide-spread like alcohol was (and still is), it’s just a matter of time before states or feds push for a good-enough (for the rest of us) solution.
THC leaves the bloodstream within 24 hours just to be clear.
I know this is a giant hairball and the downvotes and passionate discussion is why I said what I said but in the end, until we have a breathalyzer for THC, it is what it is.
The annoying thing is there's no ability to control power (or see system metrics) outside the chassis. With servers and desktop PCs, you can usually tap into power pins and such.
Well you’re making the assumption that prisoners are forced to do this work rather than opting to in order to make a little money for snacks and/or make a case for good behavior when they come before the parole board.
It's still slave labor if the most basic of comforts and privileges are locked away from you if you don't participate.
Plus you don't really have choice in the labor you perform, no choice in where you perform it, no choice in when, you aren't really paid, you can only spend money in the commissary (at insanely inflated prices).
Sure it's not a slave on a cotton field getting whipped for not meeting quota, but it really isn't far from that.
> make a case for good behavior when they come before the parole board
It can be a bit more explicit than that: in Colorado, inmates can earn 10–12 days per month of "earned time." Earned time shortens the time until eligibility for parole. Section D in the linked document (from the linked department policies page section 625-02) gives examples of behavior that can add up to earned time. For instance, a day of work at a disaster site is worth a day of earned time (D.4.a.1)
> Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that.
Exactly. Everyone I’ve talked to about my own robot vacuum (which is using Valetudo, so not phoning home to China) just kind of shrugs and says “who cares if audio and video inside my house are being piped to China, I don’t do anything interesting, what use would they have for it?” This also applies to other consumer electronics that do similar things.
They just can’t conceptualize that _in aggregate_ all this mundane information can be wielded by bad actors for their own gains. Which is funny, because they certainly have strong opinions about how Facebook et al are being used to push misinformation.
This is a little disingenuous though. Yeah you can run a database server on DO cheaper than using RDS, but you’ll have to roll all that stuff that RDS does yourself: automatic backups/restores, tuning, monitoring, failover, etc. etc. I’m confident that the engineers who’ve set up those RDS servers and the associated plumbing/automation have done a far better job of all that stuff than I ever could unless I spent a lot of time and effort on it. That’s worth a premium.
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