"Plex added a paid license for remote streaming, a feature that was previously free. And then Plex decided to also sell personal data — I sure love self-hosted software spying on me."
How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?
The only other examples are Mattermost and MinIO... which I don't know much about, but again: Aren't you in control of your own host?
This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?
> How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?
You host the plex service with your media library. Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others. Not sure now it works exactly because I never hosted it myself.
> Plex allows you to stream without opening up your firewall to others.
It relies on their hosted services/infrastructure. I avoid Plex for that reason. I just host my media with nginx + indexing enabled. Wireguard for creating the tunnel between the server-client and Kodi as the frontend to view the media (you can add an indexed http server as a media source).
Works great, no transcoding like Plex, but that's less of an issue nowadays when hardware accelerated decoders are common for h264 & h265.
> It relies on their hosted services/infrastructure.
Only if you want it to. Your local Plex server is always available on port 32400 - which can be opened up for others as well. But using Plex’s authentication is more convenient, of course.
Yeah, I was specifically talking about the "firewall" bypassing the parent mentioned (most likely combined with NAT punch-through as well). You could of course use Plex without that and use wireguard (or just make it available to the internet) and not rely on their infra.
Im confused. There are two different streaming things on Plex. They support streaming inside the plex app of content from the usual streaming services, much like Apple TV or your TV’s built in media manager. They also support streaming your collection across the internet to wherever you are. Which is now behind a paywall?
I don't use Plex anymore, but not long before I cancelled my account they starting charging to access someone's library that had been shared with you if the sharing party did not have Plex pass, or something to that effect.
> This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?
that's one way of enshittifying, but what the article talks about is nonetheless very important.
People rely on projects being open source (or rather: _hosted on github_) as some sort of mark of freedom from shitty features and burdensome monetization.
As the examples illustrate, the pattern of capturing users with a good offering and then subsequently squeezing them for money can very easily be done by open source software with free licenses. The reason for that is that source code being available is not, alone, enough to ensure not getting captured by adversarial interests.
What you ALSO need is people wanting to put in the work to create a parallel fork to continuously keep the enshittification at bay. Someone who rolls a distribution with a massive amount of ever-decaying patches, increasingly large amounts of workarounds, etc. Or, alternatively, a "final release" style fork that enters maintenance mode and only ever backports security vulnerability fixes. Either of those is a huge amount of work and it's not even sure that people will find that fork on their own rather than just assume "things are like that now".
Given that the code's originating corporation can and will eagerly throw whole teams of people at disabling such efforts, the counter-efforts would require the same amount of free labor to be successful - or even larger, given that it's easy to wreck things for the code's originator but it's difficult to fix them for the restoration crew.
This pattern, repeated in many projects over the decades since GPL2 and MIT were produced, displays that merely being free and open source does not create a complete anti enshittification measure for the end user. What is actually necessary is a societal measure, a safety web made up of developers dedicated to conservation of important software, who would be capable of correcting any stupid decisions made by pointy-haired managers. There are some small projects like this (eg Apache, and many more) but they are not all-encompassing and many projects that are important to people are without such a safety net.
So for this reason, eg when people are upset that mattermost limits the messages to 10000, their real quarrel isn't really even with the scorpion, who is known to sting, it is with the lack of there being a social safety net for this particular software. Their efforts would be well spent on rapidly building such a safety network to quickly force the corporation's hand into increasingly more desperate measures, accelerating their endgame and self-induced implosion. Then, after the corpo's greed inevitably makes them eat themselves in full, the software can enter the normal space of FOSS development rather than forever remain this corporate slave-product that is pact-bound to a Delaware LLC by a chain of corporate greed.
Only once any free fork's competition backed by VCs burning their money on a ceremonial heap has been removed can the free version of the software become the central source for all users and therefore become successful, rather than continuously play catch up with a throng of H-2B holders.
So... will uv make Python a viable cross-platform utility solution?
I was going to learn Python for just that (file-conversion utilities and the like), but everybody was so down on the messy ecosystem that I never bothered.
Yes, uv basically solves the terrible Python tooling situation.
In my view that was by far the biggest issue with Python - a complete deal-breaker really. But uv solves it pretty well.
The remaining big issues are a) performance, and b) the import system. uv doesn't do anything about those.
Performance may not be an issue in some cases, and the import system is ... tolerable if you're writing "a python project". If you're writing some other project and considering using Python for its scripting system, e.g. to wrangle multiple build systems or whatever than the import mess is a bigger issue and I would thing long and hard before picking it over Deno.
Thanks! I don't really think about importing stuff (which maybe I should), because I assume I'll have to write any specialized logic myself. So... your outlook is encouraging.
A lot of them are controllable from mobile devices through apps that could have new code remotely deployed to them - for example https://www.dji.com/downloads/djiapp/dji-go-4. The apps are mostly for controlling the camera, but presumably they're not airgapped from the flight controls.
And they run heavily encrypted firmware, so you have no idea what is actually happening. There is so much CPU power in those things it puts your cell phone to shame and a lot more sensors to boot. Some models have 8 onboard cameras.
That doesn't explain it, though. In this case and the TikTok case, nobody has been able to cite exactly what all these "personal data" are. Not once have I seen a citation of what TikTok has "stolen" from users, somehow defying data sandboxing implemented on mobile devices.
This fake hysteria over drones is even worse, considering that the drones don't have the means of sending arbitrary data to remote servers.
It can't send "whatever it wants." The user has to grant access to various categories of personal data.
And whatever it sends can and would have been sniffed by now. It's incredible how much time people have to expend on way-more-obscure snooping than that.
Markdown is devalued as a format because of the bizarre shortage of Markdown VIEWERS. You find Markdown documents in every open-source project, and you always wind up viewing them with all the embedded formatting characters. Why?
Why provide documentation in a format that is so poorly supported by READERS? Or, to respect the chicken-&-egg problem here: Why is there such a shortage of Markdown viewers?
Every time this comes up, respondents always cite this or that EDITOR that has Markdown "preview." NO. We're not editing the documentation; we're just reading it. So why do we have to load the document into an editor and then invoke a "preview" of it? Consider how nonsensical the term "preview" is in that case: What are we "previewing" its appearance in, given the dearth of Markdown readers?
Nothing tops Apple's infantile refusal to put a (real) Delete key on their laptops. Instead, they have a Backspace key mislabeled "delete."
When the Eject key became obsolete, Apple had a perfect opportunity to fix this omission with essentially no effort. NOPE. Meanwhile, everybody else managed to have a proper Delete key on their laptops.
A hill that I'll die on is that Apple's terminology is more correct than PC terminology for this.
Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter.
Delete makes sense if you consider the actions from first principles.
Consider the various forms of deletion (forward, backward, word, file deletion, etc.) Each of these just has a modifier key in Apple's way of thinking. (None, Fn, Option, Cmd) which makes complete sense when viewed against how consistent it is with the whole set of interface design guidelines for Apple software.
The only reason that this doesn't make sense is that it's incompatible with your world view brought from places with different standards. They will never "fix" this as there's just nothing to fix.
> Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter.
Backspace on a typewriter only moved the position (~cursor) back one space. Hence why its symbol is the same as the left arrow key's.
Backwards Delete was a separate additional key, if the typewriter even had one, and its symbol was a cross inside an outlined left-arrow: ⌫.
Current Apple keyboard has this symbol on the "Backspace" key in some regions instead of the text "delete", but older ones did have the left arrow.
Apple calling it "Delete" goes back to Apple II. Many other older computer platforms also called it "Delete". DEC used the ⌫ symbol.
At least you don't have to type the same letters while holding a thin tape over your screen to erase them!
Apple also had separate Return and Enter symbols on keyboards for a while, which also sounds like typewriter territory but their intended use was a bit different: https://creativepro.com/a-tale-of-two-enter-keys/
Not many people use forward-deleting. I find it much easier to just Fn+Backspace anyways, especially when Del is usually part of the shorter function row that you really have to stretch for.
And delete is a perfectly fine name -- it deletes the character you just typed. I've always thought the supposed distinction between backspace and delete was bizarre. If anything, it's the forward-delete that needs a better term, like... well, forward-delete. Fwd-Del.
It's just deleting. And that's a questionable assertion for which you've provided no support. You seriously think people Backspace old E-mails away? They Backspace unwanted files away? They Backspace selected areas away in Photoshop? OK.
"I find it much easier to just Fn+Backspace"
Except most people don't find that at all, because it's not marked on the keyboard. And again, you're asserting that a secret, two-keyed, two-handed hotkey is easier than pressing a clearly marked button?
If you watch real users when they're faced with the lack of Delete, they use the arrow keys to move the cursor across the characters they want to delete, and then Backspace them away. Twice as much work. Or they reach for the mouse or trackpad and tediously highlight the characters to delete.
And there is no separate function row on Apple laptops. The Eject key was right above the Backspace key... easily reachable.
> And that's a questionable assertion for which you've provided no support.
You're the one who's provided zero evidence that the Del key is used with any appreciable frequency at all. And the fact that Apple doesn't even bother to include one strongly suggests it's rarely used. You're literally the first person I've ever heard even complain about it. Since you've started this topic, if you want evidence from someone else, you really ought to start by providing your own.
> You seriously think people Backspace old E-mails away? They Backspace unwanted files away? They Backspace selected areas away in Photoshop? OK.
Um, yes? If you insist on calling it Backspace, the key that deletes the previous character is also the key that deletes e-mails in Mail.app, that deletes files in Finder (with Cmd), and that deletes the selected area in Photoshop on a Mac. Which is why it also makes sense that it's called Delete on a Mac. It's all extremely consistent and logical.
> Except most people don't find that at all, because it's not marked on the keyboard.
And most people don't need to, because they never want to use it anyways, even when it's a dedicated key wasting spacing on the keyboard.
> And again, you're asserting that a secret, two-keyed, two-handed hotkey is easier than pressing a clearly marked button?
Yes, because the Del position on most PC laptops is awkwardly far away and smaller than Backspace. If you find two hands or two keys difficult, are capital letters with Shift hard for you?
> And there is no separate function row on Apple laptops.
I don't know what that means? Apple laptops certainly have a function row, which is where the Eject button you're talking about has always been. And where the Eject key was is where the TouchID button is now.
> ... easily reachable.
Eject/TouchID is one of the two farthest keys on the keyboard, the polar opposite of "easily reachable". There is literally no position less reachable on the keyboard. It's not ergonomic to make it something used in regular text editing, if you're one of the few people who utilize forward delete.
"You're the one who's provided zero evidence that the Del key is used with any appreciable frequency at all."
I never said it was. You're the one who pompously declared the opposite. I merely pointed out an easily-verifiable fact: Apple neglects to provide it.
But since you've exposed yourself to statistics-based ridicule now, I'll lazily rely on Google's so-called "AI"-based indictment of your absurd position:
"Apple's global PC market share generally hovers around 8% to 10%"
This indicates that 90% of the world's computer-using population apparently DOES find Delete to be a compellingly distinct function from Backspace, and sees fit to include a dedicated key for it on its keyboards.
So you can continue to protest and cry about the harmless inclusion of a useful key that doesn't impede YOUR mode of operation at all, while the vast majority of the computer-using world demonstrates its disagreement with you by including it.
How about you lay off the insulting language like "pompous" and "ridicule" and "protest and cry"? It's completely inappropriate for HN, and demonstrates a severe lack of maturity on your part. I think you can be better than that. Maybe re-read:
I don't know what you're bringing up market share for. The idea that most people buy non-Apple because it has a DEL key is not plausible. Like INS, it's a vestigial key maintained mainly for backwards compatibilty with legacy enterprise software used by a tiny minority of businesses. Not for everyday use by normal users.
Now, you started this conversation by complaining about the lack of a DEL key, yet you're the one going on about how I'm continuing to "protest and cry"? Honestly, you might need to look in the mirror there. You're the one asking for a feature almost nobody uses, and all I'm doing is pointing that out. It's much better to respond to disagreement in a productive way by engaging in substance, not defensively by hurling insults.
To reiterate: no, it shouldn't be included on Macs because it's completely and utterly unnecessary. If you need Del functionality, just use the Fn modifier. That's what it's there for. And it's more ergonomic, as established.
"I don't know what you're bringing up market share for."
Says the guy who declared, without evidence, that "Not many people use forward-deleting."
And who, after complaining about my digging-up of statistics, doubles down by crowing about "a feature almost nobody uses," again without any evidence.
See, when rebutting an argument, you gain credibility if you at least make an effort to back up your assertion with facts. It's a fun and useful exercise, because everybody learns something... if they're willing to.
Meanwhile, your comments provide an amusing clinic on hypocrisy.
> Meanwhile, your comments provide an amusing clinic on hypocrisy.
Have you not noticed that you're also providing zero facts? Again, I suggest you look in the mirror. Do you somehow think that when you make a claim you don't need facts, but when people disagree with you they do...?
There aren't any actual studies on rates of usage of the DEL key. So I don't know what you're expecting.
I suggest, in the future, that you don't apply such double standards, where you demand empirical evidence from everyone else, but neglect to give any yourself. It's not a good look, and you aren't going to gain much respect doing it. Hopefully you can learn from this exchange and be better than that in the future. Good luck.
> Except of course that I didn't make any claim requiring statistics, while you did.
You're criticizing Apple for not having a Del key. Presumably this is based on the idea that people mostly want a Del key. Which would need to be based on statistics, just as much as my claim that they mostly don't.
The only alternative would be if you thought Apple's "infantile refusal to put a (real) Delete key on their laptops" was their refusal to cater you just you personally. I'm assuming you're not that much of a narcissist?
> And yet... I'm the one who DID supply statistics, which you ignore...
I didn't ignore anything. I already responded directly to what you said about market share, and explained how it's irrelevant and why. Irrelevant numbers aren't any better than no numbers at all.
> ...in your maniacal histrionics.
Perhaps you don't just need to read the HN guidelines again, but bookmark them and re-read before each comment you post. Also maybe check the dictionary, since you don't seem to know what those words mean? They don't just mean someone who disagrees with you.
"Plex added a paid license for remote streaming, a feature that was previously free. And then Plex decided to also sell personal data — I sure love self-hosted software spying on me."
How is it "self-hosted" if it's "remote streaming?" And if you're hosting it, you can throttle any outgoing traffic you want. Right?
The only other examples are Mattermost and MinIO... which I don't know much about, but again: Aren't you in control of your own host?
This article is lame. How about focusing on back-ends that pretend to support self-hosting but make it difficult by perpetuating massive gaps in its documentation (looking at you, Supabase)?
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