https://libgen.li/torrents/

Anna’s archive, as mentioned

Libgen has academic papers, which is really important. I’m not aware of any torrents that back up scihub, this is the closest thing

Stuff like kiwix gives you offline backups of Wikipedia

There is a large degree of this, at least with some manufacturers. the iphone se referenced being a great example. If you’re a tech dork that wants fancy features you will overlook the se 100% of the time because even if you value a small phone many (basically all) of the bells and whistles on flagship models are gone as the se was based on the low end models from 1-3 generations back. No face id, no 5g, no magsafe, etc

Even for casual users: if you valued photography the se had the absolute worst camera of all the iphones. It was slow, it had less storage (64 gb minimum vs 128gb in the iphone 13 and newer), noticeably worse battery life, etc.

the obvious answer is that people weren’t buying them enough and that capitalistic markets will not support niche products that serve smaller demographics unless they can either financially justify themselves or earn some kind of government subsidy to sustain the effort (eg for a medical device and even then it’s shaky)

There are thousands of cool things that have died because they weren’t financially viable. That is what it is, but what’s more frustrating is that the technology behind these items and ideas is then almost always kept under lock and key forever, lost to the ages, because of the sliver of hope that some portion of it may somehow become a part of some new project. Instead of sharing the information to allow for collaboration and building on what was already established, any future projects need to now start from scratch. Otherwise they may infringe on the creators ability to secure earning potential you see, and that justifies drastically slowing the development of human progress in all fields by obfuscating research everywhere

Depends on how anal you are about file sorting. My nas is almost fully automated and for the most part I don’t really rename files except for music. That’s not renamed but it is fingerprinted and auto tagged because Jellyfin displays music based on tags and if the tags aren’t consistent and clean your library will be a goddamn mess. as a result seeding music can be a nightmare bc unlike changing filenames modifying tags changes the files hash so then you absolutely cannot seed it anymore and music trackers are generally the most anal about seeding.

Just make sure once you get a setup that works well for you that you back it up. If you’re grabbing all your media from torrents you generally can grab it again (though not always, torrents die and niche media can be impossible to find a few years later) but your Jellyfin db and config have to be set up from scratch if shit goes south

Also if you end up going with a Linux distro for Jellyfin (not a bad idea) and you run into problems just remember like 60% of the time it’s because you fucked up file permissions somehow. And if you’re using docker, which isn’t necessary but totally okay (I use it), you probably fucked up remote path mappings if things aren’t working right

https://trash-guides.info/

This doesn’t cover Jellyfin but the rest of the stack the gets files into it. And frankly I disagree with a number of the ways that they do things but if you want a guide that gives you a setup that works with a community that is helpful (they have a well populated discord) this is a good starting point

Jellyfin is basically install it, create a library within the app, point said library at a folder on a drive somewhere with media on it.

You generally want to follow reasonable naming conventions, eg showname.s01e01.mkv but these have gotten fairly flexible over the years. You don’t need to worry about the extra stuff like webdl.1080p.flux.proper etc, that is typically ignored, though there are always edge cases. The bigger headache is making sure your files match thetvdb or themoviedb as this is primarily what Jellyfin will use for scraping. If you use sonarr/radarr you can ensure the files are properly ordered and even rename them to scrape perfectly but this can be a headache for seeding if you torrent as renaming the files will break shit. This gets you into needing to hardlink if you want to keep things automated unless you want to manually go in and rename the files in your torrent client which is a chore, the trash guides describe how to set this up

Anime can be a chore, especially older releases, because lots of good shows were released by random people and not groups. As a result they decided to just release things with sequential numbered episodes (eg instead of s01e01,02, etc it’s just a folder with 1.mkv, 2.mkv, etc). Or they released them with episode numbering that differs from what tvdb has because they insist that some other source like anidb is gospel. Certain western shows can be a nightmare because of stuff like this too (American dad is the worst)

From there it depends on how you want to customize your Jellyfin install. I use a kodi as a front end so the only plugin I bother with is Jellyfin for kodi. But before that when I used native clients I used jelly scrub, introskipper, etc. but a lot of those plugins are redundant now because they’ve been built into native Jellyfin.

You also may need to set up transcoding. This depends on your setup. My setup direct plays everything (ugoos streaming box with Coreelec/kodi). This is really only necessary if you have a setup that benefits from the direct formats, eg a surround sound setup, oled screen that can play dolby vision or a led that can do hdr10+, etc. or if your server is really garbage and can’t handle transcoding. But really it has to truly be awful; intel quicksync going back years can handle most modern files pretty effortlessly (unless you start messing with stuff like av1 or vp9), nvidia transcoding also works fine even with relatively old cards (though using much more power by nature of needing a gpu installed). If you have an amd cpu video core next works too although quicksync is objectively superior, though not necessarily enough to justify buying a whole new setup and creating a bunch of waste when your amd rig will work well enough.

As you can see transcoding is in and of itself a diverse topic and how you set that up depends on your setup and needs: what’s your hardware, do you need tonemapping, how many concurrent streams do you anticipate having, etc.

It sounds like a lot but if you play with it for like a weekend you’ll be fine and then you’ll be free of streaming bullshit and the associated data collection

Finamp is also on ios, making it a great solution for when you have several users across ecosystems. There are other Jellyfin music clients as well but I don’t know them

You can also point Navidrome at your music folder for web access which I prefer when using my laptop

The discovery problem is definitely the biggest challenge though. Lidarr is something but if you enable it with newsgroups you’ll generally only find more “notable” music. Anything on the more esoteric side is generally gonna be tougher.

You can integrate torrents and private trackers but if you’re anything like me you want to run all downloaded music through a mass tagging program like beets.io or picard to get stuff tagged according to musicbrainz so your library is consistent, which wrecks seeding, and private music trackers are generally pretty draconian about seeding. So then it’s either keep two copies of music, one to seed and one tagged, or hit and run everything and get banned, or just have a library with messy tags (which if you’re like me is just simply not an option). I currently do the two copies thing because it’s generally not that much space and once I hit a 2:1 ratio I get rid of it. In the instance the tags match 100% I point it at my library and permaseed. This is labor intensive though and everything else on my server is mostly automated

I have never figured out a way to integrate soulseek. This would probably be the optimal way as the library is almost as extensive as private trackers (sometimes more so), I can filter by quality (though sometimes flacs are transcodes with this way), there’s etiquette to not clog peoples queue but no real seeding rules, etc. but on my server soulseek runs in a vnc based docker and scripting that goes beyond my talent level

Interesting. I also wonder how it would fare across different models (eg user a uses chatgpt, user b uses gemini, user c uses deepseek, etc) as that may mimic real world use (such as what’s depicted in the comic) more closely

I remember when compression was popularized, like mp3 and jpg, people would run experiments where they would convert lossy to lossy to lossy to lossy over and over and then share the final image, which was this overcooked nightmare

I wonder if a similar dynamic applies to the scenario presented in the comic with AI summarization and expansion of topics. Start with a few bullet points have it expand that to a paragraph or so, have it summarize it back down to bullet points, repeat 4-5 times, then see how far off you get from the original point.

However, my extensive mermaid knowledge consists of: ariel,

I feel like the classic image the mermaid in my head is clamshells as a bra. However, my extensive mermaid knowledge consists of: ariel, the concept of the undine (which I have never seen depicted and I’m not sure is a mermaid actually, is this something that encompasses mermaids technically? Not really my forte), and decerto, who I have also never seen depicted

Sure.

I’m not sure what the rules are about recommendations of specific providers here as you’ve said but I can certainly write about my experiences with providers

Emu streams is my current provider and they’re decent. The EPG is complete for us channels but not for some of the foreign stuff or for 4k. They have a pretty extensive vod library but the quality ranges, sometimes it’s 4k but sometimes it’s 480p, mostly 1080p, almost none of it has subtitles (but the channels do). I think they just grabbed shows as they came out and never updated them. Buffering is uncommon but does happen sometimes. I don’t watch sports but my partner does; the Super Bowl 4k stream had lots of buffering but the 1080 stream was perfect and basketball games work fine. Pricing was about 70cad for 7 months when I got it and they accepted paypal and crypto

I also tried earl hickeys iptv, very similar experience but more issues with buffering and not as many channels. However pricing was extremely attractive, 35gbp for 12mo

And not via that forum but another provider I found via a private tracker called media solutions that is similar to emu. Less issues with buffering but pricing and most responsive to support via telegram but priciest. I don’t remember the pricing offhand but like $140usd a year or so?

I’ve tried 4 iptv providers for long term subs and evaluated a ton more. They’ve all been okay but none were amazing so I keep trying new ones when my sub runs out

My basic thing is this: if they don’t offer a trial I don’t fuck with them. If the epg is totally fucked or the buffering on channels I watch is atrocious during the trial I don’t bother. If that’s all good I buy a month and see how it goes. I do this because I’m pretty sure some have better servers for trials, or maybe I just got lucky during the trial period, because during the month service goes to shit sometimes. If the month is good I’ll extend it longer

I’ve never found one with a complete EPG. I’ve found ones with complete epgs for us channels (my current one has this) but international channels, raw 4k streams, etc? They always have no EPG

https://forum.iptvinsider.org/ is the best forum I’ve found for this but as you’ve said it’s a nightmare to browse and absolute garbage. It does at least have some user reviews but I ultimately don’t trust them too much and go with the above

Short links are bullshit anyway. Don’t obfuscate where you’re sending me, that’s sketch. That’s phishing email behavior. Just because you don’t want me to erase all the tracking bullshit from url. Soon I won’t be able to anyway because most sites are starting to embed it into the url anyway. Fuck you and fuck the internet

they’re making efforts to not financially enrich those involved. A step in the right direction, at least

That’s silly. A motherboard with a free pci slot (I think x8? Been awhile), a cheap hba with the associated sas cables, and literally any case that will hold the drives. You could strap them all to a board if you wanted

Obviously you’ll need cpu and ram. Make sure the power supply is beefy enough to cover the amount of drives you plan to use and preferably get a good quality one if you plan to run it 24/7. I do think it’s worthwhile to get server grade hardware as it holds up better to long term 24/7 use but it’s not necessary. It’s also absolutely fine to go entirely used; my whole build was all ewaste and was maybe $300 minus the drives (which added much more). And my build was frankly overkill for a nas but I also run VMs and do some local llm stuff. If you just want to serve files for like Jellyfin/plex you really don’t need much, an ewaste pc from like 2015 will probably do the job spec wise (though increasing ram a lot can help significantly especially if you do zfs)

I have a 15 drive nas. My drives are sata but my hba is compatible with sas drives. I use an lsi 9300-16i and I have read of people using it with sas arrays just fine. If you shop around you can get it with cables for like $40-50 used (maybe more now since inflation fucked everything and you need the less common cables). Be careful because there are lots of counterfeits.

Also be mindful of cooling, the card runs HOT. I added active cooling to mine with a 3d printed bracket. If you’re only running 3-4 drives you could also get the 9300-8i which is cheaper and runs cooler, but has half the drive lanes so you’re limited in terms of future expansion.

Is it exposed to the internet?

Mine is local only so I’m not as diligent with updates. I push them like once every 2-3 weeks. Some containers automatically update but some don’t because in the past that has broken associated scripts

Well of course. Me too! The only way that changes is if we change the framework of our entire economic system, really

And mine either!!

I assume they’re being pragmatic. Appealing the us to remove copyright is a fools errand. Appealing to shorten the length of the prection period is too frankly given the nature of corporate protectionism but it’s far more likely than America ever entertaining the idea of free information, regardless of the benefits that could ensue. Think of the shareholders! And yourself! Gotta hang that carrot in front of you. What if you finally write that novel and it blows up! I know you secretly want to be a multimillionaire! No one just makes art or has passion to study and document something without financial gain, that’s dumb. Ignore all those forum posts where people do exactly that

Mihon is still available although it doesn’t do anime, only manga

It happened long before chatgpt. Subredditsimulator was touted as a “fun game” at first but it was really a testing ground for bot devs. That goes back to like 2016, 6 years before chatgpt.

Openai was established 2015 though, some of their team was probably already shitting up the internet by then