“Regrettably, the number of mortalities reached 1,301, with 83% being unauthorised to perform hajj and having walked long distances under direct sunlight, without adequate shelter or comfort,” the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/23/hajj-pilgrimage-death-toll-extreme-heat-mecca-saudi-arabia

That’s still 200+ deaths who were registered. And my understanding of Saudia Arabia in this context is that they don’t always permit Muslims from certain countries, so they have no choice if they want to make their pilgrimage. This is a once in a lifetime event that some people may plan out years in advance. I don’t think it’s fair to blame them for not registering, especially when in some cases they can’t.

The group used “sophisticated computer scripts” and software to scour piracy services (including the Pirate Bay and Torrentz) for illegal copies of TV episodes, which they then downloaded and hosted on Jetflicks’ servers, according to federal prosecutors.

They probably used Sonarr and Radarr and called it a day (or similar off-the-shelf tools available on GitHub). It’s not very sophisticated at all. That combined with Jellyfin and a VPN (or Usenet or a country that doesn’t care about piracy) and you have your own up and running. You could also just use free sites with an ad blocker instead of paying $10/mo like the service this article is about charged.

Unrelated to all of this: https://rentry.co/megathread

Available information indicates that it’s all processed and stored on-device (and even encrypted). I’ll wait for confirmation from security researchers, but the available information I’ve come across says that it’s all done locally.

It’s probably not a bluff. They’ve pretty much saturated the U.S. market; there’s not much room left to grow here. It would make more sense to focus their efforts on growing in other regions where they have plenty of headroom to increase their userbase and monetization. Depending on how things play out, they could match their current revenue in a matter of years and still have room left to grow. There’s also the potential to re-enter the U.S. market down the line. Why would they throw that all away and essentially create their own competitor by selling their core technology and diluting/confusing their brand with whatever U.S. company they sell to?

I use Flow Launcher with Everything and love it (both installed via Scoop btw)

When I installed Nobara Linux on my younger sister’s old hand-me-down laptop, I spent more time trying to get the WiFi card working then I did installing the new SSD and operating system. And this is a distro focused on making Linux more “works out of the box” than Fedora (which it’s based on). This isn’t something she would have been able to figure out on her own. I switched the laptop from Windows 10 because of how slow it was, but slow is better than no Internet if you aren’t a tech nerd who can figure out what random ass commands to run to finally get WiFi working.

If not then there’s always Navidrome which is built specifically for music. Haven’t used it myself but lots of people seem to love it.

I like Jellyfin for my media server, including music.

On Android I use Symfonium (works with Jellyfin as well as other backends). Nothing comes close to this app imo.

On desktop I use Feishin which serves me well (Jellyfin only afaik). It’s not perfect and it does have a bug where adding an album to queue will actually add all albums with that exact name to queue (even from different artists), but that issue is being tracked on GitHub and otherwise I run into few issues.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2907:_Schwa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu4zyRqILYM

The entire time. Obligatory “what Hamas did on October 7th was horrendous,” but if you look into the history of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, it’s pretty understandable (although not justified) why something like that happened. Israel has been the bad guy from its conception.

Israel has been particularly monstrous the past few months, but this is something it has been working towards for decades. Only recently has it felt willing and able to go this far without its allies pulling their support.

To clarify, they’re not going after patent trolls afaik, just going to court when they’re targeted by them (instead of forking up a payment to the patent troll company to avoid that). Iirc, the last patent troll they took to court ended up collapsing and isn’t operating anymore.

They misinterpreted “metaverse platform, mozilla.social” as a single item in the list, not as two items.

For anyone who isn’t aware, Mozilla has a thing called Mozilla Hubs that could be considered a metaverse product

While we’re talking about asymmetric encryption, can someone explain to me why you can’t decrypt information with the same public key that encrypted it? I understand the analogies (locks on a briefcase, unmixing paint, etc), but I can’t “un-analogize” them to understand what’s actually going on. Encryption keys aren’t physical locks or paint. They’re numbers(?). So why can I encrypt something by multiplying by a known public encryption key, but I can’t decrypt it by dividing by that same known public key?

Amazon bought Twitch for its video live streaming infrastructure/tech, which at the time was unmatched. Now Amazon offers that infra/tech via AWS and anyone can spin up a Twitch competitor just as capable.

Amazon doesn’t care about Twitch at all. Prime subs are just another benefit to make Amazon Prime more appealing to consumers, but iirc Twitch is the one who actually pays out of pocket for Prime subs.

STOP DOOMER POSTING I know climate change is a frustrating problem to solve (to say the least) but holy shit this doomer posting makes it so hard to keep up the momentum necessary to solve it

It is NOT already too late

The way the climate change works, it won’t be too late until we’re all dead

Stop Doomer Posting

It is not possible to move 1.8 million people out of a region like Gaza without mass death. This is not some secret information that Israel doesn’t know. The state of Israel has demonstrated at every possible opportunity that at best it does not care and at worst that’s the goal.

I’m not sure if the piracy megathread or FMHY megathread cover the *arr stack specifically, but they have lots of information so I’m recommending them broadly for anyone wanting to ingest information about piracy.

Regarding what the arr stack even is:

Tldr, you set up a list of public and/or private trackers in Prowlarr or Jackett. In Radarr and Sonnar you set up movies and shows respectively that you want to keep track of. Rad/Sonarr check those trackers for releases for your tracked media matching criteria (like resolution, size, language, etc).

When it finds a matching release, it sends the torrent file or magnet link to your torrent client to download. When it finishes, Rad/Sonarr hardlink or copy the file to a library location and organize/name them according to rules you set.

You can point Jellyfin or Plex to that library location and all the media will be organized so it can easily figure out what media is there and grab metadata for it (cover images, description, ratings, etc). Then you can watch that media through Jellyfin/Plex or an app that plugs into them.

The *arrs also work with usenet if you’d prefer that over or in addition to torrenting with a vpn.

Radar and Sonarr are tools to track movies and TV shows respectively. You can add a movie/show to track, tell it the quality you want it in, and set up Prowlarr or Jackett to give Son/Radarr the access to the torrent trackers it needs. You can also use Usenet but I have no experience there.

It will search those torrent trackers for releases matching your movies/shows in the quality and language you set for them and send the downloads to the torrent client you set up. When the client finishes downloading, Son/Radarr copies (or hardlinks) the files to your library folders.

If Son/Radarr is tracking a show that you currently have downloaded in 480p, but the quality profile allows upgrades up to 1080p, it will search for 720p and 1080p releases and pick the best match it can find. When the torrent client finishes downloading it, Son/Radarr will automatically replace the 480p release with the 1080p release it just downloaded.

We used the 100 AI and 100 human White faces (half male, half female) from Nightingale and Farid. The AI faces were generated using StyleGAN2. The human faces were selected from the Flickr-Faces-HQ Dataset to match each of the AI faces as closely as possible (e.g., same gender, posture, and expression). All stimuli had blurred or mostly plain backgrounds, and AI faces were screened to ensure they had no obvious rendering artifacts (e.g., no extra faces in background). Screening for artifacts mimics how real-world users screen AI faces, either as scientists or for public use, and therefore captures the type and range of stimuli that appear online. Participants were asked to resize their screen so that stimuli had a visual angle of 12° wide × 12° high at ~50 cm viewing distance.

Can’t wait for them to try this, it flops, half the staff gets laid off, the CEO steps down with a golden parachute, the CEO trades places with the CEO of another tech company, that new CEO makes an even worse decision, another half of the staff gets laid off, the new CEO gets a raise, Microsoft buys both companies, Google makes a competing game studio that gets killed before their first game release, and Apple releases their first video game for $3000 that only runs on M2 and above.