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Joined 12 days ago
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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • I think it’s a joke about physicists not understanding tolerances.

    I remember hearing an old story about a company buying signs from a contractor. The contractor produced all kinds of things, so it was fairly straightforward to send them the CAD file and stop worrying about it. One manager did an audit, and realized they were paying hundreds of dollars each for these basic signs. They weren’t fancy or anything, and were just signs throughout the facility that got updated regularly. So why the hell were they paying so much for what should have been a simple print job?

    After some investigating, the manager discovered it was because the engineer who did the original design for the signs forgot to change their default tolerances from 3/1000 of an inch. The contractor was busting out calipers and meticulously measuring the spacing and sizing on each letter before it shipped out the door.




    1. This hasn’t been a notable issue in a while. That’s why Plex’s https-by-default was such a big deal. With https, even your ISP can’t see what you’re streaming. They can see that something is being streamed, but not what specifically.

    Also, you totally glossed over the fact that Plex is simply easier for non-savvy people to set up. Plex provides a unified login experience similar to major streaming services, which Jellyfin simply can’t provide; If your mother-in-law can figure out how to log into Netflix on her TV, she can figure out how to log into Plex too.

    And the unfortunate truth is that Plex’s remote access is much easier for 90% of users to figure out. It doesn’t require VPNs or reverse proxies at all. You just forward a port and anyone with access can easily see your server. But my MIL’s TV doesn’t even have access to a Jellyfin app without sideloading. Not to mention the fact that I’d need to walk her through actually setting the app up once it is installed, because there is no unified system for logging in. And if I’m not using a reverse proxy for my Jellyfin server, then I also need to walk her through setting up Tailscale, assuming her TV is even capable of using it at all.

    Any single one of those hurdles would make Jellyfin a non-starter if I want to walk my MIL through the setup over the phone, and they’re all currently present. And some of them will never be fixed, by design. For instance, the lack of a unified login page is by design, because a unified login would require a centralized server for the app to phone home too. That centralization is exactly what Jellyfin was made to rebel against, so it’s a problem that will never be “solved”; It is seen by the devs and FOSS enthusiasts as a feature, not an issue.

    From a FOSS perspective, Jellyfin is a modern marvel. But it’s definitely not at the same level as Plex when you compare ease of setup or remote access. Jellyfin is fine if you’re just using it locally, or are willing to run Tailscale to connect back to your home network. But if you’re looking for true seamless remote access and need to consider the mother-in-law factor, then Plex is hard to beat.


  • Yeah, exactly. First world was allied with the US. Second world was allied with the soviets. Third world was basically everyone else, and was largely considered irrelevant to the Cold War. That’s why “third world” became a signifier of undeveloped countries; If a country wasn’t part of the Cold War, it was likely because they didn’t have enough developed resources or manpower to be considered a war asset. If they were developed enough to contribute, one of the two sides would have already been working on recruiting them to the war.





  • Blizzard is bad about this with WoW too. A lot of the content is only available as launch-day cinematics, and is vaulted once the expansion has launched. Getting the full plot for WoW as a new player is basically impossible, because so much of the game has been hidden from players.

    It’s to create FOMO, and keep players active. If players know they can access content whenever they want, there’s no incentive for them to log in right now.


  • This is the worst way to go about doing it, because you should never assume a drawing is made to scale unless it is specifically marked as such. A protractor would be useless if the drawing isn’t to scale. Generally speaking, if a problem isn’t drawn to scale, it’s because all of the info you need to solve it is already present in the drawing. You don’t need to bust out the protractor to measure angles, because the angles can either be calculated from the available info, or aren’t needed in the first place.