Headline misleading. Makes it sound like this is a problem that they are just getting around to fixing. Reality is this is an intentional business decision that has made them tons of money and they are now publicly claiming to address it when their subscribers are sick of listening to AI slop.

In concept, as a partly libertarian, I agree, they should sell the hardware and what I do with it is my business and if I misuse it and get in an accident that is my fault not theirs.

In practice, most people don’t see it that way unfortunately. There’s an awful lot of people who already misuse autopilot, even going back to the early days of autopilot. And every time someone gets in a crash in a Tesla, the question becomes did autopilot kill them and can we blame Tesla for the crash.

Personally I wish more people took the absolute view, namely that it’s supervised autopilot so either the human did something stupid or the computer did something stupid while the human was supposed to be watching it and either way it’s the human’s fault. Unfortunately this is not the world we live in :(

Point being, I would complain more about the parenting behavior of society at large than the parenting behavior of big tech.

I own a Tesla with FSD. This is not quite accurate. Tesla uses pressure in the steering wheel and a cabin camera to evaluate driver attentiveness. If you haven’t applied pressure to the wheel in a while, there is a flashing blue warning on the screen. If you still don’t apply pressure to the wheel, it beeps. If you still don’t apply pressure to the wheel after the beep for a few seconds, you get a strike and it locks out for the rest of the drive. Or if you get repeated beeps on the same drive, like seven or eight, it locks out for the rest of the drive and you get a strike.
If you are looking away from the road for more than about 10 seconds, it beeps. Same as above, get seven or eight beeps on one drive and it locks out for the rest of the drive and you get a strike.
I believe it’s currently at five strikes before FSD disables for 2 weeks. If you go for 2 weeks without getting a strike, one is removed.

The nag system is annoying. On the highway, it’s very good, usually better than I am as a human. However even with the nags it is still a huge benefit, and I think it makes me safer because I am more of a supervisor than an operator and I can spend more of my attention looking out in other directions and keeping better situational awareness overall.

Two problems here.
One is jurisdiction. If the website is not incorporated in Florida, has no offices in Florida, and does not use Florida servers, why should they be subject to Florida law? Everything they do is completely legal in their home jurisdiction.
This sort of enforcement is basically impossible on the internet. If anybody can access any website from anywhere, how is the website supposed to keep up with hundreds or thousands of changing jurisdictions each with their own legal requirements? And why should they have to?

Second is interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. It reserves to the federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce. I would think that demanding that a out of state business change its business practices would fall afoul of that.

Now it could be argued that since the website advertises in Florida and accepts sign ups from Florida residents, that they do business in Florida. However the simple solution there would be to disable payment for Florida residents.

When you buy a game, doesn’t matter the platform, you pay for it with a credit card. The credit card companies are holding the game platform hostage, saying either they start censoring what games they sell or they lose the ability to process any credit cards for any games at all.
That is essentially holding a gun to their heads, if they can’t process credit cards they can’t bring in any money and they might as well just close shop and go home because their business is finished.
You can boycott steam or itch or whatever else, but they all use the same credit card processing systems- Visa, MasterCard, Discover, etc. if they start applying these policies to all game retailers, it will simply become impossible to buy any vaguely pornographic game. Period. Anywhere.

Thus, boycotting steam or itch is counterproductive. They are victims just as much as the consumers. They have no desire to ban these games, they were happily selling these games a week ago. But when they are being told ‘ban a bunch of low volume games or you cease to exist as a company’ that is what they do.

Thus, this phone call campaign. It is focusing on the credit card companies, the ones who are actually applying this pressure to game companies.

It is telling them we do not want them dictating what people are and are not allowed to spend money on. We do not want them to enforce morality. And if they got the impression we did, it’s because a small minority made a couple of phone calls.

The idea is if 1,000 people call in and complain about the porn game, and 100,000 people call in and complain about the censorship, hopefully they will get the message.

I think the problem is the farmers would be happy to know IT if it meant they could fix their damn tractor. Deere doesn’t want them to know IT, it wants them to just call their local Deere service center anytime anything doesn’t work. Problem is, if it’s during a harvest or some other critical time, they can’t wait a week for a service appointment so they have to pay through the nose for immediate call out. And much of the time, the problem is something that they are easily capable to fix on their own, but can’t because they don’t have access to the service software that only dealers get. Or it’s a situation like iPhones where they can easily make the repair but need the software to authorize the repair.

The result was a lot of farmers installing hacked Ukrainian firmware on their tractors, simply because the hacked version would accept any part connected and not require authorization from a service laptop.

Well that’s shooting yourself in the damn foot.

Apple users are a tiny percentage, and most of the sort that happily uses whatever Apple gives them without question or concern for other options. I have no idea what this thing did, but if it did something different than every other browser should start targeting Windows and Linux.

Yes I am, and that is exactly the point. I do not want spinning disks in my desktop, or anyone’s desktop or laptop. Give the actual computer a fast SSD for the OS and programs, then store the big data on a NAS or server. How’s the computer access it from that server in real time.
At 100 megabits (10 megabytes per second) that isn’t very fun. Gigabit ethernet is 100 megabytes per second give or take. That is where it starts to become useful for storage, as most spinning disks themselves have a transfer rate between 100 and 150 megabytes per second.

But as you just pointed out, that can become a bottleneck. Especially if you have multiple people accessing the server. How much of a problem it becomes depends on what they’re doing. IE, 10 people editing photos can happily share a gigabit link to the server because they load the photo once and then the link sits idle while they work as the photo is cached in RAM, 10 people editing uncompressed high definition video will probably want a constant full gigabit to each of them because they’ll be using almost all of it constantly so you need a gigabit to each desk and 10 gig to the server (and a storage array with sufficient bandwidth)

All true. But what if you aren’t just storing media for consumption? What if you’re doing photo editing, video editing, etc? If your NAS is either flash-based or has a flash cache, that extra speed can be really useful.

100 MByte/sec. 8 bits per byte, call it 10 when you include overhead / CRC / etc.
1000 mbit = 100 mbyte

About damn time. We got a boost every few years from 10 to 100 to 1000. Then we just… Stopped. Stagnated. It’s understandable why, for a good long time one gigabit was all anybody needed, 100 MByte/sec is pretty good even for a NAS.

Of course then fiber ISPs got in the game, now in a lot of places you can buy 7-8gbps as a consumer product. And even multi-gig, which was supposed to ‘fix’ this, really ended up being insufficient. You could make a salad argument that multi gig was a waste of time and we should have just started moving to 10 gig.

Unfortunately, 10 gig switches still carry a significant premium. But this will start to shake that up. Sooner the better.

This is absolutely right. We are getting to the point where the circuit pathway is hundreds or even dozens of electrons wide. The fact that we can even make circuits that small in quantity is fucking amazing. But we are rapidly approaching laws-of-physics type limits in how much smaller we can go.

Plus let’s not forget an awful lot of the super high-end production is being gobbled up by AI training farms and GPU clusters. Companies that will buy 10,000 chips at a time are absolutely the preferred customers.

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.

Yeah I actually hadn’t seen that at all. There’s not many of those toaster style NAS cases, that one is fairly big as it needs a full size power supply. What I have in mind though is basically same size and form factor as a Synology DS9xx, 4-6 3.5" bays, main board under or off to the side, 1-2 NVMe slots, low power CPU. Basically clone a Synology DS9xx but put a standard UEFI BIOS on it as well as a video output. I think that would sell pretty well. Especially if you gave it 10 gig ethernet and a CPU that had an AI accelerator.

Could of course build the thing yourself, but it ends up bigger.

Yeah exactly. And from what I understand of this thing, it has a fairly easy to use auto update system. So every couple months just plug it into your router and hit the update button. I don’t think it’s a ripoff.

If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It’s for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn’t be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need this. If you don’t have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.

Oh absolutely. Without a doubt. Broadcom / VMware have lost trust for good

Tons of alternatives from other NAS vendors, but I’m not sure anyone makes a Synology type box that is a generic x86 to run your own OS. Plenty of tower server type things but I’m not aware of any little toaster type boxes.

Oh tons of alternatives for sure. Where I’m at, at this point if I go somewhere else I’m going to want open source most likely.