CoyoteFacts

Weirdly, Chris does have a GitHub repo for it, which would be way more secure for serving downloads, but it’s not mentioned on the download page. We’re also assuming that Chris is trustworthy and has not included a malicious payload into this file, in which case it wouldn’t matter if the file is correct - it would still be malicious.

My advice is don’t run things you don’t understand or that people you trust have not vouched for. If you use Linux, you inherently trust your repository maintainers to not serve you malicious code and to audit the packages they are maintaining, so you can be delivered safe software from secure repositories without needing to understand every line of code. This isn’t 100% bulletproof, as we saw with the XZ Utils backdoor, but it’s a hell of a lot safer than piping things raw.

As an aside, please don’t pipe arbitrary code from the internet directly into execution. Download the file and read it first. Someone could easily pwn that site and host malware at that URL, for example.

Doing your own encodes is also really cool. I’m not too sure what the AV1 compatibility of your friends’ players would be, but yes AV1 encodes are a very efficient way to microsize. If you happen to be on PTP, there’s a giant AV1 research thread with people testing stuff out. It looks like they prefer SVT-AV1-PSYEX as of the latest posts, though I don’t know enough to understand which encoding settings are the most impactful.

E-Fund, yes, for sure put that in an HYSA so that you can access it when needed. However, if a person is keeping non-E-fund money out of the market for fear of volatility, they’re actually technically undertaking a larger risk than being in the market because their money will never outpace inflation, whereas investing in a low-cost broad index fund has an extremely high chance to outpace inflation over a 5-10+ year horizon. Not to mention that when an investor undertakes market risk they’re also getting a positive risk-adjusted return in exchange for doing so.

Also, keep in mind that HYSAs don’t always offer such high rates every year, whereas inflation will always be present. And despite the “official” inflation numbers being around 3%, my actual expenses say otherwise, so I’d still be eyeing 3-4% as treading water at best.

If at all possible, get the snowball rolling on compound interest and let gravity do the rest; your future self will thank you to bits. Head over to one of the finance communities and they should set you straight. Personal finance is effectively a solved math problem; there’s really only one good answer that people will give you as long as they’re not trying to reach into your pockets for a cut, and the skill required to invest is zero. All you need is any amount of extra cash every month to pack onto the snowball. Time is by far the most valuable part of investing, so the earlier you start, the less of your cash you need to invest to get the same outcome: a reasonable retirement age with a body that isn’t burnt-out.

I’d definitely start considering inflation. If your money is stagnant and not earning interest, it is shedding value. Like it or not, we’re all inherently playing the game; it’s in everyone’s best interest to learn the rules.

If you’re only at 10mbps upload you’ll have to be very careful about selecting microsized 1080p (~4-9mbps) or quality 720p (~6-9mbps) encodes, and even then I really wouldn’t bother. If you’re not able to get any more upload speed from your plan then you’ll either have to cancel the idea or host everything from a VPS.

You can go with a VPS and maybe make people chip in for the storage space, but in that case I’d still lean towards either microsized 1080p encodes or 1080p WEB-DL (which are inherently efficient for the size) if you want to have a big content base without breaking the bank. E.g, these prices look pretty doable if you’ve got people that can chip in: https://hostingby.design/app-hosting/. I’m not very familiar with what VPS options are available or reputable so you’ll have to shop around. Anything with a big harddrive should pretty much work, though I’d probably recommend at least a few gigs of RAM just for Jellyfin (my long-running local instance is taking 1.3GB at the moment; no idea what the usual range might be). Also, you likely won’t be able to transcode video, so you’ll have to be a little careful about what everyone’s playback devices support.

Edit: Also, if you’re not familiar with microsized encodes, look for groups like BHDStudio, NAN0, hallowed, TAoE, QxR, HONE, PxHD, and such. I know at least BHDStudio, NAN0, and hallowed are well-regarded, but intentionally microsizing for streaming is a relatively new concept, and it’s hard to sleuth out who’s doing a good job and who’s just crushing the hell out of the source and making a mess - especially because a lot of these groups don’t even post source<->encode comparisons (I can guess why). You can find a lot of them on TL, ATH, and HUNO, if those acronyms mean anything to you. Otherwise, a lot of these groups post completely publicly as well, since most private trackers do not allow microsizing.

SuccessfulCrab only does WEB-DLs so “subjective quality” isn’t as much of an issue as it would be with the encoding groups, but yeah I agree that scene is usually best avoided if you have access to reliable P2P sources. Quality > speed for me any day.

SuccessfulCrab is a legitimate scene group and ELiTE appears to be some sort of P2P x265-1080p transcode bot/group (their releases on IPT/TL look fine and go back quite a ways). I’d stop using whatever you’re indexing from that’s either serving you malware or failing to regulate the malware in its users’ uploads. The real problem is that someone is mimicking these groups and putting out fake releases, so playing whackamole with the fake tags that that person is using is only treating the symptoms, and they can easily change the tag again.

Screen-sharing is part of chat apps nowadays. You’re fully within your rights to stay on IRC and pretend that featureful chat is not the norm these days, but that doesn’t mean society is going to move to IRC with you. Like it or not, encrypted chat apps have to become even more usable for the average person for adoption to go up. This reminds me of how all the old Linux-heads insisted that gaming was for children and that Linux didn’t need gaming. Suddenly now that Linux has gaming, adoption is going way up - what a coincidence.

Edit: Also for the record, I have a tech-savvy friend who refuses to move to Signal until there are custom emoji reactions, of all things. You can definitely direct your ire towards these people, but the reality is some people have a certain comfort target, and convincing them to settle for less is often harder than improving the app itself.

Yeah I’m reading a little bit on it, and it seems like apt-get can’t install new packages during an upgrade. On initial reading I was thinking there were specific packages it couldn’t download or something, but this makes sense too. Regardless, this is news to me; I always assumed that apt and apt-get were the same process, just with apt-get having stable text output for awk’ing and apt being human-readable. I’ve been using nala for a long time anyway, but this is very useful knowledge.

Whoa, do you have something to read up on that? I’d be extremely surprised, since apt-get is supposed to be the script-safe variant, i.e. I’d imagine it’s the more stable of the two.

Forks found in kitchen.