• 1 Post
  • 129 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle

  • You shouldn’t even have Jellyfin on a reverse proxy, because it shouldn’t be externally available. There are several known security vulnerabilities (all marked as “closed” due to inactivity on git) that the devs have said will likely never be patched. Because patching them requires breaking away from the Emby fork that the entire project is built on.

    It should only be externally available via a private VPN. And that alone excludes a lot of “I want to share my library with friends/family” scenarios, because step 0 will be getting their devices connected to your VPN.

    At the very least, set up some form of access control/username+PW directly on your reverse proxy as a secondary security measure. Because if you can reach the JF landing page, you can exploit those vulnerabilities without needing a valid JF login. So you should configure your reverse proxy to act as a gatekeeper, and ensure attackers can’t even reach JF at all without having a valid login to your reverse proxy. But this will break most JF apps (except for browsers) because they likely won’t have any way to give an initial user+pass to the reverse proxy before they hit the JF server.


  • I mean, in terms of raw capability, it’s actually one of the better “turn a dumb TV into a smart TV” devices on the market. It has good hardware transcoding support to take the burden off of your server. It also has very little in the way of fluff. It was one of the few boxes that wasn’t packed full of ads by default (though I’m not sure if this is still true).

    But yeah, it means you’re locked into Apple’s ecosystem. Which is… Not always the best. Apple is notoriously difficult/annoying if your app gets tied up in approvals, so native apps can sometimes be trapped in limbo for a while. And that’s assuming they even allow the native app.

    I guess you could build an HTPC with similar functionality and hardware support, but then you’ll be stuck using a Bluetooth keyboard to navigate things, plus all of the “oh let me wait for my computer to boot up before I can watch anything” pains that go along with it. There are solutions for a lot of the complaints, but a lot of them are fiddly or require lots of extra stuff just to achieve the same basic functionality of “remote has power button that turns on TV and streaming box, and navigates menus as if it’s a native app.”





  • Forums are great for being forums. Real-time instant messaging, voice chat, video chat, and screen sharing are all a very different use-case. They’re two entirely separate products, and comparing them is apples and oranges. People are looking to replace Discord with Discord-like services, because forums don’t fucking do what Discord does.

    The big problem (and the reason everyone seems to compare the two) is that Discord started eating forums, as companies realized it was easier to create a Discord server instead of creating (and hosting, and maintaining) a support forum. And that’s a perfectly valid complaint. But that doesn’t mean forums are a valid replacement for Discord.


  • Which is ironic, because you’re statistically most likely to roll over your own child. Kids are dumb and will do things like run in front of your vehicle as you’re pulling out of the driveway. And if you’re driving one of those massive trucks with gigantic blind spots, you won’t see them.

    It’s sort of like having a pool. Statistically, someone from your household (like your kid) is the most likely person to drown in your pool. Simply because kids are fucking stupid and they’ll inevitably spend a lot of time around it.







  • Yeah, my complaints about Apple all stem from the fact that my industry has a standard program that only runs on Macs… And every Mac I’ve used has inevitably ended up taking 4x as long to do basically anything else when compared to Windows or Linux. The only reason I ever use a Mac is because my job requires it, and even then it is only begrudgingly; if there was a way to run the program on anything else, I would have done so a long time ago.

    And yeah, I agree 100% about the “different first, better second” design choices. Lots of the most frustrating things about Macs are due to intentional design choices that Apple makes. Not because it is better for the user, but simply because it is different.



  • America may be constantly battling racism and xenophobia internally, but we recognize it for what it is: a shit behavior that should should be excised. European and Eastern cultures like Japan are so casually racist and xenophobic that they don’t even recognize it in themselves.

    The best way I’ve heard it described is that Americans consider racism something you do, while the rest of the world tends to view it as something you are.

    To an American, if someone is a racist, it’s because they do racist things. So Americans are actually fairly good at recognizing and excising casual racism, because they recognize it as a behavior they can change. But this also means Americans are fairly quick to judge individual actions as racist, because they see it as something that should be improved upon in the future. To an American, a racist is racist because they have recognized their own racist behaviors and don’t see them as a problem.

    Meanwhile, Europeans and Asians tend to think of racism as something you are. And that’s a big difference, because it makes them much less adept at identifying the more casual forms of racism. Because even if they’re casually racist, they’ll simply tell themselves “well I’m not a racist, therefore my actions weren’t racist.” Since that binary “is/is not a racist” flag hasn’t flipped in their brain, they’re able to tell themselves that their individual actions aren’t racist.

    It’s like Europeans need to be at least 51% racist in order to be considered racist, so anything below that amount is excusable. Individual people will obviously have different thresholds for when that Boolean bit gets flipped from “not racist” to “racist”, but it still needs to hit that personal threshold before they’ll start calling out racism. And europeans will tend to judge their own actions much more leniently, like a zealot telling themselves that God is on their side so their bad deeds aren’t really bad.

    But that causes interesting culture shocks whenever Americans interact with Europeans or Asians. Europeans are quick to jump on the “all Americans are racist” bandwagon, and the American will tend to nod along and agree because they recognize that everyone has the potential to be racist. Then the American will see the Europeans do/say some vile racist shit, and start to call it out. But then the European gets defensive and adamantly states that they’re not a racist… Because the European takes the “hey that was pretty fucked up and racist, don’tcha think” as a personal “you are a racist” attack, instead of a “that individual action was racist, and you should examine why you did it” behavioral check.

    And the American will be confused on why the European immediately jumped all the way to “why are you calling me a racist? I’m not racist” argument. Because in their experience, the only people who immediately jump to that are the full blown reich-wing racists who don’t see their own racist actions as a problem, but want to continue existing in a civilized society. Labeling someone as a racist is a big deal for an American, because it means the person has refused to examine their own racist behaviors, or has done so and sees no problem with the racism. To an American, labeling someone a racist is basically the nuclear “I’ve exhausted all other possibilities, and can only conclude that they’re doing it on purpose” option.

    So Americans will often walk away from the interactions thinking “holy fuck those Europeans were really goddamned racist” simply because the Europeans refused to acknowledge that their own individual actions had the potential to be racist. Meanwhile, the Europeans will think that Americans are really fucking racist because Americans are quick to call it out amongst themselves.




  • It’s also about fusing different cuisines together, to make something new. America is the big melting pot, and that means you end up getting flavor palettes that otherwise wouldn’t have been brought together.

    Traditional Mexican food isn’t anywhere near as spicy or as cheesy as Tex-mex, for instance. That’s because Texans took the traditional Mexican cuisine, combined it with American peppers and English+North American aged orange cheeses, and created Tex-mex. Tex-mex also tends to rely on flour instead of corn, because Mexico had red/yellow/white maize (and later, modern yellow corn) while American settlers had wheat.

    And then California Mexican food is an entirely different third type of food.

    Hell, my favorite local pizza joint sells a chicken tikka masala pizza that is fucking wonderful. We have a really big North Indian population in my area, so lots of the local restaurants have veggie options (India is largely vegetarian) and/or Indian spice blends incorporated into some of their menu items.