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.

So riddle me this. Inner City, poor area, 2:00 a.m.
One gang member approaches another rival gang member, pulls out an illegally modified full auto pistol, dumps an entire 30 round magazine into him.
Does he get the death penalty?

And yet you all are still using SMS two factor authentication. Why does my Xbox video game account have better security than my money?

Of course people are tuning out. Please keep in mind I am saying the following as a mostly liberal slightly libertarian.

What has passed for liberal culture over the last decade has included an awful lot of outrage over every injustice but not an awful lot of solid action to correct those injustices. The Democratic party has tried to harness that with a lot of identity politics that avoid the real issues. And so the result is you have a ton of people who are always upset but things never get better.

So of course people burn out. Or they get cynical and decide nothing is going to change so it's not worth getting worked up over. You see a lot of that in this very thread.

To anyone angry at me, downvote me if you want, but if you want change actually fucking do something. Stop consuming short form content like Twitter and TikTok, start consuming long form things that make you think and expose you to different viewpoints. Lex Friedman interviews are a good place to start.

Understand that not everybody who disagrees with you is bad or evil or malicious.
Very few issues are simple. There is rarely an absolute obvious right and wrong. And if somebody adopts a viewpoint you think is wrong, consider that maybe they have reasons they think it's right and use those reasons to challenge your own beliefs. You may conclude that they are still wrong, but you must be open to the possibility that you might be wrong. If you aren't open to being wrong, why should they be?
And in the world where nobody can admit they are wrong, nothing productive happens. You just have two sides shouting at each other.

Then take a step back from your own personal outrage and think about what is actually important. If you had to choose between ensuring every American has good health care, and ensuring every American has their pronouns recognized, which do you think is more important? So which one are you focusing your advocacy and speech on?

The simple fact is, if you (and I am addressing everybody on all sides here) stop getting riled up over wedge issues and start focusing on the things that The majority of the country can agree on, you might find there's an awfully big agenda of problems we all agree should be fixed that aren't even being discussed.

That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.

It's also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren't going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.

I don't always side with either Republicans or Democrats. I just want good government. And I am 100% in favor of repealing the procedural filibuster. I think the filibuster is a valuable tool that is important for defeating certain bad legislation, but it should not exist as a way to make sure any and every contentious legislation requires 60 votes.

If someone feels that strongly about something, let them get up there and read the phone book into the record for six hours.

They are doubling down on that mistake it would seem. Article says most of their losses last month were from their foundry division. I realize I'm just a random person on the ground, but shit like this really has me shaking my head. For a company like Intel foundry is absolutely essential to their business. If they can't build the chips, build them better, faster, smaller, they can't compete. It's like if Airbus said they are firing everybody in their airplane division to focus on important things. What the hell, the airplane is the important thing. Same thing with Intel.

Seems like a great time to buy stock in AMD.

Is it bad that my first thought on reading the headline was 'it's gonna be a fucking MAX, isn't it?'

My thought exactly. What I guess was an attempt at a saturation bombardment, costing at least half a billion dollars, and it achieved literally nothing. Meanwhile in Russia you hear shit like the story the other day where a man got shot in the knee, and instead of getting him knee replacement and disability payment they sent his wife a bag of vegetables and they're sending him back to the front line (even though he can barely walk). This whole situation is so fucked.

Hopefully this judge doesn't come down with a case of severe depression that causes him to shoot himself twice in the back of the head and then drive his car off a cliff, as usually seems to happen to those who threaten a certain political family...

The explanation I've always had- I think this was from some official source but I could have just made it up.

Starfleet ships use EPS (Electro-Plasma System) to route power around the ship in the form of electro-plasma (a highly energized form of plasma). The warp core generates a lot of this plasma, which is piped through conduits to various devices around the ship. The EPS system and its related systems generate a lot of treknobabble about 'scrubbing plasma conduits' (apparently done from the outside using a field generator tool, but still boring), 'replacing plasma relays' (the valves that route plasma around, apparently they go bad frequently); problems like ruptured plasma conduits are dangerous and require immediate repair, etc.

Because this all works in a grid system, whenever the ship takes damage (especially energetic damage like weapons fire) the EPS conduits can carry energy spikes all over the ship. That's why as the ship takes damage you see random small explosions and sparks all over the place- something hits or spikes the EPS grid and the shockwave ends up, well, wherever in the grid it ends up.

Of course many EPS conduits go to bridge terminals, especially as those terminals may have direct connections to the ship systems in question.

Of course in reality this would be seen as a horrible safety risk, and a bridge terminal that could probably run on a car battery shouldn't have explosive plasma running through it especially when it can explode and harm the operator. In fact one could argue a safe starship should keep all EPS stuff as far away from any essential human-inhabited areas of the ship as possible (especially the bridge).

One counter to that might be that perhaps the consoles actually play some role in EPS switching, but that seems a bad tradeoff to me.

This 100%. Look at forums. Back in the early days, there were lots of little independent forums. Sites like Reddit took over because you could easily keep your identity across multiple forums and see the content from all your communities on one page. We gained convenience, but didn't think too hard about what we were losing or who we were losing it to. Then along came enshittification and we are collectively realizing what we lost. Federation is of course the solution. As I see it, the only missing piece is monetization. Platforms like YouTube make it easy to monetize page views, Twitter / X is doing the same. That's much harder in the fediverse.