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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Can you maybe clarify what you mean with “work”? What are you trying to achieve by significantly exceeding any supplemental recommendation that I’ve ever heard of?

    Are you worried, that your Vitamin D3 levels are significantly too low, because you’re suffering e.g. from SAD, another mood- or an autoimmune disorder?

    Talk to your doctor, get your levels checked, follow their advice and take the dose they recommend for the time they recommend!

    Are you planning to relocate to a cave? Will you never see the sun again?

    Talk to a medical professional about that plan, take whatever supplements they recommend for as long as they recommend them.

    Are you living in a cold and dark country like Sweden? Then that country probably has safe guidelines you can follow. If you’re still worried or you are experiencing any symptoms that might be related to low Vitamin D3 levels, talk to a medical professional!

    Why are you trying to exceed any recommended dosage by the factor of 10? Where did you get that number in the first place?

    I believe that number is still low enough to not pose any immediate risk in the short or mid term. Your doctor might even agree that high supplementation is necessary to get your level up.

    As a long term plan and without knowing your actual levels, it’s just stupid: At best it does nothing but waste your money on needless supplements. At worst it increases the risks that come with overdosing on Vitamin D3.



  • You are aware that this isn’t a lifelong commitment, right? A Plex license doesn’t make using it mandatory. In fact, had you read a bit further, you’d have seen that it’s no commitment at all, and I’m still running and maintaining a Jellyfin server simultaneously, reverse proxy and all. Not just as a fallback, but also for the things it still does better.

    I migrated my household use to Plex, though, because this evil “closed source for profit app” offers an on-device user experience that is as good, if not better, than that of a commercial streaming services. This makes the rest of the household use it happily, instead of seeing it as an inferior alternative.

    Jellyfin’s user experience is simply not there yet, not even close. Its clients, if available at all for the system in question, are (mostly) functional, but certainly not fun.

    I had the money to spend on the evil “closed source for profit app” and it made my family’s life a little better for it - are you sure that trying to shame me for that was the right reaction?


  • Plex killed their official plugin repository, but plugins are, technically, still supported. There just isn’t much life left in that ecosystem after Plex strangled it.

    Ironically, it’s probably Jellyfin’s thriving plugin-ecosystem that’s holding back its clients - since anything with a native UI can’t really be used with any plugin that extends the UI feature set and vice versa.

    Oh, and all “workarounds” that I know of for “offline” Plex involve essentially disabling user auth for certain IPs - which is insane. Plex simply doesn’t support local auth, it’s not an offline-capable solution. That (and some other restrictions) is why I’m still running and maintaining Jellyfin as a fallback.


  • Jellyfin requires a reverse proxy or similar to be reachable from outside the network, once that’s set up, the usability gap between the two becomes a lot smaller. And Jellyfin does, still, have some benefits over Plex - first and foremost: it doesn’t require an active Internet connection and an “ok” from a central server to fully function - it also has fewer restrictions when it comes to sharing content and a better plugin ecosystem.

    Again, I think both are highly capable servers and I’m running both in parallel, even after migrating most of my personal use to Plex.

    It’s the clients where it all falls down, sadly. Jellyfin’s are, even after all these years, clunky, ugly and unpleasant. The choice of supported devices and systems is also quite limited. This is where Plex shines: they have a, generally excellent, client for pretty much everything you would ever want to play your media on.







  • MacOS is a good middle ground but not one I would personally use outside of a work machine.

    I fail to see how it’s a “middle ground” between the drawbacks you mentioned before.

    When it comes to gaming, Mac OS is the absolute bottom of the barrel, compatibility is utterly atrocious. With Apple’s insistence not to allow Vulkan drivers, they pulled the rug out of any leaps Mac OS could have made in that regard (like Linux did).

    Apple also pulled the plug on any server capabilities Mac OS once had.

    So, when it comes to gaming or server use, Mac OS would be my absolute last choice, not a middle ground.

    Software choice is limited, but software quality is generally high and for some professions, the choice is flawless: when it comes to content creation, Apple’s ecosystem is hard to beat.



  • The Epson Eco-Tank printers are probably one of the most infuriatingly mislabeled products ever, though. They come with self-destruct timers.

    If their software counter device that their excess ink sponge pad is full (which can happen rather quickly depending on printing behavior and the amount of cleaning cycles), they turn themselves into e-waste. Epson considers the sponge non-serviceable and the only official solution is to buy an entirely new printer with a clean sponge. Absolutely nothing Eco about that.

    There are (paid!) counter reset hacks available now, though.

    So, yeah, fuck Epson, but for very different reasons than op is listing.


  • Made good printers. They were one of the last bastions of sanity, but last year that one fell, too:

    As far as I know, they finally pushed firmware updates to block 3rd party toner to most of their printers - which is pretty evil, given that most people purchased Brother devices exactly to avoid that kind of bullshit and nobody expected it from them.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

    That said, I love my Brother DCP-9022CDW. It has been an indestructible workhorse, eats any toner I want and lets me reset the counter and keep printing another 2000 pages on an “empty” toner. Heck, I’ve had third party toner that I could reset three times before actually running out. That latest firmware update will stay far away from it, though.



  • It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.

    There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.

    I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.




  • Same here. One of the biggest issues is that Lemmy is currently terrible at surfacing content from niche communities: no weighted activity, no “multi-reddit-syle” community grouping - pretty much any main view mode is dominated by a few large communities only. This makes the death of the small communities a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    The next version of Lemmy is making some very tepid improvements in that regard, but it’s nowhere near enough.


  • A new scaled sort option has been added. This sort is identical to the Hot sort, but also takes into account the number of each community’s active monthly users, and so helps to boost posts from less active communities to the top.

    This is such a vital change and should be the default. Lemmy is currently effectively suffocating and killing its small communities and stunting its own growth due to its complete inability to surface their content. No scaled sorting, no “community bundling” - this is an important step in the right direction but there’s likely a lot more work needed to solve this problem.