GnuLinuxDude

I'd be happy enough with a Smart Fortwo style vehicle. I'd be more than happy with good public transportation and non-car dominated urban planning. I'd be over the moon for high speed rail lines covering the country.

For what it's worth, I personally think svt-av1 also produces a worse looking picture than aomenc. I'm not personally convinced that AV1 is at fault, just that the x265 encoder is much more mature than svt-av1, aomenc, and rav1e. I haven't tried a high quality film source yet, mostly just SD animated things, where svt-av1 usually loses to aomenc in what I'm looking for (best quality picture per bitrate), but svtav1 tends to win out in encode speed.

If you haven't tried it out yet, I would suggest trying av1an (an encoding framework) with aom and at least comparing a few samples with what you get out of ffmpeg and svt-av1. Av1an can do chunked encoding, which helps speed by running multiple encoders in parallel. I don't think that aspect helps much with svt-av1, but it does seem to help with aomenc.

I wrote a bit about it here (https://lemmy.ml/post/2843230), though I didn't include any film grain settings in that post.

With SVT-AV1 have you been using the --film-grain-denoise 0 flag? If you share what your encode settings are there may be improvements that can be found.

delete this shit right away

I have almost completely dropped reddit. I'll check it once every few days on old.reddit for a few niche subreddits, or as I do regular online research on a topic, because it still has a long history. In the end, I never liked Reddit as it's just a silicon valley-based social media tech company that is designed to track users.

Lemmy itself is going great. I, for one, am happy that there are way more socialists here as a proportion of the population, and it makes me more comfortable as a user. And ever since Reddit killed 3rd party apps + ever since the lemmy web UI dropped websockets, actually visiting the Lemmy page feels much better. I didn't create an account on Lemmy for years because I really hated that websockets thing and seeing posts just appear randomly while leaving the site open.

My wish for Lemmy is a common sentiment: I would like to see more people with an easier way for them to get started. And I'd like to see less defederation. Lemmy.world performing preemptive defederation from Hexbear was a really bad move, IMO.

Someone mentioned how Lemmy draws a tech enthusiast crowd, and I think that's true. But that was also true for Reddit in its early days, as well. I think so long as the posting quality here is good, more people will eventually find their way in. If I can start seeing some cool home DIY stuff (to inspire the fortunate future day where I can finally be a homeowner myself), that is when I know Lemmy as a social platform has made it. I don't have the heart of a true poster, but I hope that if I have useful information to share and post that I'm doing my part in helping the community grow a bit larger.

No disagreement about the privacy of services and getting what you paid for. But I'd like to pay commensurate to the use of the service. I was ABOUT TO say Tutanota can get you secure email for $1/mo (which fits much better with how much I actually use email), but I double checked and apparently they had a recent price hike. That's just how it goes, I suppose.

Proton as a package is nice. If you immerse yourself into their ecosystem (email, drive, pass, vpn) you can get a lot of value from that $10/mo.

I had to unsubscribe from them after using them for some years because they just won't bring feature parity to the Linux VPN client. I know they don't have permanent, fixed port forwarding on the Windows client, but the fact that they still haven't brought that feature to Linux is a big 🙄 for me.

The other thing is I'd be cautious about being dependent on any service where if you decide it isn't bringing you as much value as you pay for, but you invested in certain extra features that are paid-only. In my case I had a secondary email handle (one that didn't just have my full name in it, so I can sign up for stuff anonymously). Well, after coming to grips with the fact that I don't want the VPN anymore, and that I don't want to pay $4/mo just to send one email a week and receive a few that are only confirmations, that second address can no longer send/receive. I had to move every account into secondary free proton email before my term ended.

I'm not saying there's anything nefarious about using a paid feature and then losing it. I am just saying be cautious about it and understand what you get yourself info when starting a subscription that you may depend on.

edit: this is advice directed generally, not specifically to the person I'm responding to who merely inspired me to comment

Unfortunately as more and more people got online it became more and more ripe for abuse. I can't imagine Wikipedia not getting horrible defaced if its editorial standards were still in 2006. Old Wikipedia had some weird shit. Not every mid-level WW2 Nazi commander needed a page of thinly-veiled apologia, and thankfully many of those excesses are already dealt with. Also, the articles in general are of a higher quality than they used to be.

I hope they can work out a solution that allows trusted junior editors to become admins more easily.

PikaBackup is more of a Time Machine style backup system. Not just for Gnome, it simply is made with the GTK.

Ultimately, I went with a Sony DualSense for my latest gaming controller. It has low latency when wired and the buttons are not clacky. Solid construction. I also have an 8BitDo Pro 2, which has one thing I especially like -- hardware turbo buttons. The rest of the controller is merely OK, and IMO not worth the extremely high praise it otherwise receives. Serviceable controller.

• KeepassXC [password locker]
• SyncThing [keep some dirs synced between computers]
• Thunderbird [Check 4 email accounts simultaneously]
• PikaBackup [Relatively easy disk backup utility]
• FSearch [Fast searcher of all files on my computer. Like Search Everything for Windows but worse in many ways]
• AudioBookshelf [Podcast server]

I use all of those pretty regularly. Honorable mention on iOS is a program called Is It Snappy? which helps me measure input lag. It doesn't collect any data or run ads (rare trait on a phone app). I actually made a purchasing decision with the help of this thing to correctly conclude that the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller had a noticeable input delay (enough to make me return it). The funny thing about that was if I just looked up spreadsheets others have done I would have seen that same conclusion there, too, without having to go through the effort of buying it myself :P.

I've been using it in Fedora since they switched to it as the default FS. I have not done anything special. I am not trying anything fancy except compress-force=zstd:1. Seems good to me!

But Wednesday’s move to significantly bump prices, marked an acknowledgment by Iger of the media giant’s intent to squeeze more revenue out of streaming by pushing consumers to the advertising-supported plans, which have proven to be more profitable.

“The advertising marketplace for streaming is picking up,” Iger told investors on the quarterly earnings call. “It’s more healthy than the advertising marketplace for linear television. We believe in the future of advertising on our streaming platforms, both Disney+ and Hulu.”

This is extremely important for them. Netflix's excellent deal for most of its streaming existence was obviously a thorn in the side of many other businesses. Even if streaming services can get you to pay an exorbitant amount of money on an ad-free tier, advertisers are frothing for the chance to advertise to you regardless. They want you to see their ads so badly. And let's not forget all the big tech companies, Netflix included, were riding high during the free money days of 0% interest loans. Those days are over, and the bill is due. Wall Street wants its money. And we are all the ones who have to pay up. Cheap streaming is officially over.

This is why these companies, including Netflix, have all introduced ad tiers. Not only is it a great way for them to juice their revenue streams, but also every other company wants a permanent residence in your brain, and then some. Given the way things have been going since duo-eras of the COVID pandemic and corporate profit-based inflation, they don't even need to collude on prices. All the execs need to do is look at the business press and say, "Hey, they're getting away with increased prices and password sharing crackdowns. We can do the same thing. The pay pigs keep paying!"