I agree, I really preferred S1 for a lot of the "softer" aspects of character building. We really got an impressive look into a character I grew up admiring and it just made me admire Picard more. S2 and 3, while fine, definitely reverted a bit towards the "Star Trek" formula.
I don't! I personally love all the new Trek's. Even the ones folks love to hate. I'm just well aware of their contentiousness when writing the post.
I mean, the last time there was a sort of science fiction renaissance (arguably the 40s to 70s) people felt better about their lot in life - well besides the whole cold war thing.
So I'm not sure that tracks as much?
By the same logic one could argue that we should see more fantasy stuff. And, sure, kinda - but not the same level as the post-LOTR fantasy boom. I know Amazon is trying to do their thing with the Tolkien universe, but it doesn't seem to be sticking in the same way as it's sci-fi contemporaries. HBO has their other GOT universe franchise and even that seems to be falling flat on audiences.
Why would Sci-fi be preferable to Fantasy if it's just about escapism? I certainly wouldn't know, but it's definitely a curious thought.
Qobuz is unfortunately the only HiFi service worth anything ever since Tidal went with the MQA sham.
But yeah, purchasing music is overly complicated by the use of 2 distinct applications one to stream, the other to buy.
Not to mention that I'm outright insulted by how little care they put into organizing their library so that duplicate artist names don't result in a single chimera artist where you need to sift through the non-related artist stuff yourself.
What they did to VAST is a damn shame... Tried reporting it multiple times now via email and support tickets, but those assholes don't care.
Nope - full fat install on hardware - as I said in the post.
Again, just so you don't miss the crucially important context - I'm an advanced user. I typically run vanilla arch or endeavor, both of which do not have these issues. Not to mention, I know that many of these are a result of adding so many repositories on top of the base Arch ones - at least as upgrades are concerned.
If this was in a VM I would go to great lengths to specify as such.
Lucky! I wish I had symmetrical fiber with all the ports available.
I totally have a server capable of hosting a LOT of things but lack the upload to make use of it. I'm considering transferring to a rack mount and sending it to be colocated at a datacenter within driving distance.
You missed one:
ISP - Internet Service Provider
Eh, but then he won't learn anything. I've never found that response acceptable. It just perpetuates the problem. To each their own though!
On a technical level, user count matters less than the user count and comment count of the instances you subscribe to. Too many subscriptions can overwhelm smaller instances and saturate a network from the perspective of Packets Per Second and your ISPs routing capacity - not to mention your router. Additionally, most ISPs block traffic traffic going to your house on Port 80 - so you'd likely need to put it behind a cloudflare tunnel for anything resembling reliability. Your ISP may be different and it's always worth asking what restrictions they have on self-hosted services (non-business use-cases specifically). Otherwise going with your ISP's business plan is likely a must. Outside of that, yes, you'll need a beefy router or switch (or multiple) to handle the constant packets coming into your network.
Then there's a security aspect. What happens if you're site is breached in a way that an attacker gains remote execution? Did you make sure to isolate this network from the rest of your devices? If not, you're in for a world of hurt.
These are all issues that are mitigated and easier to navigate on a VPS or cloud provider.
As for the non-technical issues:
There's also the problem of moderation. What I mean by that is that, as a server owner you WILL end up needing to quarantine, report, and submit illegal images to the authorities. Even if you use a whitelist of only the most respectable instances. It might not happen soon, but it's only a matter of time before your instance happens to be subscribed to a popular external community while it gets a nasty attack. Leaving you to deal with a stressful cleanup.
When you run this on a homelab on consumer hardware, it's easier for certain government entities to claim that you were not performing your due diligence and may even be complicit in the content's proliferation. Now, of course, proving such a thing is always the crux, but in my view I'd rather have my site running on things that look as official as possible. The closer it resembles what an actual business might do, the better I think I'd fare under a more targeted attack - from a legal/compliance standpoint.
And I apologize in return for the rather harsh way I came across. The common (and frutrating) nature of your comment didn't deserve the terseness of my response.
See: every AAA big game releases lately. Even on Windows, having to nuke your graphics drivers and install a specific version from some random forum is generally accepted as fine like it’s just how PC gaming is.
Never had to do that since I was ROM hacking an old RX480 for Monero hashrates. In fact, on my Windows 11 partition (Used for HDR gaming which isn't supported on Linux yet), I haven't needed to perform a reinstall of the NVIDIA driver even when converting from a QEMU image to a full-fat install.
When I see those threads, it often comes across as a bunch of gamers just guessing at a potential solution and often become "right" for the "wrong" reasons. Especially when the result is some convoluted combination of installs and uninstalls with "wiping directories and registry keys".
But, point taken, the lengths gamers will go to to get an extra 1-2 FPS even if it's unproven, dangerous, and dumb is almost legendary.
It seems that more and more people feel justified in their doxing. And that's what scares me. More more people feeling justified to perform a form of violence.
Because that's what doxing is, a form of non-physical violence.