There is also a micro-aggression against Iranians by fringe communities of Europe/US and even our Arab/Turk neighbors! They somehow think that the name of Iran is "fake" or "manufactured" in 1930s! at the request of Hitler [1].
While we literally have attestations in government letters (in almost every century prior to 20th), local literature and population awareness of the continuity of the freaking name of the country but somehow they completely ignore it.
They also frequently use the word "Aryan" as a derogatory/fake term for Iranians and say "why you don't look like white Europeans if you claim to be Aryan".
Can you explain bit more? Isn't the dump of last RARBG magnet links on the order of MBs? We can just download it and grep in plain text. I don't get what is the role of SQLite or IPFS here.
Disclaimer: I wrote that article and was somewhat involved in the other sqlite over ipfs project this is forked from.
Yes, for MB size files just downloading the whole thing will be faster and much easier - even if running in the browser. I'd say the boundary is somewhere around 10MB compressed (~20-200MB uncompressed). Looks like the sqlite dump used here is ~400MB in size, ~180MB compressed. Loading that in the browser would probably work but it wouldn't be too great.
While we are at it, an honest question: Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker?
What would release teams gain from setting up encoding pipelines and upholding their networking infrastructure?
> Why should _anyone_ undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and development time burden for maintaining a public tracker?
Try a more extreme example: why should anyone undertake the legal risk, monetary cost and logistical hassle of hiding Jews from the SS? It's not some psychopathic business decision; it's because some people stubbornly insist on doing the right thing despite it being unpopular, illegal, and clearly a bad idea.
If someone does manage to turn a profit doing it that's (all else being equal) great, but it's not the point.
Because some people grew up poor and without much access to content. Then they learned about this thing in the 90’s called the internet where you can share information with anyone for free.
So said poor person learned programming and other skills to get a tracker working so that they could give back to others who are in the same boat.
This way the poor kid (who’s family can’t afford lunch, let alone a 10€ /month Disney + subscription) can chat with their rich friends at the lunch table about the latest marvel film the week it releases and god forbid, fit in for once.
they are not searching the indexers, they are searching the DHT directly.
Some private trackers do not set the "disallow DHT" flag, so those will be indexed as well. Most do, however, and it's impossible to scrape those without an account, yes
Many years ago, I read a comment on Slashdot saying "the fact of a programming language having a "code of conduct" makes it ripe for everlasting drama and politics."
The reason slashdot is no longer relevant as the go-to tech discussion site is just because everyone who loves hating on "modern" things like CoC stayed, and everyone else left. These days it would be more strange to see a major project NOT have a CoC than seeing one. There is drama and politics in any large org whether or not there is a CoC or not.
Slashdot was sold to another media company which had other priorities. Are you aware of its "redesign" drama strictly followed by that same new leadership? Many users left then and there.
I left a long time ago. I think around the same time as CmdrTaco. But the place was basically just tech Luddites and Microsoft bashing so it became a bit repetitive. Also: HN.
Slashdot is a good example how a vastly unpopular redesign to make the site more "modern" can bring the whole business down. It's not even the bad redesign per se; it's sticking to it, and not reversing on it. A real shame in my opinion as I think that auto-moderation system is the best I've seen.
It was ridiculously easy to game the Slashdot moderation system. You knew what topics would get upvoted -- positive about Linux, negative about something like SCO during the lawsuit period. It was not difficult to accumulate karma.
I'm not sure if that was the fault of moderation system. This is more of an echo chamber effect which exists everywhere where there are humans involved. Not sure if technology can change that.
When I read about codes of conduct like this I worry about humnan relations. Does remote work cause the need for CoC? The over prescription of interactions seem like sci-fi to me. I haven’t worked in an office since the last millennium.
No, CoCs became a trend way before covid made remote work possible for the masses. They initially were demanded by project members after high-profile scandals of some kind, usually racist or otherwise discriminatory bullshit, sexual assault on conferences or bullying (Linus Torvalds for example used to be infamous for his language), and then other projects (or their members) wanted ones as well as a preventive measure for the future.
For what it's worth, I dislike CoCs because many of them are written with the assumption that people will behave like utter trash without being explicitly told not to and I grew up with the old "Don't be an asshole" rule [1]... but given what happened in the past where people were clearly incapable of not being assholes and communities having splintered over it, they seem to be inevitable.
I dislike CoCs because they aren't what they claim to be: Instruments to protect people. They are tools of power, ready to be used when needed to bully or oust someone. I therefore really don't understand the broad acceptance or even call for Code of Conducts.
I think this is a reasonable concern. The most recent episode of drama out of Rust is a pretty clear example of problematic behavior by some leadership person, and so it'll be interesting to see whether equally clear consequences will result. In other words, it'll be interesting to see whether their code of conduct is worth the bytes it is stored in.
> Instruments to protect people. They are tools of power, ready to be used when needed to bully or oust someone.
They are both.
A CoC, like other weapons, is more or less value-free. The CoC itself doesn't care what you point it at. It's a question of who is wielding it, and who they're wielding it against.
The problem is most people will in fact not be assholes, but the ones who have a disproportionate effect, because there's no direct penalty. Someone can't stand in your yard and loudly shout personal abuse for very long without getting hauled away by the police*, but there's no such enforcement mechanism online.
[*] yes, it can be more complicated than this. you get my meaning.
> The reason slashdot is no longer relevant as the go-to tech discussion site is just because everyone who loves hating on "modern" things like CoC stayed, and everyone else left.
That was certainly not my experience; I left because all discussions were monopolised by a few seemingly unemployed accounts to shame any and everyone into agreeing with whatever the vocal minority at the time was pushing.
When I stopped reading it, the only people left were those who were constantly using shaming language on anyone who didn't agree about things like a code of conduct, or words are violence too, etc.
The fascist part of it is forcing people to use them and threatening them when they don't understand the need to address a non-problem with terminology, duties, and responsibilities they don't agree with.
Can someone tell me what is the appeal of *arr apps? I'm not a hoarder or professional movie/show watcher, why should I set up what is basically a glorified "periodic metadata downloader with a tiles UI"?
I tested radarr and readarr recently. Didn't find out why people use them. Like libgen was better than readarr and I couldn't even select the encoding/file size of a movie title in radarr (there are some predefined profiles and you can define yours too but I expected something waay too simpler to do this. Like if you select fhd, it may download a very large file. You have to manually set the bitrate slider for all profiles, but then you may risk losing some available item if the release is very new and not encoded. I mean the UX was confusing)
And I see people host yet another tiles UI (Plex/Jellyfin) on top of that just to show a folder structure with pretty thumbnails? Each one of these apps is usually written in C#, taking ~300MB of RAM mind you...
What would help me is simply a search box that crawls all available torrents and presents rows with filtering based on size and encoding. I tested prowlarr for this but the UX was poor.
*Arr is automation. Add a TV show, connect some pieces together and your favorite TV show gets downloaded, catagorized and added to your own private Netflix server (Plex).
Sonarr? TV shows. Radarr? Movies. Books. Music. Etc.
"missing something obvious" the UX might be horrible... but once you set it up? you don't have to look at it.
"And I see people host yet another tiles UI (Plex/Jellyfin)" if all you think Plex is a "tiles UI" then there's no wonder you don't understand it... I have hundreds of movies, dozens of shows, audio books, music, etc in Plex and all the metadata gets automatically added and I can automatically play anything on my phone, tv, etc.
Oh... my friends/family has access to my Plex library as well so they can request and watch when they want.
Plex does transcoding and all that fun stuff.
You're missing all the details that go miles beyond a "tiles UI".
>Can someone tell me what is the appeal of *arr apps? I'm not a hoarder or professional movie/show watcher, why should I set up what is basically a glorified "periodic metadata downloader with a tiles UI"?
As streaming gets split up into little fiefdoms it can become difficult to have access to the content you want, furthermore as some content for various reasons is never made available or fully available - for example if you want WKRP in Cincinatti with the original music you will need to pirate it (I would of course like to hear I was wrong about this - other than find some CD somewhere with all that content at a yard sale)
I don’t want to download tv shows or movies when they come out. I don’t even know their schedules. Just add them in *arr and they appear in Plex automagically as they come out. For TV shows specifically this is a huge time saver.
Plus they let less technical family users add and manage media on their own.
Regarding not being able to select encoding, etc - you setup profiles and it automatically chooses the best release for based on the criteria you set. Again, it’s one less thing to think about.
It’s weird to me too. I consume a decent amount of media but if I can’t think “oh yeah I want to watch this particular thing” I just don’t download it and it falls out of my brain. Which I’m fine with. Foundation was like that, and His Dark Materials. I guess I would have finished them if they downloaded automatically but they were kinda lame.
I guess I just consume media more haphazardly than most people. The whole point of my PLEX is only exactly what I’ve requested shows up.
To be clear, the *arr suite of apps don’t just download things randomly. You still only get what you request. You just don’t have to go download a new TV show episode every week or keep an eye on exactly when the new movie hits the shelves.
You just tell the apps ‘follow this tv show/movie/whatever’ and it grabs it when it becomes available.
I personally solve for this by configuring my profiles to download decent sized files for my preferred formats, and then I run FileFlows as well on my media server to automatically transcode everything into the same h265 codec and transcode settings and stuff...it's all just hands free, everything gets spit out perfectly how I want it.
Now that being said, the plex app blows on Apple TV with h265 codecs for some reason, so I'm now using the Infuse app which is ok, but yet another thing. But overall, yeah, I've been able to cancel multiple streaming services (hulu, sling, soon netflix) and have MORE content available than before. saving a grand a year in streaming services ain't bad for a few hours of learning how to set it all up.
> how do you control the quality and encoding of the show?
There are settings for setting the desired quality parameters, and even for transparently replacing the on disk version with a higher quality version becomes available.
The key is Overseerr. It allows non-technical folks to say "I want XYZ show/movie" and it'll just show up as part of the private Netflix (Plex). It's incredibly simple to use, but it depends on the various *Arr apps to do the finding and downloading.
Are there any "side channels" that host university lecture videos and course materials for less fortunate students in 3rd world countries? The ones on MIT courseware or Youtube are old.
I mean something along the lines of academic torrents etc...
Huh? There's new university lecture videos being added to Youtube all the time, so I don't know why you'd say everything there is old. Besides, for many (most?) subjects it doesn't matter if the videos are old or not. Something like, eg Linear Algebra, just doesn't change that much.
All of that said, one other option you might check out is videolectures.net[1]. There's some pretty good stuff there.
Why the ancient world seems mysterious and completely orthogonal to our modern ways?
At some point in history, "something" happened, I don't know what. Like Augustus a Roman emperor, was initiated into the mystery of two goddesses? What was that? The Sage caste of india could just decide to self-immolate? Why not other people of india and why certain caste did stuff? Why Marcus Aurelius was so wise and unique?
Why later kings and heads of states and general people were not like this?
> Like Augustus a Roman emperor, was initiated into the mystery of two goddesses? What was that?
Probably normal mystery-religion/club shit. We'll do the secret rituals, teach you our secret signs, impart some secret knowledge. Ta-da, now you're a 10th degree freemason, master-elect—er, I mean, are initiated into the mysteries of Juno or whatever. There are surviving fairly-old mystery religions (in addition to the alluded-to imitators of that sort of tradition, like the freemasons). They tend to be really shit at proselytizing and to not do great in a globalizing world in competition with bigger religions that are good at gaining converts, so it's a dying breed of religion, but hardly a mystery (ha, ha). Between that and limited ancient accounts, we can make a decent guess at the general kind of thing Roman mystery cults were up to.
> Why Marcus Aurelius was so wise and unique?
Eh, he wrote a pretty-good book on an existing philosophy that he'd been taught. Not nothing, but not exactly revolutionary. Epictetus, Seneca, and others preceded him. Anyway, a lot of that book doesn't get quoted in tweets, because it's not-so-wise-seeming stoic physics, metaphysics, and religion/cosmology. It's just the pithy bits of ethics and right-living that people really like. Meanwhile, in a few hundred years, Rome produced, what, two emperors whose writing we still care about at all, with IIRC 3ish volumes between them that are still read by ~anyone? Again, not nothing, but also not that out-there.
> Augustus a Roman emperor, was initiated into the mystery of two goddesses? What was that?
Yeah right? That is weird now. But I’m pretty sure the simplified version of what happened to that is is: christianity + germanic invasions..
> The Sage caste of india could just decide to self-immolate?
Fanatism has existed for a long time and “honorable suicide” too.. In that case it was about reincarnation.. I guess in modernity it’s less common because we have better options?
> Why Marcus Aurelius was so wise and unique?
I’m pretty sure he was not more wise and unique than lots of wise and unique people living today.. He just happened to be the literal emperor, and wrote a book. Also they had a Lot of really shitty emperors though..
> The Sage caste of india could just decide to self-immolate? Why not other people of india and why certain caste did stuff?
I think others did it too (or had it done to them?). I’m not expert and risk mangling a description of the ritual, but Sati/Suttee was where widows sat on their husbands funeral pyre or were buried alive.
The Greek authors naturally were not completely versed in the ins and outs of Indian traditions so they confused different social phenomena. There was no “Sage caste” but there were different orders of monks following different philosophies. They are loosely grouped together as Shramanas and they generally believed that this world was illusionary and full of suffering and the task of religion is to find a way out. Some of the more pessimistic ones thought that the only truly nonviolent way to do it is by suicide. This is an official dogma of Jainism to this day (though Darwin has moderated actual practice considerably.)
Sati is a different social custom from a much later time period.
While we literally have attestations in government letters (in almost every century prior to 20th), local literature and population awareness of the continuity of the freaking name of the country but somehow they completely ignore it.
They also frequently use the word "Aryan" as a derogatory/fake term for Iranians and say "why you don't look like white Europeans if you claim to be Aryan".
[1]: https://www.les-crises.fr/l-origine-nazie-du-nom-de-liran-un...