Magical times before my own on Usenet.

Exactly this. I don’t need 1080P or 4k mp4 rips with 10bit audio, and I definitely don’t have the storage for it, but when that’s all that is seeding, its usually quicker to just download it and re-encode.

Downloading large files from Usenet was paid pretty early on. If the core functionality of Usenet is now paid, this is news to me.

For your second point, its not at all uncommon for previously-legit sites to go malicious. Age alone means nothing, nor does reputation after a few years.

His progress is exceptional, but far from impossible, without doping. He was in the right age-bracket for it as well.

These projects collaborate and copy each-other’s work way more than you would think. When one stagnates, others pick up the slack, and when one pulls ahead, the others increase their efforts to catch-up. More potential solutions for the same problems is a good thing.

Be more specific. As is, you’re describing the actions of states and madmen, not anarchists.

Two of my kids are working-age with their own debit cards, and have their amazon accounts linked to mine. My MIL’s credit card is attached to my account, so anything she wants to order, she just sends me a link. My wife just straight-up has all my logins when it comes to spending money.

… All that, and paying for it once is easier to explain/deal with versus every order having to be >$35 . It’s a pain to get my wife to actually order things she wants/needs as it is.

Basically, I would rather stop dealing with that company entirely, for ethical reasons, than put more thought into my dealings with them with each transaction.

I pirate what’s any good that I cannot find legally for streaming, as well as educational stuff that I want available should I and/or my family find ourselves without internet access.

Sometimes I’ll go so far as to pirate things that I cannot find without ads(even with premiums*), but mostly if it’ll let me see the first few minutes before playing an ad, I just live with it.

* The only reason I still have Amazon Prime is for the free shipping. I pay extra for no ads. I pay extra for HiDive. There appear to be things available on Prime with HiDive that aren’t available on just Prime or just HiDive. Magically, those shows(Ranma 1/2, for example) have ads. WTF?

None of these companies have ethics. Why should you get hung-up in ethics for a victimless crime?

Absolutely.

Sending telemetry where? My phone? My server?

They’re trying to get the word out so enough xenophobes pile-on to end the program.

Seriously though, for people who can keep a grasp on reality, the older editions had the potential to be far more useful. Many of the newer versions have not been more powerful so much as more sanitized, and as the web fills up on AI slop, the need to sanitize the output of AI trained on newer data-sets is only going to get worse.

A lot of what I said on the first half of that paragraph only applies to ChatGPT specifically though, as theirs is the progress I’m read-up on.

video unavailable.

Pretty sure you can do this with freight trains as well, and it should be cheaper. Though there would be no water, and likely no power hookups this way.

Exactly.

Its not “the Cloud” if its your own systems from top-to-bottom … More like Remote Play? … Seems Sony, Microsoft, and Valve all use that terminology for Streaming Gameplay from their consoles to another device.

Streaming to another location than where your Server is setup is tricky, mostly due to latency and establishing a connection that doesn’t get throttled(or compromised) by the ISPs involved. Personally, when I tried to get into it, about 10 years ago, I didn’t have the budget for a GPU that could be persuaded to support it at all.

Today, I’m more likely to keep such a server in my vehicle(on Battery/Solar), so its always just a local connection away, if I were to bother with the budget and hassle involved*. Around the house, I’ll just slap a new desktop together where I want to play games, or game on my laptop, and call it done.

*Ideally, I could build this for less than my good laptop would cost to replace, and use something much closer to outright disposable to game outside of my car. In practice, I just bring my good laptop with me everywhere, risk be damned.

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I’mma go with “its useful” to do things the hard way often enough to stay in-practice, as the hard way is both often a backup method and either the method newbies are trained on, or a differentiator between newbies who would rather let things slide when the easy way isn’t working, versus motivated people worth incentivizing.

Sometimes the incentive is “not having to attend remedial training”, sometimes its additional training and raise/promotion opportunities. Its worth remembering that today’s hard way was often the new, easier way in the past.

You might try something like these, or hiding a bunch of rubber/neoprene casters in the bottom of the two “feet”. Otherwise, for hardwood floors, thick felt is pretty well the gold standard for anything permanently attached to furniture.

You could also try securing PTFE along the bottoms of the feet, then when moving the table, you lay down a wool blanket or rug, and keep the rug stationary while moving the table across it. You could also flip the table over and do roughly the same thing.