The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Wrathbone]

It's completely mental from a security perspective. Even if Microsoft say they don't collect data that their AI uses, they probably do, and it opens the possiblity that somebody could. Combine that with an AI that is aware of everything on screen and you may as well say farewell to data privacy. Any business that has certain ISO ratings that require policies such as making sure any sensitive data on screen is not being viewed by someone behind you (which is something we had to implement a few years back) is surely going to inherently violate that by using the new Windows.

Microsoft will probably address that by reluctantly putting options in to disable the more business-critical problems, which will then present as endless recommendations in Windows to enable all the AI stuff, much like every feature upgrade now tries to foist Office 365 and OneDrive on you.

[Raid]

Pat of me thinks "ambient" in this context is just marketing speak trying to avoid the inevitable furore over privacy concerns. I am not installing an OS that is constantly analysing everything on my screen because there is no way it's doing that locally. I'm not sure I'd trust them even if they were adamant that it was, because that amount of unnecessary processing would absolutely murder anything with a battery. They're not going to be able to sell a reduction in laptop battery life of three quarters.

[Alan]

Linux is looking better and better.

[eny]

I don't need to have a conversation with AI, not when this latest stage of "technology" has ridiculous power demands to serve it, at the expense of the population as a whole.

[Wrathbone]

Linux is looking better and better.

I've loved using Mint so far. Not tried any games so far - not sure if SteamOS is the better option overall.

[Raid]

I don't need to have a conversation with AI, not when this latest stage of "technology" has ridiculous power demands to serve it, at the expense of the population as a whole.

Indeed. Just imagine the energy requirement of AI analysing the screen contents of millions of machines constantly. Data centres are predicted to draw 10% of the energy production of the entirety of human civilisation within the next 5 years, and the government of the biggest home for data centres (currently about 40% of the world's capacity) are going out of their way to destroy the move towards renewable energy sources.

Just imagine the destruction of human society and its home ecosystem being caused by the son of a talking fucking paperclip.

[Wrathbone]

If aliens are coming to kill us, it's hard to argue against them at this point.

[eny]

I have always said, the further humanity moves from its connection with Nature the closer it moves towards it's doom. Starving what gives us breath is zero sum.

[Lenny Solidus]

We were never anything more than a curious experiment.

[Mantis]

I'm not too bothered about fixing it as I'm building a new PC over the next couple of months and will be using the old one to stream everything from a Plex server going forwards.

Having spent the last month building a streaming server, I'd have a look at Jellyfin rather than Plex. Free, open source and zero complaints so far. From what I gather, Plex has nosedived into adverts and upselling features.

I haven't looked into Jellyfin too much yet, but as I understand it there isn't a great option for streaming my music collection with it. I'm also planning on moving away from Spotify with a locally hosted collection and PlexAmp looks like a good option for mobile when I'm out and about if I buy a Plex Pass for it.

All of this Microsoft crap is also making me second guess sticking with Windows too. I may have to look into dual booting an app friendly version of Linux with a second partition for whatever desktop version of Steam OS I can find.

[Alan]

You can run jellyfinn and plex servers side by side using the same library structure. Handy for testing or just best of both kind of thing. Filebot is very handy for file naming/structures and keeping everything organised.

You don’t need a sub for Plexamp remote access, only for videos. I think a sub unlocks shite like ai playlists but nothing worthwhile. There are things each do better and there are things about each that annoy me. Nothings perfect but they’re good enough! Probably plex for audio jelly for video is the best but worth trying both.

[Wrathbone]

Yeah, the only music I’ve used with Jellyfin is a handful of live concert DVDs and there’s no great category for them to pull the correct metadata, so if you’ve got a load of music then it’s not ideal for that. Where it excels is TV series, especially if you use the TVDB plugin for metadata.

[Mantis]

Not a bad idea, I hadn't really given much thought to just splitting duties between apps. I'll look into Jellyfin, cheers chaps.

[Wrathbone]

More AI nonsense. I’ve filled a 5tb HD with DVD rips so for the time being I’m ripping to the system SSD in my streaming server - about 200GB of files so far. When I tried to add the new folder path to Jellyfin it said it couldn’t find it, and being new to Linux I went to Gemini for help. It had me perform various analyses and ruled things out, then asked me to run some commands. I did so, as it stated that it needed folder permissions, etc. Non-destructive actions, as it described them when I queried their safety.

What I should have done is scrutinise each statement, but not being especially familiar with Linux commands and being assured that it was all fine, I skimmed them and proceeded. Skipping forward 20 minutes, none of it worked and the AI was going in circles - total balls, so I gave up. Then idly skipping through folders while I pondered if I’d missed anything obvious, I discovered to my horror that all the ripped files on the SSD were no longer there.

After a moment of panic, I realised that they were still there somewhere due to the available space on the drive, and after some frantic command prompt searching I found everything in a totally different folder. It turns out Gemini had casually (and slyly) decided to move the entire fucking directory without highlighting this at all. Even more ridiculously, Jellyfin accepted the new location, meaning Gemini had the solution but didn’t even realise it!

I’ve seen AI produce dumb non-solutions. I’ve seen it ignore basic logic and go on wild goose chases that can waste hours. But I’ve never seen it do something so monumentally reckless as to tricking a user into relocating a 200GB folder without their knowledge or approval. Caution is the lesson here - don’t take a damn thing it offers at face value.

[Stormbringer]

Got a letter through the post yesterday; a £100 FINE from that awful drive from Glasgow to Edinburgh to visit my grandma.

What did I do wrong? When I got back to Edinburgh, I found myself accidentally in the exclusive bus lane...and I couldn't get back into the main line of traffic. I didn't deliberately drive in the bus lane...I just found myself in it. And for that, £100 is lost.