kstenerud

Actually, Japan is one of those interesting cultures that traditionally inverts permission. That's slowly going away now in many areas as they adopt a more western approach, but it's part of their culture's origins.

There's a difference between not giving way to a robot vs spending 10-15 minutes actively blocking it.

Yes, we're going to quickly come to a head on the issue of robots on sidewalks, much like we have with e-scooters, or Google's ill-fated bikes.

The robots open a new possibility on an existing system (sidewalks), which is going to lead to problems from both sides until the legislature comes up with new rules. This is how free and democratic societies work.

I didn't take it quite so literally. It's more about taking a chance to be the person you want to be.

Q put it best:

"This is the man you are today. And you should be happy! You have a real heart beating in your chest, and you get to live out the rest of your life in safety: running tests, making analyses, and carrying reports to your superiors."

I think the most memorable of the Picard-focused TNG stories for me was "Tapestry". It really hammered home how much of one's potential is lost when one never takes risks.

I actually found DS9 to be the best of all of them. Aside from the terrible Dr Bashir character, they felt believable, and like any real environment had personality clashes, personal issues, baggage, and of course interpersonal conflicts.

The difference was that rather than turn it into soap opera porn, the characters actually tried to behave professionally (most of the time).

> Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence.

Really? So doing things like learning to play an instrument or mastering chess are pointless?

> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.

Why must a university education be only a career generator? What about a well-rounded education, with a specialization in the things that interest you?

> If Claude Code has existed when I was starting out, nobody would have cared about Austral or my other open-source projects

Claude code is here, and yet I'm still writing open source code that people appreciate.

> As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude. AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other.

Your friends don't need to all be techies. There are many other ways to make friends.

> What even is the point of cities in a world without work?

Community? Actually physically going outside and meeting people?

> The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?

Human connection? Experiencing things in the world together? Physical contact?

I haven't noticed any difference. In fact, I just set it on a laundry list of 12 items to sort out overnight. It took 10% of my weekly quota to do it, and it probably would have only taken half the tokens if I'd been monitoring it. But it did work while I slept, so I'm not too torn up about it.

There were a few small issues with its work (it's not the greatest at getting layouts right, and one of the features it implemented feels clunky and will need tuning), but the architectural refactors it did worked perfectly and I'm happy with the performance improvements.

I haven't yet checked out the research tasks it did, but usually it does a decent job. I could have just asked it to research and implement, but I find it best to manually verify its conclusions first.

I liked my prof's approach to exams:

"You may bring one 8.5x11 double-sided cheat sheet into the exam. You may write anything you want on it. And I promise you that if you prepare such a sheet, you'll never even look at it during the exam."

And he was right.

"I think Scratch is so featureful that it is intimidating to newcomers. The paradox of having so many toys is that it’s hard to know which one to play with."

I'm the exact opposite. I want the choices and possibilities so that I can run with them. When the space is limited, it can still be fun and interesting, but only until you've plumbed the depths and everything you do becomes derivative, repetitive, and boring.

Growing up, my favorite toy was a huge bucket filled with random lego pieces. Some were basic bricks, some were from the technical set, some were from themed sets (cars, space ships, etc). I'd spend hours coming up with new designs, the original box designs long forgotten.

Jellyfin can only be used from remote if you can expose its ports somehow. Lots of routers block that, or your ISP is set up such that you need NAT tricks, and have to use STUN and TURN and such to work around it. Jellyfin doesn't handle any of that. Tailscale helps here, but then if you want family members to use it, you have to set them up on tailscale as well. Or you set up a service on a VPS.

I wrote this because I'm unhappy with the offerings out there, including Emby, Plex, and Jellyfin. Also too many bugs that have been sitting for years with no solution. For Jellyfin in particular:

- SyncPlay is buggy, doesn't support voice, and seems to be unmaintained now.

- Way too many CVEs, mostly FFmpeg injections (CVE-2026-35033, CVE-2026-35032, CVE-2026-48793, CVE-2025-31499).

- The session key leaking in URLs.

- Upgrades breaking the database.

- Needless transcodes and wrong "can play this" guesses.

- Subtitles that load late or drift after resuming.

What's wrong with the name?

Differences from Plex:

- Watching your own films away from home isn't paywalled, and never will be.

- Hardware encoding is free, and always will be.

- No cloud account required unless you want my convenient discovery service.

- If you don't want to use a cloud account at all, you can set up your own discovery server on your own VPS for watching away from home even through routers and shit (also free).

- No ads, no storefront, no telemetry.

- Watch Together with voice. Multiple people can watch a synced video, and talk to each other (I've tested this with me in Germany and the other person in Australia, and it worked beautifully).

- Hardened against corrupt video files and issues like NFS failures (getting stuck forever in a syscall). Everything vulnerable is separated and isolated.

- Open source. The server is AGPL and the web clients are MPL.

- Your files are left alone. Media is read-only by default. The server reads the .nfo metadata files you already have, from Kodi for example.

What's not there yet:

- Native apps. I'm only doing a web client for the time being until all the features are in place. It's pretty fast, though.

- Music. This comes later.

What's wrong with the name?

Early beta will be web browser only, but I'll be adding shims to support existing clients (for the functionality they support). Ultimately I'll be adding native clients but those are some time off.