Hacker News: TechBro8615

New comment by TechBro8615 in "uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store"

TechBro8615 — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 19:05:47 +0000

Safari content blockers are not enabled in embedded Web Views.

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

TechBro8615 — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 06:44:18 +0000

No, usually this is done behind closed doors and away from the press.

New comment by TechBro8615 in "OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 23:56:53 +0000

The suddenness of the firing, and the bridge-burning language (basically "he lied to us") rather than any sort of soft exit, suggests that it must be something in the "other" bucket.

The details are anyone's guess. But if we're engaging in wild speculation, how about this weird coincidence: one day after Xi Jinping and Sam Altman are in the same place, Sam Altman is abruptly fired.

New comment by TechBro8615 in "OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 23:42:08 +0000

The anti-snitching culture within this community seems to rival that of even the mafia. Perhaps that's why it's been called "the gay mafia" in the past...

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Your WiFi Can See You"

TechBro8615 — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 03:45:17 +0000

CNLohr made a similar project three years before that: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aqqEYz38ens

I know this stuff is dystopic, but I personally find it really cool. That said, I also disable WiFi and prefer ethernet wherever possible...

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Pineapple ONE: open-source 32 bit RISC-V CPU that you can make at home"

TechBro8615 — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 02:46:43 +0000

This guy built a 32-bit RISC-V CPU in Terraria: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zXPiqk0-zDY

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Vegas casinos are still reeling from a cyberattack"

TechBro8615 — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 18:10:17 +0000

Yeah, rather than take a reputational hit, they've now got a reputation for paying ransoms to hackers. They will now be targeted by more hackers wanting ransoms.

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Show HN: Bleuit – A Recursive Reddit"

TechBro8615 — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 06:31:02 +0000

It seems like the only post on here is a link to this post on HN. Well played, I suppose.... this is indeed recursive.

New comment by TechBro8615 in "You're online all day. Why not use the browser to remind you of things?"

TechBro8615 — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 06:27:39 +0000

Thanks for the depressing reminder.

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Ask HN: Why is archive.is logged into GitHub as user “volth”"

TechBro8615 — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 06:20:38 +0000

(I once saw a Google result for Stackoverflow that included a username in it. I never saw it again or investigated it further, though.)

I don't know what's going on with archive.is, but that service has always struck me as sketchy. Unfortunately since I use Cloudflare WARP as a VPN, I'm not actually able to access archive.is (although technically I believe this is not because of the VPN, but rather due to 1.1.1.1 DNS and its lack of support for EDNS [0]). So again, I haven't investigated it much.

But I've always wondered who has the time and resources to maintain the archive.{is,ph,etc.} websites, which must cost a lot of money for no directly obvious financial gain. But there is some serious intelligence value to knowing who views those sites and where the links to them get posted. And that's not to mention how weird it is that they insist on EDNS (which sends client IP with DNS queries) in the first place.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495204

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Subdomain.center – discover all subdomains for a domain"

TechBro8615 — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 06:03:55 +0000

I get a rate limit error when I click the text input (I'm on a VPN).

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 19:02:56 +0000

Yeah, I've heard of it and it looks great. But it also means I need to maintain a media server (which costs me time and money, and is also a potential liability in terms of copyright mafia and script kiddies who find a vulnerability in it and end up on my network). One day I'll get around to building a proper setup, with automated deploys, isolated networking and secure hosting... but for now the least work is just downloading files one at a time when I need them, and otherwise just watching Netflix.

Frankly the motivation that will finally make me build this is that my mom is complaining about the streaming service fragmentation... each of her favorite shows is on a different service with its own $20/month subscription, and that's on top of the $100/month for cable. For now she's just password sharing, but when that stops working I'll get around to setting this up for her so I can manage it remotely. Or maybe by then the services will figure out they'd be better off just streaming everything free on the internet and splicing ads into the streams. You know, like TV...

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Plex to block all servers hosted at Hetzner"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 18:50:03 +0000

When I used a Chromecast, I was fond of an even more direct method. On my laptop I ran a Node CLI called "peercast" [0] with a single argument (a magnet link), and it streamed a video file while downloading its torrent, and since it called the torrent library directly, it could prioritize downloading the earlier chunks of the file so I could start streaming the video before the download completed.

It looks like that repo hasn't been updated in a while, although it might still work. It's an offshoot of peerflix [1], a Node CLI that streams video from a torrent to an h264 playlist. So without peercast I would just open my browser to the local network address where peerflix was hosting the h264 playlist, and use the Cast button to stream it to my device (which I believe technically means Chromecast "takes over" downloading the playlist, rather than my laptop pushing the video to it, so I just needed to use a URL with the LAN IP of my computer).

[0] https://github.com/mafintosh/peercast

[1] https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 18:35:12 +0000

Apparently the overarching goal of Jellyfin is to always be able to "direct play" (no transcoding), but whether or not that's possible depends on each file and the client device. They have a comprehensive table of which formats require transcoding on which devices: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 18:20:16 +0000

I'm not certain, but I think it will avoid transcoding for certain "Web-native" formats that your client device can already play. For example, if you download an mp4 then you should be able to watch it on your iPhone without Jellyfin needing to transcode it.

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 18:18:34 +0000

I run it on my laptop, and when I want to watch a new episode of a TV show, or a movie, I search for it on 1337x.to, find the mp4 with the most seeders, copy the magnet link, paste it into Transmission and then press enter. Within half an hour, the file is in the folder where Jellyfin knows to look for it. Then I open Jellyfin on my phone and watch the content in bed.

This works for me because I've never cared about hoarding a library of TV shows and movies that I've already seen. I just download what I want when I want it.

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 18:15:30 +0000

Alternatively: don't have Plex accounts in the first place. Distribute the software in such a way that it can be deployed silently and independently of any connection to the company that creates it. (In ancient times, this was actually the normal way of distributing software - you went to the store and bought a CD with a program on it, and then you could run that program on your hardware without ever interacting with the company that made it.)

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Plex announced to block instances on German hosting provider Hetzner"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 18:09:33 +0000

If you're pirating content, you should retain complete control and security over your setup. How does Infuse enforce its yearly license cost? There must be some telemetry at the very least, which is exactly the issue that got Plex into this situation and why people would do well to avoid it (unless of course you're just watching your own legal copies of media).

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Arm jumps 18% in market debut to notch $60B valuation"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 18:02:26 +0000

They didn't walk away from it. They were blocked from making the acquisition.

New comment by TechBro8615 in "Plex to block all servers hosted at Hetzner"

TechBro8615 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 06:37:53 +0000

I've never understood why Plex phones home or why Plex the company has any insight at all into what's running on your Plex installation. I was never able to look past that, so I never installed it.

After years without a media server, I've started using Jellyfin and it's great. It's self-hosted but still has decent client apps. And there's no sketchy corporation watching my server, which just runs on my laptop and streams to my phone via my local network.