>Private entities might have their own policies, but government censorship is fairly small.
It's a distinction without a difference when these "private" entities in the West are the actual power centers. Most regular people spend their waking days at work having to follow the rules of these entities, and these entities provide the basic necessities of life. What would happen if you got banned from all the grocery stores? Put on an unemployable list for having controversial outspoken opinions?
While quality libraries do exist, let's not pretend that most people are validating and testing the libraries they pull in, that abandoned / unmaintained libraries aren't widely used, and that managing the dependency hell caused by libraries is free.
AI's / LLM's have already been trained on best practices for most domains. I've recently faced this decision and I went the LLM custom app path, because the software I needed was a simple internal business type app. There is open source and COTS software packages available for this kind of thing, but they tend to be massive suites trying to solve a bunch of things I don't need and also a minefield of licensing, freemium feature gating, and subject to future abandonment or rug pulls into much higher costs. Something that has happened many times. Long story short, I decided it was less work to build the exact tool I need to solve my "right now" problem, architected for future additions. I do think this is the future.
> AI's / LLM's have already been trained on best practices for most domains.
I've been at this long enough to see that today's best practices are tomorrow's anti-patterns. We have not, in fact, perfected the creation of software. And the your practices will evolve not just with the technology you use but the problem domains you're in.
I don't mean this as an argument against LLMs or vibe coding. Just that you're always going to need a fresh corpus to train them on to keep them current... and if the pool of expertly written code dries up, models will begin to stagnate.
I've been doing this a long time too. The anti-patterns tend to come from the hype cycles of "xyz shiny tool/pattern will take away all the nasty human problems that end up creating bad software". Yes, LLMs will follow this cycle too, and, I agree we are in a kind of sweet spot moment for LLMs where they were able to ingest massive amounts of training material from the open web. That will not be the case going forward, as people seek to more tightly guard their IP. The (open) question is whether the training material that exists plus whatever the tools can self generate is good enough for them to improve themselves in a closed loop cycle. LLM generated code was the right tool for my job today; doesn't mean it's the right tool for everyone's job or that it always will be. One thing constant in this industry is change. Sold as revolutionary, which is the truth, in the sense of going in circles/cycles.
Also, they've been trained on common practices more than they've been trained on best practices. And best practice is heavily context dependent anyways.
Humans can learn from new experiences. LLMs have to be retrained (continuous learning isn't good enough yet), or you have to fit enough information into the context while still having enough for the task itself.
You're being a bit obtuse here yourself. The original premise of Plex was to stream your own media on your own network. I was a very early user of it, before these additional "features" that were pushed more by the Plex team than by user demand were added. They made it so you had to hack the xml config file to be able to use it in the traditional no login way, that was a pretty hostile move in my opinion and was the first eyebrow raiser for me. They also made it so you had to have a paid account to use any of the mobile clients in a clear monetization move there is no technical reason why you can't open your plex server to the internet and connect a mobile app that way, that's what jellyfin allows. I worked around this for a while by connecting to my home network on a VPN and just using chrome mobile to stream but it was less than ideal, obviously. Yes then they offered the proxying service with dynamic TLS cert generation as another paid for service, I remember it, but having never had a plex account let alone a paid one it was no interest to me. Do you work for Plex? Because your post reads like you do, especially the attitude of people not knowing what features they want and needing Plex to tell (sell) them.
Agree with others it's not solely about cost. For me it was about the very clear monetization drive Plex started doing years ago, while remaining nominally free to use for your own media. At some point, and I've already switched off it so maybe it's already happened, they will monetize tracking/meta data about what is in your own collection.
I've run both and Jellyfin is actually easier to run IMO, since it is in package managers. Also has free android/iphone app. What do you think you have to do in Jellyfin you don't in Plex?
I send them an email that contains a link to jellyfin.mydomain.tld with their new username and password, plus a few tips for how to get the most out of it (I wrote a template a few years ago).
It's not any more work for me than giving a user library access on Plex, but it does require I have a reverse proxy and a domain.
Sure. I think this was originally written by GPT-3.5 but I've tweaked it a lot since then. I try to keep it short enough that people will actually read it all the way through while still answering some of the more common questions.
Subject: Welcome to <my real name>'s Jellyfin Media Server
Hi there,
Welcome aboard! You now have access to my media server and can enjoy my library of Movies and TV Shows.
Here are your login details:
Link: https://{JELLYFIN_DOMAIN} (bookmark this!)
Username: {USERNAME}
Temporary Password: {PASSWORD}
Please update your password as soon as you log in for your security:
Log in with the information above. Click your profile icon (top-right corner, looks like a person). Choose "Profile" (same icon again). Enter the current password and your new chosen password, then click Save.
Tips:
Jellyfin works like any other streaming platform, you can browse, watch, and favorite. It always keeps your place and remembers what you were watching so it's easy to come back to.
Jellyfin can be used in a web browser, or you can find apps for phones, tablets, and some TVs.
Browse the full list of movies or shows available by clicking the boxes under "My Media" on the home page.
You can request new media by visiting {REQUEST_DOMAIN} and logging in with your same Jellyfin username and password. Please only request things you are sure you will watch in the next month or two.
Jellyfin and Ombi are software packages that I run on my own computer, but I did not build them.
Please reply to this email if you have any issues.
Enjoy!
Maybe it isn't the US government we need to worry about. What's stopping Flock from compiling and selling personal dossiers on every citizen like all the other big tech companies? They're just a private company so nothing to worry about, right?
I have a nightly software build of a piece of software that takes 6 hours to create a 70GB artifact. The build process requires a GPU so it runs on my own HW. That's ~180 hours per month for this job alone. Is that really so hard to imagine?
I don't know how much of that 6 hours build is tangled up in github workflows, but if it's a single contiguous block, you probably could make it near zero by making the self-hosted runner do only the preparation and only the final upload process (workflow_dispatch when the build is complete).
Most of it is just time waiting either while the source assets are downloaded (I clean slate it, that's the point of CI after all), the build itself runs, or the artifact is uploading to it's storage home. I'm sure it could be re-architected to use less actions minutes but if I'm going to redo it I will probably just move away from actions altogether because it's only loosely linked to Github anyway (runs on a schedule) and that way I am insulated from any future changes they come up with. The hardest part will likely be figuring out the Slack bot posting, I do use the marketplace action for that, but that's probably low lift. With LLM assisted coding I'm leaning more and more to little in house apps for stuff like this, it keeps you from dealing with lock in and other extractive gotchas.
Love-hate for me as well. Love that there is native github integration for triggering events and other github bits. Hate the brittleness and anymore the reliability even if you are just using the control plane. I've always sought to keep my actions as mainly just calling existing scripts, that is keep logic out of them and make them relatively dumb wrappers but it would still be some effort to get off it.
It's a distinction without a difference when these "private" entities in the West are the actual power centers. Most regular people spend their waking days at work having to follow the rules of these entities, and these entities provide the basic necessities of life. What would happen if you got banned from all the grocery stores? Put on an unemployable list for having controversial outspoken opinions?
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