• 2 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Quicksync

    Yeah, it doesn’t sound like you’re transcoding in a way that’ll show any particular benefit from Quicksync over AMF or anything else. My ‘it’s better’ use case would be something like streaming to a cell phone at 3-5mbps, and not something local or just making a file to save on your device.

    DDR4 and no ECC

    That’s what my build is: 128gb of Corsair whatever on a 10850k. I’m sure there’s been some silent corruption somewhere in some video file or whatever, but, honestly, I don’t care about the data enough to even bother with RAID, let alone ECC.

    I will say, though, if you’re going to delve into something like ZFS, you should probably consider ECC since there are a lot more ‘well shits’ that can happen than what I’m doing (mergerfs + snapraid).

    power consumption

    A $30 or whatever they are kill-a-watt plus something like s-tui running on the NAS itself to watch what the CPU is doing in terms of power states and usage. I’ve got a 8-drive i9-10850k under 60w at “idle” which is not super low power, but it’s low enough that the cost of hardware to improve on it even a little bit (and it’d be a very little bit) has a ROI period of longer than I’d expect the hardware to last.


  • If you’re going to be doing transcoding for remote users at lower bitrates, quicksync is still better than AMF, so I’d vote Team Intel.

    If you’re not, then buy whatever meets your power envelope desires and price point.

    For Intel, anything 8th gen or newer should be able to natively do anything you need in Quicksync, so you don’t need to head to Amazon and buy something new, unless you really want to.

    Also, I’d consider hardware that has enough SATA ports for the number of drives you want so that you can avoid dealing with a HBA card: they inflate the power envelope of the system (if power usage is something you’re concerned with), and even in IT mode, I’ve found them to be annoyingly goofy at times and am MUCH happier just using integrated SATA stuff.




  • New (7000 and 9000) ryzen CPUs have an iGPU that can transcode via AMF, so the ‘equivalent’ would just be buy a modern AMD CPU.

    AMF isn’t quite as good as Quicksync, but it’s probably fine for most use cases for most people, though I can notice the image quality losses when you’re doing something like transcoding to 1080p low(ish) bitrate for remote streaming, and so have a very big bias in favor of nvenc or quicksync.

    Also, I’m in the more-ram-is-better camp, so buy as much as you want and/or the platform supports.







  • Search will never search non-local content.

    Which is the point I’m trying to make: right now, you cannot use search as a discoverability medium, unless you’re on something the scale of mastodon.social.

    Search with a focus on new content discoverability is utterly useless for smaller or single user instances, because a search that only finds things you already know about isn’t exactly a useful search for discoverability.

    If I have to be on the biggest instances, then there’s very little difference between something like Bluesky and Mastodon in terms of usability, and uh, I might as well pick the one that’s more likely to have the most growth and diversity of content.

    We have to give up on the idea of having easy and direct access to the whole of thw fediverse.

    I agree, and it’s why I’ve pretty much migrated back to centralized services with the exception of Lemmy, because Lemmy works very well in terms of finding useful shit to follow in a way that literally no other federated platform does.


  • Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place,

    They’re also subject to interpretation, regulatory capture, as well as just plain being ignored when it’s sufficiently convenient for the regulators to do so.

    “There ought to be a law!” is nice, but it’s not a solution when there’s a good couple of centuries of modern regulatory frameworks having had existed, and a couple centuries of endless examples of where absolutely none of it matters when sufficient money and power is in play.

    Like, for example, the GDPR: it made a lot of shit illegal under penalty of company-breaking penalties.

    So uh, nobody in the EU has had their personal data misused since it was passed? And all the big data brokers that are violating it have been fined out of business?

    And this is, of course, ignoring the itty bitty little fact that you have to be aware of the misuse of the data: if some dude does some shady shit quietly, then well, nobody knows it happened to even bring action?


  • How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?

    I think what they’re saying is that the ideal wouldn’t be to force everyone to host their own, but rather for the people who want to run stuff to offer them to their friends and family.

    Kinda like how your mechanic neighbor sometimes helps you do shit on your car: one person shares a skill they have, and the other person also benefits. And then later your neighbor will ask you to babysit their kids, and shit.

    Basically: a very very goofy way of saying “Hey! Do nice things for your friends and family, because that’s kinda how life used to work.”




  • The problem I ran into is that every single platform that primarily interacted with Mastodon (The keys, etc.) had the same exact same set of problems.

    While yes, my Firefish instance had search, what was it searching? Local data only, and once I figured out that Mastodon-style replies didn’t federate to all of someone’s followers, it became pretty clear that it was uh, not very useful.

    You can search, but any given server may or may not have access to data you actually want and thus, well, you just plain cannot meaningfully search for shit unless you go to one of the mega instances, or join giant piles of relays and store gigabyte upon gigabyte upon gigabyte of garbage data you do not care about.

    The whole implementation is kinda garbage for search-based discovery from it’s very basic design all the way through to everyone’s implementations.



  • Install it and use it?

    Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).

    It’s very centralized, but it’s not that different from what you’d have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.

    Though really you shouldn’t do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate “microblog” shit because it’s designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)