I speak from experience that no one other than professionals should be handling their own mail servers in 2024. I worked for a mail host. The amount of spam and attacks that befall a mail provider, even a small one, is bonkers. Plus, mail is just too damn important.

I wish it wasn’t the case because the idea of everyone privately hosting their own mail servers would be pretty awesome. Sadly the modern internet makes it way too risky.

For DVDs, I’ve never had an issue. They just amplified the BS on BluRays tenfold.

I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.

I’ve taken to doing everything I can to play things through my computer, but they do everything in their power to make them unplayable. This includes things like adding hundreds of bogus playlists so you don’t know which one to play, adding extra layers of encryption that cause image corruption a few chapters into the movies, and more.

If they just allowed you to easily watch and rip the movies that I pay actual money for, I think a lot more people would be open to a physical collections of their favorites. As it stands, I can’t really recommend it.

This was done by hand on my end. If I had needed to do it procedurally, I’m not sure what my approach would have been, but the direction I’d probably head in would be to look into finding duplicate MD5 hashes.

I’ve always been one for moderation. Plus, the big issue was just being able to find all of it. Everything was so scattered and in some cases I had half my Steam library downloaded onto two or three of the hard drives, all outdated.

Now I know where it all is and can easily back it up, where before I only had one copy of a lot of my most important files.

I had a bad habit whenever I would go to reinstall an OS to just copy the entire user folder into one of many places on my largest hard drive. I had at least 4 or 5 of these. So tons of it was cache files.

There were some folders that were 50+GB that had like 3 txt files and a song worth saving in them. In some ways, I was impressed.

I still miss Hangouts + Voice

It’s kind of magic how we are finding that having a third party resolves a lot of the issues. I wonder if the future structure will rely on more of a Prompt > Filter AI > Generative AI > Filter AI > Output. It seems ChatGPT and the Bing implementation have at least some level of AI detection on the image side already.

We have neutral evil at my work and it sometimes hurts my soul.

For about a month, my Google Hone app swapped between a new interface and the old one about once every couple days. I was never sure what I was going to get.