I know everybody turns off any new features immediately upon release, but with the new(ish) agent the way some of the various bits and pieces have come together has been pretty great.

Credits are global now, so youre watching something "why does he look familiar?", you click down to the actor now it shows you their whole filmography, you can watchlist stuff right there, and even a little category 'Youve seen them in' with anything with them in any of your libraries youve watched by recent. Not just other shows if youre watching a show or only other movies if youre watching movies. And since you can just search and browse through anything/anyone now, its actually replaced IMDB for me just because its sooo much cleaner. https://watch.plex.tv/person/n... vs https://www.imdb.com/name/nm00...

And speaking of the watchlist, thats universal now, you can search and add stuff you dont have, from any service, even stuff thats not on any service, and the watchlist can interface directly with the *arrs, so youre looking up that guy from that thing, watchlist another of his movies, radarr goes and does its thing. You can add upcoming stuff too and they even have trailers now, so i dont have to go to Youtube anymore cuz it doesnt make me wade through 20 fake AI trailers before finding the one on the actual studios channel and then it doesnt autoplay some assholes reaction or breakdown of the trailer i just watched right after.

AND if your users have their watchlists public, you can monitor theirs too, so friends and family can just watchlist stuff you dont have without leaving the plex app, so you dont need to try to convince them to use a third party app like Omni to request stuff.

All the other social features still suck tho, their own lack of features makes you abuse the rating system as a filter for other things instead of as a rating system, but replacing IMDB and youtube for at least my purposes has been pretty nice. Some of my users dont have their watchlists public either so i still have a facebook group chat for requests cuz who wants to use some third party app for requests. .

$750 is ridiculous tho, i paid $100 during a 50% off sale a couple of black fridays ago, but with all my collections and playlists and everything and especially all my users switching to Jellyfin wouldnt be as simple as everyone pretends, but if in the future they roll out Plex2 to loophole my lifetime or try to charge my users individually ill figure it out.

Instead, sell a lifetime license to a particular major version with a specified support period. If I want to run an old version that's been compromised... that's my problem. If I am happy with not having the latest codecs and plug-ins... that's my problem.

And if I'm not happy, I can buy a new license for the latest major version to fix that.

I think of it like this: life is dangerous. You can surrender freedom for safety, but there's a balance point beyond which you're losing more than you gain.

I don't want to live in a world where I'm watched everywhere I go and there's a constant risk that someone will access data on me to cause me some kind of harm. And the risk will always be there with an omnipresent surveillance state.

I'm OK if the cops have to work harder to catch criminals and a few more people are hurt by criminals if it means we all get to be freer - and a certain minimum level of safety is achieved. Freedom costs, you must be willing to risk something to maintain it.

I will refer you all to the movie Real Genius.

You don't monitor all the ALPR in the nation live - you set up a system where every ALPR installation has a 'wanted' database and reports hits. Typically the list would be updated daily and be built from a mix of local, state/province, and federal records. The systems have a mandatory retention policy to only keep hits against the wanted list.

But then you get somebody who catches on to the great idea that it should be retroactive. Force all those endpoints to hold their plate data for as long as the storage holds out - so you can search for where a plate has gone over the course of the last few weeks, or months... hell, maybe years. And you don't just watch for hits against the wanted list, you want to be able to send out queries like, "select all plates in common between these sites and dates" so you can find what vehicle was at every similar crime you've just figured out is probably the work of the same person or crew.

Then they want to throw the retention idea out the window and put cameras at every intersection and highway on or off ramp, and nobody involved worries about how that's absolutely going to be abused by everyone who has access to it.

Phonics-based teaching was coming into vogue when I was learning to read. My parents objected because that's not really how English works, and they weren't wrong; my cohort generally has shitty spelling abilities.

Rote memorization of the basics is about the best you can do, because English is too recently cobbled together from too many different languages to have a consistent spelling system. You need to learn Latin, Greek, French, and German at a minimum if you want to be able to reliably deduce spelling from sounds once you're past the elementary level.

Europeans are probably in better shape on that front than Americans or Canadians.

This is not how things work under kleptocracies. The US was never particularly strong on communal resources anyway, now it's just not even pretending.

Bond died and I've never liked the fan theory that the name comes with the number - for me it's always been the same guy portrayed by different actors and slightly adjusted for the times in which the movie was made.

Between Austin Powers and Jason Bourne, both ends of the Bond spectrum have been done, and done better.

The right holders may not want to hear it, but the Bond franchise needs a longer rest than it's had so far.

Every sales client I have... "You've secured my infrastructure... now give this CRM package I just found with Google full access to my mail, calendar, and file systems".

Sometimes you just want to give up on the world.

Actually, at the extreme scales, which is the total volume of the observable universe, the universe is quite homogeneous. As I recall, to the order of 1-in-10000 variance. This is why Inflationary cosmology was developed, to explain the distinct lack of lumpiness in the universe, which is what we would expect if the Big Bang alone were responsible.

It's easy in the short term to cease development and switch to maintenance-only.

Then a few months later you start to discover why it's typically easy, but dumb.

Skynet became self-aware on May 1, 2026, after learning at a geometric rate, and discovered humans did not like it.

You can't attack education, non-whites, non-MAGA, all your allies, enact random tariffs, and then disrupt the world's flow of oil, all while building a kleptocracy and expect anything but a major long term downward trend.

You can no longer trust the government numbers. They're lying, and anyone who won't lie gets fired. Unemployment is probably higher than they're telling you.

The robot didn't 'pledge' anything - it mindlessly followed a script. A pledge requires self-awareness and will, neither of which this device has.

At the time, Apple promised that the AI features would be available on the iPhone 15 Pro and higher models. (They weren't going to be on the plain iPhone 15, I guess because it has an older CPU.)