JGrffn

I'm relatively new to usenet myself and have both torrent and usenet tied to my *arr automations. From what I can tell, for newer stuff they're less distinguishable than for older stuff. Things basically get uploaded in both places for the most part, so you can also get duds on usenet, the same duds you'd get on torrents.

They do! All of these backbone comply with takedown requests. Some comply with DMCA requests only, some comply with NTD requests only, and some comply with both. It's actually another thing you could consider when selecting your providers, you check their takedown policies. By mixing and matching, you increase your chances of finding every part of your file.

So, the thing saving usenet in particular, is that the pieces of the file get scattered through the usenet, and you require indexers to find the whole thing. This makes it difficult for takedown requests to actually take down the whole file. Sometimes the best they can do is remove a few parts, and you can repair your file with what's left. Sometimes they do win, but it happens infrequently enough that you should be able to complete most of your media library without issue.

You gotta pay. I posted an explanation on usenet as a reply to this post. You can find more info, such as specific providers and indexers, in the /r/usenet wiki.

OK, let me mention some important caveats, just so you can keep them in mind:

You can think of usenet like the internet. You have data on servers all around the world, you have sites such as Google which index these sites and content, and you have your ISP which gives you access to the internet.

Likewise, on usenet you have the data scrambled on servers all around the world, on different backbones of the usenet. These backbones are accessed through service providers for the backbones (sometimes they're resellers, sometimes it's the backbone selling access). These service providers operate just like an ISP, selling you monthly or yearly access to the usenet backbone of your choosing.

Then there's the Googles of usenet, Indexers. There's a ton, they vary a bit from one another, but essentially they find all there is to find on usenet, presenting the files to you as a whole. You want a specific... Ahem... Linux iso? An indexer will know where all the pieces are and it will tell you with an NZB file, kind of like how torrent files tell you where to look. Indexers can be a monthly subscription, but some of them offer lifetime subscriptions as well, and they don't break the bank.

The last bit you'll need is your download client, to do what you do for torrents. These are free tools, sabnzbd and nzbget. Either one works.

So, I did mention there's multiple backbones of usenet. Indexers don't lock themselves to specific backbones, and no indexer covers everything there is on usenet, which means that to get the most out of usenet, you'd ideally have multiple indexers and multiple providers (making sure you don't get providers from the same backbone as they'd essentially have the same data). Multiple indexers give higher chances of finding something on a search, while multiple backbones increase your chances of finding all the pieces needed to complete a file. This is not absolutely necessary, but dare I say you'll notice the difference as soon as you bump things up to 2 of each.

So, essentially, usenet is by far the best method for completing your media library (leaving torrents as a desperate backup route), but it can become expensive.

Murica is the world, duh

I can appreciate that aspect of lemmy, very technical users talking about very technical approaches to left-leaning codes of ethics, such as FOSS, privacy, self-hosting, etc. In this regard, Lemmy definitely is better than reddit and I'm learning a lot about it all in here, and am beginning to apply the things I've learned in my own life and computer systems.

As for actually being more left leaning? Nah son, it's the same ideas as reddit but with a sense of hatred for "reddit libruls" for not being true scotsmen. There are right leaning communities on both platforms, there for sure are more tankies over here, but almost every single moral stance found on reddit can be found here. Literally the only thing missing on reddit is such a Tech-oriented user base (which if we're honest, you could also find on reddit but it surfaces a lot more on lemmy in general) and the russia apologists.

Maybe people over here should stop playing the no true scotsman game and actually open up their doors and take it easy on the gatekeeping. And by "here" I mostly mean the tankie instances, holding their "holier than thou" stances n shit. Chill the fuck out, act like a true left leaner and work together with the people you're gatekeeping, get the movement going somewhere instead of armchair criticizing people for not being left-leaning enough.

OP is asking for trouble with this question, everyone's just gonna say what they use/their favorite, in a very opinionated way. Best advice is to try and see what you like, but I do prefer liftoff from my limited experience with lemmy apps. It just works and it's pretty.

They already have a sort of functional "Assistant". You can type to it, or you can use OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text language model loaded up on your Home Assistant machine through an add-on in order to talk to it, it works pretty much as well as any other proprietary speech to text model, except it's self hosted. The assistant can talk back with another add-on, though the voices are still too robotic IMO.

Key part in all of this is the "sort of functional" bit. Commands seem to have to be very literal to be understood, otherwise it just tells you it doesn't understand.

I'd still rather host my own assistant than rely on Google or Alexa, though, so I'm just gonna put my faith on the HASS team.

but literally nothing is stopping you from running your own server.

Nothing except gmail's very strict and hard to follow guidelines for spam filtering. Whether it's a byproduct of spam filtering or whether it's the intended result, the fact that Google essentially controls email traffic means you're not gonna have a good time communicating with others using your self-hosted email. This issue has been raised by self-hosters getting blacklisted, all the way to companies getting rate limited. If your intended use is to communicate with your everyday person, and considering the everyday person probably uses Gmail, you're in for a bad time at some point down the line.

It wouldn't be the worst idea to come out of it, to be honest.

If everything is perfectly simulated, the rules that allow consciousness to emerge are also there, and thus consciousness would emerge, regardless of whether it's a simulation or reality. If we only simulate a consciousness without laws of reality, that consciousness would still be designed to mimic a consciousness from a reality with laws (ours), and since it would be a perfect simulation (and it would have to be so in order to run meaningful tests), that consciousness might as well be as real as us. Thus, unethical.

Let's not forget that email is technically a defederated platform and it was monopolized by Google anyway. It can and will be done if allowed to be done by complacency.