I can’t speak to their Password Management as I use Bitwarden for that

But I am slowly but surely migrating myself away from gmail to (my own email at my own domain routed to) Proton. The webmail is very much comparable to gmail and, if you communicate with like minded people, it has decent support for signing and even encrypting email both to other proton mail users as well as to complete randos with just a password that you can send later. My only real complaint is that (… for some really good reasons) there is no easy to use exchange server and I need to run their mail bridge to use a desktop client like Thunderbird to send and maanage and (one day) back up emails.

VPN? I switched over to this around the same time I decided I wanted to “take control” of my email and it works pretty well. Very easy to get some openvpn credentials that I can plug into whatever setup I want. And no extra fee for port forwarding unlike SOME providers. That said, my main complaint is that the port is semi-randomized which doesn’t play the nicest with my totally legit linux iso torrenting setup… But a quick docker ps and docker logs and then updating the config is pretty trivial and I only have to do it maybe once a week?

The big elephant in the room is that, as you rightfully understand, you are still putting a LOT of trust. But that is actually why I like Proton. Because other companies pretend they are going to knife fight the CIA and the US Government on your behalf all while actively not acknowledging anything until we get a post mortem. Proton are VERY open about just how far they are willing to go to protect you (not very) and what YOU can do to mean that Proton can’t provide much useful information once the appropriate paperwork and legal actions have been filed.

I wouldn’t trust a paid account with anything more sensitive than what really innovative stuff a friend did with a bun in the dumpster behind the Wendy’s the other night. But, hypothetically, if I needed to send an anonymous email? Third party VPN/Tor, clean hardware, and a free Protonmail account works great and I do trust Proton to give the absolute bare minimum in that case.

And just for a bit of context. My “grand plan” is to migrate the vast majority of my correspondence and accounts to email addresses tied to one or more of my own domains. Currently I plan to use Protonmail for the mail server because I don’t want that smoke. But the point is that I control the email address so I can get my Heat on and walk away in 30 seconds (actually more like a few hours but…).

Which is why the other aspect of that is that I want to back up the emails I actually want to save (rather than just EVERYTHING like those of us with older gmail accounts do) via a local client that I then archive to an encrypted volume on my NAS and (REDACTED) after that.

Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.

It was inevitable (and is arguably the “logical” extension of sponsor segments).

As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.

On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads…

I guess I am not getting it.

If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).

Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.

But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.

The list of all the horrifically shitty things LMG has done over the past few years will fill up a thread on its own and I strongly encourage you to educate yourself before even thinking of defending them for… anything.

But some highlights:

1. Over the span of a week or two went from “Companies aren’t your friend. I am not your friend” to “Written warranties are worthless and can only hurt you so you shouldn’t want them. Also, if there were a written warranty and I were to die then my wife (who just so happens to be the CFO and second biggest shareholder in the company…) would suffer from harassment. So written warranties are bad and just trust me bro”. This was bad enough that his decades long crony (Luke) even openly criticized him
2. Stole a GPU from a small company, shit on their prototype for weeks on end even after knowingly using it with the wrong card, and then sold the prototype cooler to a random third party. Proceeded to make claims (that the timeline doesn’t even work for) that they resolved this before anyone caught them and their main argument is they accidentally removed said company from those emails where they were “solving” it.
3. Have increasingly openly acknowledged they will do big pieces on products they hate if the money is right. I think the most recent shitfests are a pool cleaning robot that barely functions and now sponsorshipps from one of the shittier VPN companies because the money is really really good.
4. Responded to an “internal investigation” of sexual harassment and assault claims (where at least one perpetrator is literally recorded sexually harassing the entire company… during the all hands about sexual harassment… literally the day after his direct report left the company because of being sexually harassed) by talking about how they will sue any future whistle blowers or accusers for defamation.
5. Went full “but the white man is the real victim” after even d-brand acknowledged a fuck up where they “roasted” an Indian guy because they thought his name was funny
6. Basically turn every single accusation into “They are personally attacking Linus Sebastien because they are jealous of his success and genius” level cancel culture nonsense

They are rapidly circling the drain and I for one am waiting for the “Well, these aren’t tech so we don’t have a conflict of interest and you should buy some joe rogan branded supplements” within the next few months. Likely because more and more actual tech companies don’t even want to deal with them for the PR boost.

I mean… plenty of youtubers and channels are doing exactly that. Ian McCollum (Forgotten Weapons) and the “educational” gun youtubers have History of Weapons and War. A bunch of creators did Nebula. Corridor Digital have their channel. That comedy channel that came from college humor have their own site? Same with those two channels that pissed everyone off in the past few weeks? And Linus Media Group have been trying to add “we run a shitty version of youtube” to their grift for years now. And Rooster Teeth and Giant Bomb had their own video site for basically the entirety of their runs.

Let alone stuff like Utreon and the other one. And then there are the various successors to liveleak that are basically about spamming yu with an insane amount of spyware and ads in exchange for letting you upload faces of death.

And while I think it is a fundamentally flawed idea that mostly just does the legwork for those sites to run the software: Peertube is a thing and there are plenty of instances that exist.

So I am REALLY curious what evil organization you think is waiting to kill anything that is not made by Youtube. If you comply with DMCA requests and don’t host CSAM then it is just a function of whether you can afford it.

Which… is the real issue. There is just a ridiculous volume of storage and bandwidth required for even a “small” youtube. Which is why almost all of the successful “alternatives” only really host a very small subset of videos.

So… to punish them for “harvesting” your data you are going to… continue to give them your data.

“Time theft” is very questionable and more a topic for society as a whole but…

Okay? Then don’t watch youtube. Rather than allow them to engage in “time theft” but calling yourself smart because you don’t watch ads.

Also: As has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, the scale of Youtube (and Twitch) is massive and truly hard to comprehend. The only companies that even have a snowball’s chance of running that are Google, Amazon, and MS because they ALSO have giant “cloud” services. And… it is pretty clear none of them really know how to run a site like that (hence why MS just gave up entirely).

In this case, they are a monopoly because they are the only company that even wants to try and make something as massive as youtube work.

But, regardless: It is fine to not “feel bad” about running an adblocker. Just don’t “feel bad” when youtube runs a you-blocker as a result.

Sort of.

The issue isn’t userbase size. Plenty of creators have tried to have their own private hosting over the years. The fact that the “successful” ones are Rooster Teeth (dead), Giant Bomb (basically dead), and Linus Media Group (unfortunately not dead, but shifting ever more toward right wing grifting) says a lot.

The issue, as those channels learned, is discoverability. If your entire fanbase go to giantbomb.com to watch videos then you aren’t getting surfaced in the youtube/whatever algorithm. So as your userbase leaves (get pissed off, get older, die, etc) you don’t have a good way to replace them and you more or less wither and die. You could see this on the forums (and the threads on sites that still have forums) where you almost never saw a new fan show up and it increasingly became all about the more vocal members of “the community” as even the fans started to nope out of chat (because nobody gives a shit about the guy whose gimmick is that he kept saying he was a duck…) and forums (because we don’t care about the guy who can’t stop talking about how “kino” Snyder films are).

And that is why stuff like Nebula, Gun Jesus’s latest side hustle, Corridor Digital’s site, etc are very much dependent on relying on Youtube for the “advertising”. It says a lot that most of us only even check Nebula when we see a new Legal Eagle or Nile Red video on youtube and want to watch the ad-free version.

And the fact that Microsoft noped out says it all.

Basically, the only orgs that have a snowball’s chance of hosting a twitch/youtube are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft on account of them also being three of the largest “cloud” providers and having the resources at cost. Amazon/Twitch are scrambling to find a way to deal with the increasing shift to sponsored streams, Google/Youtube are cracking down on adblockers, and Microsoft just gave up.

People refuse to even let an ad play but sure, they’ll participate in the pledge drives

Mentioned it before but:

LLMs program at the level of a junior engineer or an intern. You already need code review and more senior engineers to fix that shit for them.

What they do is migrate that. Now that junior engineer has an intern they are trying to work with. Or… companies realize they don’t benefit from training up those newbie (or stupid) engineers when they are likely to leave in a year or two anyway.

I selfhost my own nextcloud for notes and documents that I would like on my phone but not via google.

It is not a google docs/gmail/whatever replacement. They’ve spent the past few years hardening it and pushing for all the hallmarks of enterprise first software (e.g. making it a complete fustercluck to not have a proper domain name) but you still have stability and performance issues and the occasional upgrade issue that fucks up everything

I would also point out that if you aren’t selfhosting, what are you actually getting out of this? You are just spreading your data out to other companies who are often less transparent about how they monetize you.

Mate. If all you want is an echo chamber then don’t post on a message board. That is a blog post with the comments turned off.

And I did read your blog post. I didn’t watch your podcast so, deep apologies if that offended you somehow. And I still think you are doing what a lot of developers did during the 00s when “console ports” and “optional gamepads” were the big thing in PC dev space. You are trying to adapt an existing control scheme with radically different inputs rather than acknowledging what controls you actually need.

That is WHY Caves of Qud is such an amazing steam deck experience. That is WHY stuff like Stardew Valley on the Steam Controller are still looked at so fondly. And that is why so many other games never “feel right”. Because devs are trying to map a gamepad to a keyboard (hello Dark Souls) or an analog stick to a mouse cursor (fuck you Bungie and Ubi) or a keyboard to a gamepad.

Hell, we still see it with a lot of the CRPG, Strategy Games, and RTSes that devs try to make work for a gamepad. Very few get it “right” because it is a really hard challenge. And why Dragon’s Age increasingly became basically a Divinity 2/Oblivion style game rather than a “real” CRPG like DA:O was.

I guess my argument would be: If you are trying to adapt a keyboard to a gamepad without taking advantage of a touch screen (arguably even then), you are “doing it wrong”. That is why Caves of Qud is, somehow, one of the best Steam Deck experiences out there.

If there hadn’t already been a court ruling-ish (it is complicated) giving Nintendo the “right” to do this? Sure

As it stands? It very well could be an intern filling out a word document

You don’t need a lawyer to file a DMCA request. You just need to be ready to get one if someone disputes it.

And Nintendo almost definitely have lawyers on retainer, if not in house. The added cost of this is the effort it takes to search github for “uzu” and send an email.

It is almost a zero cost. They already have the legal-ish ruling. It is just filling out a form letter and sending it out.

The “vibe” doesn’t really matter. You are getting paid to do a job, you are gonna do it. You can’t refuse to write documents because you have to use Word instead of Google Docs or whatever.

No, it really is the training. Because the most obnoxious thing in the work force is an old white guy. They can’t outright say “no”. But they will do everything in their power to talk about how EVERYTHING is a blocker and they can’t get any work done because nobody wanted to teach them something. Or nobody was able to answer the questions that they refuse to ask. And so forth.

Having a database of training videos or even an outsourced consultant goes a long way toward “Hey Jon? Nobody gives a shit. Do your job”. Whereas having to link to just a document or explain something yourself is how they will actively refuse to ever retain any information.