I don’t see what you’ve written and provide the most likely response to the prompt you’ve made.

I cognitively think about what you’ve said, comprehend it, consider the concepts you have portrayed and formulate an idea that becomes my response. I then transcribe that response into language, and write it out in such a way that others can comprehend.

Cognition is the part that’s missing. And what we don’t know about how human cognitive abilities work, far outweighs the amount we do know. Right now our best theories involve a complex interconnection of brain cells that send signals along neurons to other cells and that somehow, in a way we don’t currently understand, results in the complex thought and cognition that we, as humans, have.

To summarize cognitive capabilities into a series of neurons firing is reductive and discounts the very Science that you are basing your answer upon. The Brain is still a thing that we have a lot of work left to do before we can understand it. Your comment is disrespectful of the scientists that are trying to push the understanding of the brain to new levels.

Be quiet.

Nope. There’s no cognition, no cognitive functions at all in LLMs. They are incapable of understanding actions, reactions, consequences and outcomes.

Literally all it’s doing is giving you a random assortment of words that vaguely correlate to indicators that scored highly for the symbols (ideas/intents) that the prompt you entered contained.

Literally that’s fucking it.

You’re not “talking with an AI” you’re interacting with an LLM that is an amalgam of the collective responses for every inquiry, statement, reply, response, question, etc… That is accessible on the public Internet. It’s a dilution of the “intelligence” that can be derived from what everyone on the Internet has ever said, and what that cacophony of mixed messages, on average, would reply with.

The reason why LLMs have gotten better is because they’ve absorbed more data than previous attempts and some of the outlying extremist messages have been carefully pruned from the library, so the resultant AI trends more towards the median persons predicted reply, versus everyone’s voice being weighed evenly.

It only seems like “AI” because the responses are derived from real, legitimate human replies that were posted somewhere on the Internet at some point in time.

This is as much of an artificial intelligence as a mannequin is an artificial life form.

Yuuuuup. It’s like taking nearly the entirety of the public Internet, shoving it into a fancy auto correct machine, then having it spit out responses to whatever you say, then send them along with no human interaction whatsoever on what reply is being sent to you.

It operates at a massive scale compared to what auto carrot does, but it’s the same idea, just bigger and more complex.

You American? Sounds like what’s happening there.

It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

I suppose it depends on where you live …

I don’t think it matters where this happened. IMO, “what the fuck is this” is the appropriate reaction to giving no consequences for rape. This would also apply to a litany of other offenses, but in this case rape.

I also think rape is one of the worst things anyone could do to another, right up there with slavery, torture, and other, similar things. I would consider murder to be less offensive, since at least then the person doesn’t have to work through the trauma after. It’s a mercy. Still unacceptable in a civilized society, but anything you have to live the rest of your life dealing with, is worse IMO.

A fate worse than death. In this case, getting SA’d, and having your attacker convicted and let go because of bullshit like this. Idk about you all, but that would fuck me right up.

That’s just it. Police beat and harass people and the public barely takes note. So fighting back and getting beaten isn’t really going to move the needle here in terms of public support. Those that would be outraged by someone getting disappeared in broad daylight by thugs in all black with masks on, that are claiming to be law enforcement, will also be outraged by anything more significant. From a public support standpoint, you don’t gain a lot of attention by fighting back and getting beaten.

Honestly, someone should go to the local PD and report that person as missing/abducted.

To be clear: anyone with the skillset, knowledge and experience to effectively stand their ground against these kinds of people, absolutely should.

Unless they clearly identify themselves and show proof (badges and documents) that prove their claims of being law enforcement, you should 100% fight back against being kidnapped by these thugs. They are little more than a gang with government funding if they’re not doing things “by the book” so to speak.

As far as I can see, most of this kind of thing that’s been happening lately is more based on feelings and assumptions by a small group who is going around mostly unchecked, doing a lot of damage. If the police/LEO crowd had a PR problem with BLM (and all related incidents including protests) then this is going to be a complete shit storm when it finally hits the fan, which might be four years from now…

On an individual level, I completely understand why someone untrained and unprepared would want to avoid any harm coming to them by complying, regardless of who the perpetrator is. Whether police, FBI, homeland security, secret service or some other form of LEO, or simply an organized gang of thugs… Self preservation is going to be the main goal. Far be it for me to fault someone for doing what they feel is going to give them the best outcome in that scenario.

As much as I agree, resisting is likely going to escalate the situation beyond what most people are willing to deal with.

Face it, very few people have the knowledge and skill required to even put up a fight against anyone that is prepared for that encounter.

I get why the victim here didn’t really fight back. I get why she let them take her away. I understand the fear she was probably feeling in that moment, and it can be paralysing for someone who isn’t prepared to fight for their life and doesn’t have the knowledge, skill, or experience required to handle the situation.

To be clear: I’m not saying this victim is dumb, inexperienced, or lacks general life experience, I would argue quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is that they don’t have the knowledge, skill, and experience with confrontations. I’m certain, beyond any doubt, that this person was very intelligent, skilled and experienced; just not with physical confrontation.

This is shameful behavior. Why did they feel the need to ambush a bookworm? Not to insult them so all but they are clearly more of an intellectual person than a combative person.

Disclaimer: I’m not American, I’m just empathetic to those that get disappeared in the middle of the day by people wearing all black without so much as a badge being flashed.

Oh, I’m not saying anything about the quality of their product. I’m only discussing the popularity of their product. Enshittification comes for every company, and when subway started operating at a much larger scale than they used to, in part because of Jerrod, suddenly, saving 5 cents on something (and making it shittier) would actually result in millions of dollars extra on the earnings sheet.

Before, the 5 cents wasn’t worth much because quantities were too low to matter, and the better quality item could be a reason that people kept coming back. But they started to expand and grow before Jerrod was brought on, he was just extra jetfuel for the whole thing.

Reminds me of subway. They somehow survived that whole PR nightmare, but still… They’re not nearly what they used to be.

Wow, what an incredible take with zero supporting information, either information I’ve seen published, ever, or information provided by you, the poster.

Thanks for this, DrDickHandler, it’s really helping this conversation evolve into something better!

(/s for anyone too tired to see it)

As a person who lives in a place, I would be hard pressed to ever be unwilling to defend the place where I live. I can’t even imagine giving up the fight so a foreign government can occupy the land I call home.

I would be surprised if Ukrainians would ever get tired of defending their home land.

I can, however, see Russians being unwilling to sign up to invade a country that clearly doesn’t want them there.

All I’m trying to say is: I agree.

Fair point.

Go Ukraine!

Russia is going to run out of troops.

IDK when, but they’re basically feeding their population into a meat grinder trying to take Ukraine.

That’s not too say the Ukraine isn’t taking losses… I’ve just, seen some numbers that indicate that Russia is going to run out of people to send to their deaths before Ukraine will.

Putin needs to give this up before he doesn’t have a military anymore.

This seems pretty on-brand for burr… He’s always kind of rooted for the “little guy” so to speak. He’s also blunt and doesn’t really give a shit if you don’t like what he has to say.