tables

Driving is one of those things where we're supposed to be human - make choices, act sensibly, think about what we're doing and adapt to others around us. But often people assume it's something entirely deterministic - "if the light is green I'm going to launch forward even if there's still traffic moving past me and I'm going to get hit or hit someone, because green means I HAVE to go".

Being polite to others, asides from the nicety of it, is often more positive to everyone on the road than going "I have the right of way so I won't let anyone in" and allows traffic as a whole to move with less issues. But some people go way too hard on the mentality that every road user other than them is stupid and stop acting like humans because they assume others won't be able to cope. Which usually complicates traffic for everyone.

There's a roundabout in my daily commute in which at the end of the afternoon 80% of drivers are coming from and going to the same direction and there's usually heavy traffic in that specific direction that blocks the roundabout. Often, drivers who are approaching the roundabout to go to a different direction will signal their intention, and users already inside the roundabout will give way - even if they technically have the right of way and don't have to - because those users aren't going their direction and will only increase the number of cars stuck if they're not allowed through. Roundabout users being polite effectively makes traffic as a whole go more smoothly and everyone benefits. Sometimes someone inside the roundabout will be an ass and not let people through - and the result is always that everyone is stuck for more time because there are now cars inside the roundabout which could've already vacated it which are stuck behind someone who could easily let them through.

You can be nice, just make sure you think about what you're actually doing before doing it.

Letting a car go in front in the situation above: you're probably causing an accident.

Letting a car go in heavy traffic when there's one lane each way and everyone's stopped already anyway: won't cost you much time and you've allowed that person to move on with their life instead of being permanently stuck at an intersection he's never going to be able to get out of unless someone yields.

I live close to a few intersections where if no one is nice and yields, it's impossible to join unless you barge your way in and hope people stop. But to be fair, these aren't designed like death traps like the one above.

You react to small disagreements with insults, accusations of the user being a fed and threats of censorship (banning him because you disagree with him). I have no idea if you're an admin on lemmy and actually have the power to do this, but this is fairly downvoteable in my view.

Most Adobe tools don’t have any good free alternatives even for home use.

Yep. Lightroom is the one piece of software I tolerate paying a subscription for. Alternatives do exist, but they all suffer from the typical FOSS problem of never having had a designer look at them and help them build UI that's meant to be used by humans.

I've spent a bunch of time trying to learn Darktable, and at the end I still couldn't arrive to the same results I could in Lightroom by watching a 5 minutes tutorial and adjusting a few sliders. Not to mention that searching for a few of the issues I had led me to a bunch of threads of people complaining about the exact same issues only to be met by a developer telling them "if you don't like the UI use another tool".

And it’s not like the output is saved for the next time; you need to do it every time.

You can cache transcoded content in Jellyfin. So use a large enough cache and you basically only have to transcode once for every resolution. It's easier for me to set up transcoding than it would be to manually figure out which resolutions I'll prefer having around and transcoding them. Most of my stuff exists in 1080p, with 4k files for stuff I REALLY like, but I sometimes find myself watching on very low resolutions on my phone when away because I have pretty limited data.

I find that in a few movies the 4K versions have a generally better image quality and are worth it even if you are sitting far away or not watching the content in 4K resolution at all. But like you, I only keep around 4k files for stuff I really like.

EDIT: I've also run into problems with codecs on other people's devices when not transcoding. I could keep my files in whatever the most compatible codec is nowadays but having the ability to transcode on the spot is easier.

What specifically isn't working? I've got Jellyfin running on Docker with transcoding from a Nvidia GPU.

I pretty much followed the documentation here: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/nvidia. I can share my docker-compose for that specific use case if you'd like.

I think those miniPC CPUs do a good job transcoding from what I've read, the N95 and N100. I already had older hardware set up when I added Jellyfin so I got a cheap nvidia Quadro P400 for the transcoding. If you're setting up a new system though, I'd guess a Intel iGPU would be more than enough.

I've looked at https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding before for transcoding comparisons.

You raise some good points. I find that it's hard to find information on the topic as a whole because a lot of sources have fairly big biases - either pro or anti EVs - which often times aren't very transparent. And also because you usually have to dig deep to find an example that fits your situation. For example, on the topic of your last paragraph, when comparing cars to motorcycles, what's a "car"? Are we talking about a two seat Clio or a four seat family wagon? It gets even worse with motorcycles given the big variety of engine configurations.

Some years ago I read something similar to your last point - that in general, motorcycles produce a fair amount more greenhouse gases than an average car. More recently I've come upon an article that tested different motorcycles with different CCs and engine configurations and the results were a lot more nuanced. They mentioned that 2 stroke motorcycles were basically awful in terms of how much greenhouse gases they released. 4 stroke motorcycles, on the other hand, were comparable to a small car. Small and medium CC 4 stroke motorcycles would win out against the average car in terms of emissions, whereas bigger CC 4 stroke motorcycles would emit slightly more greenhouse gases than the average car.

That makes sense. Though I would like to see stats on number of cars going into the used car because of EV purchases. Judging on conversations with work colleagues, there's still a lot of people keeping their old cars around because of "autonomy fear" - in other words, people convincing themselves they need a 400Km autonomy for that one time a year they might use their car on a vacation. Which is stupid, IMO, as they'd benefit more from selling their cars and renting on the rare occasion they need to do a really long distance, but it's apparently fairly common. Though I'm sure that will change once people realize they are mostly not touching their old cars.

Eh, a motorbike isn't going to be as comfy as a car with an AC regardless of whether it's electric or gas powered. Vented gear and lighter colors can help a lot in the summer, but they don't look as cool and people would rather scorch in black gear and be almost invisible at night apparently.

I've seen a much greater adoption of EVs in my area once the range started becoming decent enough, along with the prices and the greater availability of charging stations. And I figure the same will happen with motorbikes. Electric scooters are already super popular in the city. They're cheap, they allow you to skip traffic, and the range is decent enough for short commutes. Once there's bigger motorbikes with a decent enough range and decent prices, people will buy them as well.

There's something that bothers me about the whole EV transition thing which is how polluting the transition itself is - if I have a newish gas powered car, that took a lot of resources to build, am I really saving the environment by buying a new EV, which will cost even more resources? Ideally, it would be people with really old very polluting cars switching to EVs - but because of the cost of EVs, I notice it's mostly people with bigger purchasing power switching to EVs - people who often already had fairly new and efficient gas vehicles which could keep running for a little longer without as much harm to the environment. I have a not that old medium CC four-stroke motorbike, with a low fuel consumption and supposedly fairly low pollutant output. Even if a decent alternative EV exists and I switch to it, how long do I have to ride the EV before the polution benefits of the EV in comparison to my current bike outweigh the pollution cost of building it in the first place?

Boring answer, but I play on the PC exclusively. When I'm not playing, I'm usually already using the PC for other stuff, so it's a faster switch than jumping to some other device. I thought about getting a Steam Deck for a while, but I gravitate so much towards the PC that I think I'd probably put it down after a while.

There's usually "routine" games I'll play during the week when I have little time - which are usually games that are unlikely to receive any big updates - and I'll leave new games to moments when I know I can sit down for a long while without worries.

The PC I use for gaming is practically only a gaming box, though. I don't tinker with it nearly as much as I used to. And I've started using a controller more, when that's an option.

It says it's been updated 12 years ago apparently.