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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • A token is basically just a word. Know how your phone’s auto suggest tries to anticipate the words you want to use as you type? In this case, your phone is using an extremely small token amount (typically only the previous two or three words you have typed) to try and predict your next word, which would also be a token. Your phone only uses a few tokens at a time, because as token count rises, processing requirements also quickly balloon.

    And AI chat is basically the same concept, but with a massively inflated token limit. Instead of looking at your previous two or three words, it looks at entire conversations. And it also uses tokens to generate responses, the same way your phone is using one token at a time to predict your next word.

    So when you pay for tokens, you’re essentially paying for a word count. As you continue a conversation, the token requirement for each subsequent request will increase, because it is attempting to look at the entire context of the conversation you have had.

    Models have built-in token limits, to put a cap on how much memory is required to run the model. As conversations stretch on and you reach the model’s token limits, it will begin losing context for things that happened earlier. It will try to summarize earlier parts of the conversation to shorten them but keep relevant pieces in memory, or it will just outright drop old parts of the conversation and “forget” that context, the same way my phone has already forgotten the start of this sentence.

    It’s a little more complicated that “each word is a token”, because the chatbot will combine your prompts with its own internal systems. Especially as conversations stretch on, and it begins to summarize old parts to keep them in memory. But that’s the most straightforward way to explain it.









  • I’ve said this exact same thing in the past, and been shouted down by the Jellyfin crowd. There is a lot of apologia in the FOSS community, and Jellyfin is one of the worst offenders. It has several known security exploits, and should never be accessible outside of your LAN. But every time I mention it, I inevitably get some chud responding with “lol I’ve had my port forwarded for years and been fine” as if that is a valid security audit.

    And this means your only real option for remote access is a VPN. But that makes sharing with friends/family extremely difficult.

    Especially if those family/friends also want to run their own servers, because Jellyfin doesn’t have a centralized “here are all of your servers” home page.

    It also means you end up playing administrator to all of the “I forgot my password for the ninth time this week, can you reset it for me” inane requests.

    Plex does all of those things really well. Want to share with a friend? Just send them an invite link, and they can access it with their own account. Want to access multiple servers, because you have a few friends who also run theirs? Easy, they can send invite links to you, and you’ll access them all directly through the home page. Family member forgot their password? They can click the button and follow the prompts to reset it themselves.


  • It’s a concern even with a reverse proxy. The reverse proxy encrypts your connection from A to B, but does nothing to stop the various security concerns that have been noted. Because those concerns don’t rely on intercepting unencrypted traffic. If you can reach Jellyfin’s main log in page, you can exploit it. Full stop.

    The only way a reverse proxy would stop someone from being able to exploit it is to include a separate login on your reverse proxy, meaning attackers wouldn’t even be able to hit Jellyfin’s landing page unless they know your proxy’s password. But notably, this breaks basically everything except for browsers. All of your smart TVs, mobile apps, etc would stop functioning, because they’d bounce off of that reverse proxy login page.


  • My guess was almost this. They obviously want to cash in on the panic-buyers. But I don’t think it’s because they’re going under. I think the goal is to put the lifetime pass out of reach for most people, meaning they’ll default to the subscription instead. Because Plex wants people on subscriptions. They’re more reliable income, which the company can more accurately budget for. There’s a reason everything is moving towards SAAS, and Plex is doing the same. This is simply an attempt to push/lock everyone to the subscription model instead of the single purchase.





  • This is incorrect, bordering on outright FUD. Plex only uses their servers for the initial server discovery. When you sign into Plex, your device basically contacts the central plex discovery server and goes “hey, which servers do I have access to? And where are they located?” Plex’s server then passes that info back to the device, so the device can reach those servers directly. No actual content hits Plex’s servers by default. Hell, Plex wouldn’t want content hitting their servers by default, because it’s a truly astronomical amount of bandwidth that would be required on their end, for no real benefit.

    You can technically use their relay option to bounce the video stream off of their server, but they specifically say that it’s a last-ditch workaround for troubleshooting. Because their relay server is intentionally bandwidth-capped and will throttle your video quality. So the relay is only really meant to be used for troubleshooting and edge cases.

    “Aha! But you need to contact their server to get access even on LAN! So it will stop working when your internet goes out!” You can just configure the device to use a direct connection instead. This will allow you to connect directly to a server on your LAN. No need for their handshake server.


  • Jellyfin is amazing for a lot of things, but it shouldn’t be available externally. There are a few critical security concerns that devs have openly stated will never be patched. And that makes it a non-starter for sharing with people who can’t figure out how to use a personal VPN connection. It may be fine for me and my household… But there’s no way I’m going to be able to walk my tech-illiterate grandmother through it over the phone.

    In contrast, Plex makes sharing server access very easy. Since they run a centralized server to handle all of the “which servers do I have access to, and where are they located” automatic discovery traffic, sharing content is as simple as sending an invite link. That centralization flies in the face of what Jennyfin stands for, so they won’t ever implement it. I even have a burner Plex account that already has access to my server, which I can use to sign into TVs when I don’t want to bother with the whole account setup process. Handy for things like parties, because I have a few “just hit play and drunk people will enjoy it” types of playlists ready to go.

    Basically, Jellyfin for yourself and your household. Plex for everyone else. Luckily, the two will happily run side-by-side without any issues.



  • Mine was also the 360, but simply because of when I got it. I was a young teen when it originally came out, and I begged my parents for one. They were concerned that my kid brother (several years younger than me) would inevitably end up playing the games I had for it. The 360 was marketed more as a mature console, compared to the family friendly Wii. So I had to wait until my brother was old enough to play games like COD and Halo.

    This meant that by the time I finally got the 360, the XBO was nearing release. And the 360’s multiplayer heyday had largely passed by that point, as everyone had largely moved on from games like Halo 3, Modern Warfare 2, Assassins Creed Brotherhood, etc… So matchmaking lobbies for all of the games I wanted to experience were basically only full of the diehard fans who had absolutely no sympathy for new/learning players. It meant I ended up using it primarily as a single player console. I enjoyed lots of single-player games like Final Fantasy 13/13-2, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect Trilogy, Dark Souls, etc… But that’s pretty much all I used it for. I’d chat with friends while I played if they were online, but it quickly became clear that my friends were moving on from the console.

    All of the big multiplayer experiences for the 360 were largely lost on me, because none of my friends were interested in playing those old games by that point. And multiplayer is unfortunately a large part of what the console was designed for. I think the only multiplayer game that really held our attention was Destiny, and even that turned out to be a pretty big disappointment after a while. We only really kept playing it as an excuse to hang out in voice chat.

    I was also largely moving towards PC gaming by that point. I had already experimented with installing games like Oblivion and Skyrim on my (really shitty) laptop, and got them running at potato quality. I saw the potential, and shifted towards PC gaming after getting the 360. I saved up my money from my first job, and built my first PC a year or two after getting the 360. So I only really kept the 360 around for the exclusives that weren’t on PC.

    Nowadays, I just emulate the 360 exclusives for single player. Currently working my way through Lost Odyssey, because I never actually got around to finishing it on the 360. I think because I built my PC before I beat the game.