Not just you. Low(er) quality downloads are still a huge part of the torrent scene, see how popular most 720p YIFY uploads are even though their encoder quality is pretty garbage. Most people in general want a fast download and are viewing on a small laptop or even phone screen and don’t give a rats ass about fidelity, LQ works perfectly fine for this. Even I’ll grab a LQ once in a while if it’s something my girl and I want to watch that night and I didn’t plan ahead.

The desire for high quality uploads is more for people running home setups like Plex, where it’s better to keep a HQ source file and have it transcoded to lower resolutions by your home server setup as necessary. They generally aren’t storage constrained as an 8tb hard drive for a normal PC is fairly cheap these days. I’d wager maybe <30% of torrenters actually go after ultra HQ uploads based off seeder numbers.

Personally I stick to stuff that is at least 1080p with HDR and H265 encode preferred, because I archive most everything I download due to similar problems with internet speed. Over maybe 12 years of torrents I’ve amassed a hair over 5tb of content, and that’s a LOT of movies l, it all fits on a single $120 external HDD.

It will not affect system stability, but… Surge protectors do not work at all without a ground wire to drop excess voltage to. Any kind of line voltage disturbance could kill every device.

Additionally, without any ground wire to pull the housings of devices to ground, the potential for a short to energize the case and then electrocute you is also high.

additionally additionally, if you have grounded outlets that don’t actually have a ground connection running to them, that means either the wiring system is broken or it was “updated” by an unlicensed hack job who has undoubtedly made numerous more dangerous decisions elsewhere in the circuit.

If your house is entirely ungrounded you really should have an electrician come update it ASAP. Outlet grounds have been mandatory since 1971. The chances are high that wiring predating that code is still using old cloth-wrapped wire insulation or even knob&tube, both of which are huge fire risks as the insulation is decayed badly by now. It’s expensive to have all new wire pulled but it is necessary.

it’s because implementing an existing touch screen module and then telling a bunch of code monkeys in a 3rd world country to write a barely functional UI for it is actively cheaper than engineering, sourcing, assembling and testing keypads with physical buttons or even a membrane keyboard these days

using a touch screen also means they can put the same mass produced PCB into 40 different products instead of needing a custom button pattern for each. just tell the code monkeys to update the UI. there’s a lot of economic arguments for the use of touch screens, but it sure doesn’t make the field worker’s lives any easier.

I am already the Unfortunate Cousin; however, it seems to be an unpaid internship…

The headline they want you to read: “zomg these master criminals were causing billions in damages!!!1!1”

The headline everyone else reads: “lmao piracy run by a couple random schmucks has an infinitely better service AND content selection than any corporate streaming service”

Oracle doing Oracle things.

Never forget what their name’s acronym really stands for…

i want to sleep when i’m at work. i don’t want to sleep when i’m at home during my free time

only 12?

Did you know? Emails are free and you’re allowed to have more than one…

Is that a big iron on your hip or are you just happy to see me?

Do you use Firefox?
because Google intentionally nerfs loading performance on any non-Chrome browsers.

I usually find if startup buffering takes more than 2-3 seconds on my home Internet, just refreshing the page magically makes it go away.

It federates…ish.

Some instances federate actions better than others, and even then it can be random which get properly federated- a lot of time site/community bans don’t get federated to the modlog right but content removals almost always do. I have a feeling this is largely intentional.

The most reliable method is always to check the home instance of the community/user directly.

Poleave

id still smash

You can never share any of the software specific formats ever (.ipt for inventor, .dwg for Autocad, .sldprt for solidworks, etc). All those formats include fingerprints inside that are not user visible or modifyable but include detailed info about the copy of the software license that created it. If anyone else ever opens those with a legit copy, the software itself phone home about it and they’ll know, because whatever license the pirate copy shows will not exist on Autodesk/Dassault/whatever’s side.

Platform agnostic formats likely embed this kind of Metadata too somewhere, but it can probably be stripped, and most of the time when sharing an agnostic for.at like .step/.stl the opening software is not made by autodesk or whoever.

Finally it could just legit be a user report. Companies like autodesk have a reporting system to send evidence of suspected pirated software use directly to their legal teams. It doesnt happen often but if youre using like a 7 year old copy of Inventor and something feels off… yeah. So you’re never truly safe if you have to share your models at all.

Adobe is lax about it because they care about being the industry standard monopoly. When more people use their software and become proficient in it, more companies want to buy it so they have better hiring prospects, and Adobe wins.

The stories I’ve heard about most CAD companies, especially Dassault, is that they don’t generally care about the pirated software, and if they do, the worst they’ll do if you’re just a hobbyist is send you a “cut it out dude” cease and desist.

The problems arise when you start using their software for anything that makes money, like sending models/drawings to other companies/clients or whatever. If youre trying to run a business with pirated software they will absolutely pin your ass to the wall with lawyers and go after every cent you earned using their software PLUS the cost of a full license PLUS whatever damages they feel like pulling out of their ass.

A. Their software phones home aggressively.
B. Their software embeds unique digital fingerprints in every file created with it. If other legit Autodesk software opens those files, it knows. They can and will use that to track pirated users. The neat part is, they don’t care about your priated software until you’re verifiably using it to make money, at which point they will open up your asshole with a speculum and go fishing.

That’s universal entropy for you. Everything will always decays downward, even social constructs and media.

They do in poorer areas- my local county sherrif only had the budget for two new dodge Durangos in the last 4 years, the rest of the force drive crown vics with junkyard engine swaps to keep them going past 300k miles.

Don’t use a thumb drive, use an external hard/solid state drive or install an internal drive. Even an aliexpress 64gb ssd for $10 is better than any thumbdrive. Thumbdrive’s flash and controllers are not designed for OS level continuous writes and will die very quickly.

If you must use a thumb drive, add some kind of air flow over it, and disable all logging features in openWRT to reduce writes as much as possible.