Dumb.

I bet a lot of folks have just quietly given up or moved to lemmy or mbin because they’ve gotten frustrated with all the issues.

I guess it's not quiet once I post this, but I submitted the account deletion request a couple weeks back and spent some time setting my feedly back up after 1 too many spam posts. I'm already getting my scrolling fix from rss feeds again, and this is the first time I've been on kbin in a week.

tl;dr: you're right.

Incognito mode has always been intended for prying eyes using the same browser, and it works fine for that.

Pretty much. You can download images with everything bundled and ready to go (e.g., deploy a new container image instead of upgrading your Radarr version in place) and keep them separate (e.g., Torrent container goes through vpn but your media server doesn't, Radarr upgrade going south won't affect your Sonarr install, etc.)

Until some legal entity decides to raid the servers. Pray they do not keep logs of IPs. Though usually this may be (to some extent) a gray zone in some countries.

Can you give an example? I don't think accessing a file somebody makes available has ever been an issue with copyright prosecution. They go after uploaders and hosts.

Even if they did, an IP in a server log isn't definitive proof of an individual accessing something. However, I'm less confident of worldwide legal systems understanding that. Still, I'd be curious if there's a single example of somebody being charged over accessing publicly accessible copyrighted files on the web.

I never said they're exclusive; I use both in my workflow. The comment to which I replied made it seem like private trackers were the end-all though, which I took issue with.

I also think your upsides are a bit misleading. I wouldn't use torrents without a VPN (upfront cash), and the effort to learn how usenet works isn't any more daunting than the effort needed to get into good private trackers and keep up the ratios (e.g., tracking time/ratio based on tracker, working with hardlinks, etc.).

How to pirate movies as a pro

No mention of Usenet

vSphere was never available in the free tier.

The reality is that nobody's learning much useful from Free ESXi, as you need vCenter for any of the good stuff. They want you using the eval license for that, which gives you the full experience but only for 60 days.

Still, there's a lot of folks running free ESXi in labs (home and otherwise) and other small environments that may need to expand at some point. They're killing a lot of good will and entry-level market saturation for what appears (to me at least) literally zero benefit. The paid software is the same, so they're not developing any less. And they weren't offering support with the free license anyway, so they're not saving anything there.

1. https://www.synology.com/en-au/support/RAID_calculator or similar is good to easily do these calculations
2. No, but more RAID configurations than not are limited by the smallest size drive. It's a factor to consider, assuming you can't afford to just buy a bunch of disks. I wound up maintaining two separate NAS devices, one of which gets my old, smaller disks.
3. Generally yes, though you'd be surprised how little difference disk speed makes once you get enough of them in an array.
4. I use Synology with various shucked WD externals. I have a bunch of other stuff in my homelab though, so I need the storage to not be it's own project, else I likely would have built something less expensive. I'm sure there will be better suggestions in this thread than mine.

For things I don't care enough to archive to my own collection, I use a Shield TV with SmartTube, an alternative client that blocks ads, incorporates SponsorBlock, and a few other nice tweaks. Definitely my favorite YT experience of all the ones I've tried.

I don't know how common they are anymore, as Plex has moved toward hosting their own metadata and I've never bothered using any myself, but there historically have been some number of YT metadata agents (e.g., this one) folks could add onto their Plex server and pull the metadata from YT directly. Expanding something like this to also query the Sponsorblock API seems like it wouldn't be terribly difficult.

The harder part would be getting the player to incorporate Sponsorblock to actually use that data to skip the segments. Plex, in particular, seems unlikely to ever try something like this, as their business model is moving more and more toward ad-supported streaming content rather than improving the self-hosted media server that got them popular.