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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • however, i know nothing about self hosting. My knowledge is absolutely zero […] I dont understand nothing

    This is going to be a problem, unfortunately. You’ll need to define your use case first:

    • How much music do you want to have access to? Hundreds, thousands, millions of files? How large is your collection?
    • Do you have downloaded copies of all the music you want to listen to? Are they all in one place, well organized and tagged? If you just have downloads in the Spotify app, you won’t be able to use those files, you don’t actually own that music. You’ll need DRM-free audio files.
    • Where and how do you want to be able to access them? Just from one device like your phone? Many devices? Is having access at home good enough, or do you want to be able to access your collection while you’re away from home?
    • Will you be the only user?
    • What kind of budget do you have to work with?

    An old PC might be enough to act as a server, but there’s more involved and the answer to what you need depends on what exactly you want to do. You will not be able to build a personal version of Spotify with just an old PC, for instance.








  • A long wire is an antenna that will gather electromagnetic noise from the air and turn it into random signal on the line. Shorter wires will be less responsive and therefore less noisy, and you can also mitigate the problem by grounding everything properly. It’s also possible that with the wires in that parallel ribbon, they may induce crosstalk on each other. If you want to be really careful, you could replace that big ribbon cable with an STP cable and ground the shielding jacket.

    Also, a noisy/low quality power input to the Pi will produce noise in its circuits and ultimately the output. If you can, supply the power from something better than a wall wart.


  • Your description makes belief sound like willful ignorance.

    Maybe, maybe not. In the absence of evidence, belief may be harmless, though somewhat pointless in the sense of Hitchen’s razor:

    What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

    and Newton’s flaming laser sword:

    That which cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.

    It certainly becomes willful ignorance if the believer avoids and/or actively rejects contradictory evidence.

    It sounds like the real challenge is knowing when you have enough information to convert your educated guess into full-blown knowledge

    The educated guess (hypothesis) becomes knowledge when it can be demonstrated by direct experiment rather than inferred/constructed from related knowledge. Also it’s important that the educated guess be testable/disprovable somehow, at least in theory (Popper’s falsifiability principle):

    Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it.

    So, belief is benign when it exists in an untested/untestable area and the believer is not bound to the belief emotionally. Belief is malignant when it exists in a tested area or when the believer clings to the belief emotionally. Belief is either harmless or extremely damaging, but in either case of no practical value.



  • Belief is seeing that the light is green even when it isn’t.

    Knowledge is accepting that the light is red when it is.

    Believing that the light is green will not help you when you get flattened by a truck. Knowing that the light is red will keep you from dying pointlessly.

    Knowledge is the first step on the path to wisdom. Belief is delusion.

    If you cannot demonstrate, or point to a demonstration, then all you can do is guess. You can make an educated guess based on other demonstrations, but if you cling to your guesswork as if it were demonstrated to be true, and you internalize your guesswork as part of your identity, and you refuse to let go of it when confronted with contradictory demonstrations, then you are a fool.



  • Someone else has mentioned M-Disc and I want to second that. The benefit of using a storage format like this is that the actual storage media is designed to last a long time, and it is separate from the drive mechanism. This is a very important feature - the data is safe from mechanical, electrical and electronic failure because the storage is independent of the drive. If your drive dies, you can replace it with no risk to the data. Every serious form of archival data storage is the same - the storage media is separate from the reading device.

    An M-Disc drive is required to write data, but any DVD or BD drive can read the data. It should be possible to acquire a replacement DVD drive to recover the data from secondary markets (eBay) for a very long time if necessary, even after they’re no longer manufactured.