While there are many reasons to dislike (or outright avoid) Apple - if you purchase music from them, it’s DRM-free and useable anywhere.

I believe they were one of the first official channels to do this.

Still, hadn’t heard of Quobuz and will check them out!

You’ve described Ghost. Subscriptions for content are a first class citizen.

It’s primary a writing platform with built-in monetization options and the ability to self host. We switched to it from Substack. It’s been fantastic to use and operate. Super slick.

But that’s exactly my point - we here in this bubble prefer Jellyfin - but it’s not ready for mass adoption. Even plex is a drop in the bucket.

I see Jellyfin suggested as an alternative to Plex here. I hope it is one day.

At the moment it’s nowhere close.

I’ve been running Jellyfin side-by-side Plex for two years and it’s still not a viable replacement for anyone but me. Parents, my partner, none of the possible solutions for them come anywhere near close to the usability of Plex and its ecosystem of apps for various devices.

That will likely change because plex is getting worse every day and folks can contribute their own solutions to the playback issues. With plex it’s more noise, more useless features. So one gets better (Jellyfin) and one gets worse (Plex).

But at the moment it really isn’t close for most folks who are familiar with the slickness of commercial apps.

Even from the administrative side, Jellyfin takes massively more system resources and it doesn’t reliably work with all my files.

Again, Jellyfin will get there it’s just not a drop in replacement for most folks yet.

And for context I started my DIY streaming / hosting life with a first gen Apple TV (pretty much a Mac mini with component video outs) that eventually got XBMC and then Boxee installed on it. I even have the forksaken Boxee box.

I’m not defending them because it’s a shit move, but they clearly understand the most valuable feature is not their ad-ridden free content but rather the original value prop of the service to make it easy to share personal media with small groups of friends.

We use NGINX’s 444 on every LLM crawler we see.

Caddy has a similar “close connection” option called “abort” as part of the static response.

HAProxy has the “silent-drop” option which also closes the TCP connection silently.

I’ve found crawling attempts end more quickly using this option - especially attacks - but my sample size is relatively small.

Edit: we do this because too often we’ve seen them ignore robots.txt. They believe all data is theirs. I do not.

Recently switched from VsCodium to neovim - but still use Codium for some specific tasks.

My setup customization focuses around Telescope, Treesitter, Trouble & Blink.

But the advice I got was to start with vim keybindings in VSCode. I used those for six weeks until I got the hang of the basics and it had gone from frustrating to somewhat second nature.

Then I made the move.

I still use Codium for Terraform work (I have struggled to get the Terraform LS working well in neovim and I don’t use it often enough to warrant the effort) and as a GUI git client - I like the ability to add a single line from multiple files and I haven’t looked up how to do it any other way - I’ve got other stuff to do and it’s not slowing me down.

But I grew to hate Codium / VS code tabs in larger codebases. I was spending so much time looking for open tabs ( I realise this is a me problem). While neovim has tabs, it’s much more controlled and I typically use them very differently and very sparingly.

If I need to look up a data structure I just call it up temporarily with Telescope via a find files call or a live grep call (both setup to only use my project directory by default), take a peak, and move on.

The thing is - security risks are going to exist anywhere you install plugins you haven’t audited the code for. Unless you work in an IDE where there’s a company guaranteeing all plugins - there are always going to be risks.

I’d argue that VSCode, while a bigger target, has both a large user base and Microsoft’s security team going for it. I don’t see the theme being compromised as much as problem because it got solved and also prompted some serious security review of many marketplace plugins. Not ideal, but not terrible.