fonix232

If you went back ~10 years and said this image from the next Austin Powers movie, depicting the new villains, people would believe you.

I instinctively went to cover the nearest drink. Now my neighbour thinks I'm a creep for busting her door down in a bathrobe.

Yep, some Tsoukal-sauce should fix it right up

Maybe not. Maybe she's just that one worker who's never to be found unless it's time for one of the very few actually fun tasks that she immediately claims for herself, further ruining the retail worker experience. Loading shelves? She's gone. Helping a bitching Karen? Poof right into a cloud of mist. Helping the sweet old grandma who's know about tipping $20-50 for holding her cart and putting 2-3 items in it then checking her out? Of course she's already grabbed her arm...

Centralised Auth stack for all your services.

I for example just put together a neat pocketID+Crowdsec+Caddy stack, and via OAuth I can easily manage everything. Every service that integrates with OAuth makes it super simple to create new users automatically with limited scopes, all directly fed by PocketID, allowing me to expose my services to the open web without fear of being hacked (crodsec being the fallback if shit would hit the fan, blocking all the community-sourced known threat actors and suspicious behaviour like port probing, login stuffing, etc.).

Given the prevalence of one click install NASes (and by that I mean that Plex is a one click install, or even the whole *arr stack), I wouldn't be sure.

Also that doesn't account for people who are limited by available ISPs - some of us only have the choice of a single ISP, who might not be offering static IP, and CG-NAT makes port forwarding impossible. IPv6 would fix that but given we're not much better off than we were ten years ago... I don't have high hopes.

Streaming traffic has to go through the Plex proxies if your server isn't exposed to the internet (meaning proper port forwarding, no CG-NAT and no other ISP fuckery that would prevent such functionality).

Of the 25 million users of Plex, how many do you think have the setup (either the ability or availability) that supports direct playback remotely?

Ideally yes, only basic things like authentication and server mapping should go through the main Plex servers but sadly this isn't the case. And Plex has provided that service for years, for free. Them asking money for a service that isn't free to run, is fair game.

What isn't fair is how they've been doing it.

Okay, let's clarify something.

Plex has been essentially "giving away" a service for the better part of what, 20 years?

And that service is the remote proxying of your server and its access. Basically, you didn't need to open a port, expose your server to the public, Plex provided a proxy through which you could stream to your heart's content, knowing that your server is both accessible and (more or less, more than if you managed it yourself in most cases) secure.

Now obviously, they are a company and thus need to make revenue to continue developing the server, clients, and maintaining the infrastructure. Mind you, Plex has 25 million active monthly users... Even if just 10% of that is active at any given moment, streaming at 10Mbps... that's 25 MILLION megabits per sec. 25 thousand gigabits. 25 terabits. PER. SECOND. Being proxied through infra Plex has to pay for. Your average proxy/CDN dataserver unit can do usually around 100 gigabit, meaning Plex needs 250 of those. Just to serve 10% of the userbase.

And don't forget that, unlike "traditional streaming platforms" where CDNs can greatly amplify bandwidth (due to repeating same content to thousands/millions of people), Plex can't easily utilise this infrastructure approach, AND they have to constantly stream INTO the proxy as well as outwards (a CDN pulls in the source file once and then distributes it, Plex literally needs to pull the data stream on-demand, without storing it).

I don't like these restrictions they're putting in, "enshittifying" the service - e.g. if I have my server forwarded properly and don't need to go through their proxy, I should be given a free pass (albeit I already have that since I bought lifetime Plex Pass), but I do get how it would be annoying for the average user to not realise why they're asked to pay when their friend isn't.

Joshuah the Messiah/Anointed, yes.

See that wouldn't really work. The modern "Jesus" is actually quite far from the original old Hebrew/Aramaic name he would've used.

No, it would've been Yeshua or Yehoshua (the Bible has some shifting references as to when the longer form of the name might've gotten shortened to Yeshua).

Similarly, "Christ" isn't something used in Aramaic. It's not even technically his name, it's more of a title, from the Greek Χριστός (Christos, translating as "anointed), which in Hebrew would be mashiakh - or in direct English translation... Messiah.

Furthermore Yeshua was a quite common name at the time, in Nazareth alone you would've found a handful, even though the village was maybe a thousand people at the time.

The context doesn't matter. The bottom line is that FPGAs provide flexibility, not improved performance. Period.