Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That’s my first stop for ebooks.

Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.

People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.

Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.

Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I’m in have thousands.

Many channels are default for all users in the server.

Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can’t handle this is no alternative at all.

If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.

I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.

I set up their accounts

Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.

The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.

Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.

I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.

I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.

I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.

It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.

No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?

Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.

DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).

DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.

But any 50 watt chip will get absolutely destroyed by a 500 watt gpu

If you are memory-bound (and since OP’s talking about 192GB, it’s pretty safe to assume they are), then it’s hard to make a direct comparison here.

You’d need 8 high-end consumer GPUs to get 192GB. Not only is that insanely expensive to buy and run, but you won’t even be able to support it on a standard residential electrical circuit, or any consumer-level motherboard. Even 4 GPUs (which would be great for 70B models) would cost more than a Mac.

The speed advantage you get from discrete GPUs rapidly disappears as your memory requirements exceed VRAM capacity. Partial offloading to GPU is better than nothing, but if we’re talking about standard PC hardware, it’s not going to be as fast as Apple Silicon for anything that requires a lot of memory.

This might change in the near future as AMD and Intel catch up to Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth and integrated NPU performance. Then you can sidestep the Apple tax, and perhaps you will be able to pair a discrete GPU and get a meaningful performance boost even with larger models.

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

It’s worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it’ll do it while using a lot less power.

I think it helps to think of browsing as a basic form of searching. Everything you can do in a browsing context, you can by definition do in a searching context…if the client doesn’t suck. The information needed to browse is embedded in the tags.

So this strikes me as entirely dependent on your client software. A good client should let you browse by tags. You could add Dewey numbers as tags to start with, so you can browse that way if you want, then add any other tags that might be useful (like genres, for example) on top of that.

The only difference with tags in this context is that books will appear in multiple places.

OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.

Gotcha. Typically lowercase b=bit and uppercase B=Byte, but it’s hard to tell what people mean sometimes, especially in casual posts.

Come to think of it, I messed up the capitalization too. Should be a capital M for mega.

1mbps is awfully low for 1080. Or did you mean megabyte rather than megabit?

Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.

Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?

Unlikely.

I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.

The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn’t want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.

How does it work exactly? From a quick look at the docs, it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy. Is that right? If so, that kind of mucks up the standard behavior of Lemmy. Lemmy allows both users and admins to block entire instances, so aggregating instances into one “mega-instance” effectively breaks that functionality. That’s not good from a UX perspective.

I tried searching for some bridges instances but didn’t have any luck. I guess I’m doing it wrong. Does anyone have a real example of something that works?

I would guess that’s not a hard limit. Maybe they decided to undersell it because many 4TB+ nvme drives are physically larger and/or require heat sinks, so they might not fit. I don’t see any details on their web site though.

Given two drives with the same size, same heat output, and same interface, it shouldn’t make a difference.

It’s pretty common to see fake limits like that on spec sheets. I can definitely put more RAM in my motherboard than is officially supported since higher-capacity DIMMs are out in the same form factor now compared to when the mobo was released.

It’s insane how many things they push as Snaps when they are entirely incompatible with the Snap model.

I think everyone first learns what Snaps are by googling “why doesn’t ____ work on Ubuntu?” For me, it was Filebot. Spent an hour or two trying to figure out how the hell to get it to actually, you know, access my files. (This was a few years ago, so maybe things are better now. Not sure. I don’t live that Snap life anymore, and I’m not going back.)

Can you explain what you mean by “visually lossless”? Is this a purely subjective classification, or is there a specific definition or benchmark you used?