A Reddit Refugee

current college student, permanent pirate, lover of all things mechanical and on wheels

moved here from lemmy.one because there are no active admins on that instance.

  • 2 Posts
  • 56 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

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  • If there is any game you legit shouldn’t pirate if possible, Factorio is one of them. Wube is one of the most based small independent developers out there, their code quality, optimization and game design is second to none, they have a super active community that the developers themsleves often participate in, and their game is very reasonably priced for the thousands of hours you can dump into it. The account requirement for the official mod portal is maybe the only slightly anti-user thing they’ve done.

    Oh noo, your still working 3rd party mod downloader makes you enter in mods one at a time instead of grabbing a whole mod pack?

    No offense, but I think this is a personal skill issue. If it were any other company doing it sure, but don’t take Wube to task over it just because you’re mad it takes an extra 5min to install a large mod pack via a 3rd party loader that I’m sure they’ve intentionally not blocked.


  • Not just you. Low(er) quality downloads are still a huge part of the torrent scene, see how popular most 720p YIFY uploads are even though their encoder quality is pretty garbage. Most people in general want a fast download and are viewing on a small laptop or even phone screen and don’t give a rats ass about fidelity, LQ works perfectly fine for this. Even I’ll grab a LQ once in a while if it’s something my girl and I want to watch that night and I didn’t plan ahead.

    The desire for high quality uploads is more for people running home setups like Plex, where it’s better to keep a HQ source file and have it transcoded to lower resolutions by your home server setup as necessary. They generally aren’t storage constrained as an 8tb hard drive for a normal PC is fairly cheap these days. I’d wager maybe <30% of torrenters actually go after ultra HQ uploads based off seeder numbers.

    Personally I stick to stuff that is at least 1080p with HDR and H265 encode preferred, because I archive most everything I download due to similar problems with internet speed. Over maybe 12 years of torrents I’ve amassed a hair over 5tb of content, and that’s a LOT of movies l, it all fits on a single $120 external HDD.


  • It will not affect system stability, but… Surge protectors do not work at all without a ground wire to drop excess voltage to. Any kind of line voltage disturbance could kill every device.

    Additionally, without any ground wire to pull the housings of devices to ground, the potential for a short to energize the case and then electrocute you is also high.

    additionally additionally, if you have grounded outlets that don’t actually have a ground connection running to them, that means either the wiring system is broken or it was “updated” by an unlicensed hack job who has undoubtedly made numerous more dangerous decisions elsewhere in the circuit.

    If your house is entirely ungrounded you really should have an electrician come update it ASAP. Outlet grounds have been mandatory since 1971. The chances are high that wiring predating that code is still using old cloth-wrapped wire insulation or even knob&tube, both of which are huge fire risks as the insulation is decayed badly by now. It’s expensive to have all new wire pulled but it is necessary.




  • You can never share any of the software specific formats ever (.ipt for inventor, .dwg for Autocad, .sldprt for solidworks, etc). All those formats include fingerprints inside that are not user visible or modifyable but include detailed info about the copy of the software license that created it. If anyone else ever opens those with a legit copy, the software itself phone home about it and they’ll know, because whatever license the pirate copy shows will not exist on Autodesk/Dassault/whatever’s side.

    Platform agnostic formats likely embed this kind of Metadata too somewhere, but it can probably be stripped, and most of the time when sharing an agnostic for.at like .step/.stl the opening software is not made by autodesk or whoever.

    Finally it could just legit be a user report. Companies like autodesk have a reporting system to send evidence of suspected pirated software use directly to their legal teams. It doesnt happen often but if youre using like a 7 year old copy of Inventor and something feels off… yeah. So you’re never truly safe if you have to share your models at all.


  • Adobe is lax about it because they care about being the industry standard monopoly. When more people use their software and become proficient in it, more companies want to buy it so they have better hiring prospects, and Adobe wins.

    The stories I’ve heard about most CAD companies, especially Dassault, is that they don’t generally care about the pirated software, and if they do, the worst they’ll do if you’re just a hobbyist is send you a “cut it out dude” cease and desist.

    The problems arise when you start using their software for anything that makes money, like sending models/drawings to other companies/clients or whatever. If youre trying to run a business with pirated software they will absolutely pin your ass to the wall with lawyers and go after every cent you earned using their software PLUS the cost of a full license PLUS whatever damages they feel like pulling out of their ass.



  • Don’t use a thumb drive, use an external hard/solid state drive or install an internal drive. Even an aliexpress 64gb ssd for $10 is better than any thumbdrive. Thumbdrive’s flash and controllers are not designed for OS level continuous writes and will die very quickly.

    If you must use a thumb drive, add some kind of air flow over it, and disable all logging features in openWRT to reduce writes as much as possible.



  • The absolute best bang for your buck new GPU’s for decode/encode are Intel ARC GPU’s. They use Intel’s Quick Sync Video system which is some of the best supported encode/decode libraries out there, and they’re cheap.

    An ARC A380 is easily had for $110, runs entirely off 75w PCIe slot power requiring no additional PSU wires, and supports H264/H265/AV1 encode. It’s a no brainer.

    As long as it physically fits the slot, it should not have an issue with the lower PCIe bandwidth. The lower end GPU’s really need very little even for video encode.