MudMan
@MudMan@fedia.io
- Comment on What else should I selfhost? 2 weeks ago:
I absolutely don't understand Calibre at all. That's been my point all along.
I can tell you that I've actively tried to avoid Calibre when setting up a self-hosted ebook library and I'm currently chugging along with my Calibre-web install.
Turns out, somebody is forcing me to use Calibre, because I promise if I could have stuck with the half a dozen attempts at having a ebook library handle my pre-existing directory structure I wouldn't have wasted a day having Calibre ingesting and duplicating it all, then manually checking that everything came over before feeling safe enough to delete the original repository.
Because that's how it still works as of today, as it turns out.
And again, Calibre gets no more respect from me than... I don't know, Canva. I owe neither of them anything and if I happen to have a bad time using any part of it I feel super happy and safe sharing that on whatever venue seems applicable with as much sarcasm as I see fit. Software is software and end user criticism is end user criticism. I'm being exceedingly articulate and respectful about it, by those standards, speaking with full understanding of what the bad version of this looks and feels like.
- Comment on What else should I selfhost? 2 weeks ago:
Hah. You get the "FOSS gets to be crap because you can't do it yourself" cop out often, but rarely when you haven't actually complained about it.
I mean, there are a ton of Calibre alternatives, the point everybody is making here is that a bunch of them don't get enough support or stick to Calibre conventions anyway because Calibre is at the ground floor of the entire thing and has sort of metastasized into a de facto standard architecture. I don't even know that you could make a commercial Kindle alternative and not at least support Calibre conventions at this point. It's like trying to not use HDMI anymore, and for similar reasons.
Unless you're Kovid Goyal (made me look that up and man, what a rough name to have in the 2020s), I don't see how that connects to your response at all. And even if you were, honestly. I've seen some of the other stuff the guy has done and said. I'm not sure he'd take it as an insult and I don't mean it as one. The man made the piece of software he needed the way he wanted, which is very much not universal. It just happens to now be the core of entire chunk of the ebook industry that isn't made by Amazon.com Inc., much to my annoyance.
But since I'm at it, if your software is annoying people have no need to hide their anger or contempt for the ways in which it is annoying, even if it's FOSS. If you put it out there don't be mad when end users act like end users. People who stumble upon a piece of software and try to use don't need to do an audit on your accounts and licenses to know if they are allowed to be mad at the stuff that's annoying them. FOSS competes with commercial software in equal terms, as far as end users are concerned. Some of the ways it competes have to do with privacy, security, code access and lack of fees, but all the other ways, including UX, polish and feature set, still apply.
- Comment on What else should I selfhost? 2 weeks ago:
Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it's old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.
It's not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there's all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.
I've been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it's weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.
- Comment on What else should I selfhost? 2 weeks ago:
There's a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.
A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it's inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.
See also: Gnome.
- Comment on What else should I selfhost? 2 weeks ago:
Have I? I tried so many so quickly I can't even remember.
In any case I'm part of the problem now, because my dealbreaker was having to organize my library in the obtuse alien way Calibre wants instead of the nice, human-readable way I already had. I bit that bullet, so now I'm married to a Calibre format library and thus perpetuating the terrible standard.
- Comment on What else should I selfhost? 2 weeks ago:
Hah. Good to know. I haven't refreshed that container in a while and the data keeps populating just fine, so I hadn't considered it. I'll take a peek at the new one.
- Comment on What else should I selfhost? 2 weeks ago:
I strongly recommend Overseerr if you are going to run a video server.
Forget piracy. I only host dumps of my physical media (which at least where I am is perfectly legal), but that thing has an database of international streaming soruces. I use it just as a watchlist and to check whether I have access to a thing on a commercial streaming service already. It is effectively Justwatch for your streaming media.
Immich is a pretty obvious thing, too, if you want to get out of commercial image hosting services.
I'd say, though, that's a fairly ambitious plan, and if your self-hosted apps, your home webhosting and your NAS are all going to live on the same home server I'd certainly figure out security and backups before overcommitting. That plan is a lot of hard drives and failure points you're gonna be wrangling.
- Comment on What else should I selfhost? 2 weeks ago:
I wish you didn't have to do things the Calibre way to host ebooks, but whatever effort it takes to sort out ebook hosting must be a pain in the ass, because everything is built on top of Calibre despite Calibre being perhaps the most obtuse piece of "programmer-knows-better" software ever engineered.
Almost every other ebook self-hosted app is just a wrapper on top of that nonsense. I hate it.
You can try to use Komga instead, but it's mostly meant for comic books and it's kinda heavy, honestly.
- Comment on Video Game Websites in the early 00s 1 month ago:
It's just nostalgia. The vast majority of those were either entirely devoid of content or entirely unusable.
Also, mostly Flash, so disqualified for human consumption by default.
- Comment on Steam survey for December 2025 shows Linux holding to 3.19% 1 month ago:
I definitely advocate for some key tweaks to Windows 11, for sure. Just one specifically as a manual registry edit, two perhaps, but absolutely.
Still, depending on your setup, your hardware and your use case you may or may not need to mess with some configs beyond what you'd do on Windows. Back when I moved into Bazzite I was more annoyed by this argument because I had all the setup tweaks fresher in my mind. These days I'm more part of the problem because I tweaked the tweaks and I genuinely forget all the things that needed tweaking, so in my head it was more straightforward than it was.
I'll say that I do regret somewhat going with KDE Plasma, which is a bad fit for Bazzite, but that I haven't reinstalled with Gnome because, man, do I not want to go through that process again. So that's probably a good gauge of whether that sounds like too much or not.
- Comment on Steam survey for December 2025 shows Linux holding to 3.19% 1 month ago:
Sounds about right. Console install counts start being "relevant" after 20-ish million unit sales. The Deck itself isn't close to that, and the overall Linux install base on Steam is maybe what, a third of that?
But I'd argue you need more for Steam, because a lot of those Linux users also have Windows available as it is, given that about 20% of them are on a Steam Deck and many of those likely have a Windows PC on the side rather than only using Steam on the Deck.
- Comment on Steam survey for December 2025 shows Linux holding to 3.19% 1 month ago:
Having daily driven Bazzite for ages now...
...nah, you still will tinker.
Linux advocates just don't parse what "tinkering" means for most users, and frequent distro hoppers tend to think anything that doesn't break in the install process is "tinker-free". Neither is even remotely accurate.
Bazzite is alright, but it defaults to autoupdates, so you may want to understand how rolling back on a Fedora atomic distro works if you don't want to be confused later when something fixes itself/breaks randomly for no reason.
- Comment on Microsoft's Satya Nadella wants you to stop saying AI "slop" in 2026 1 month ago:
There's only one mention of the word "slop" attributed to Nadella in the entire piece. It's this:
"We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication," Nadella laments, emphasizing hopes that society will become more accepting of AI, or what Nadella describes as "cognitive amplifier tools." "...and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other."
Now, that's entirely meaningless corpospeak, but it's also very clearly not "Nadella wants you to stop saying slop".
But the article needed bait and nobody reads past the clickbait headline anymore. The intellectual laziness fuelling the slop isn't exclusive of AI usage.
We suck at this.
I propose an oath, ok? You commit to not using GenAI in 2026... and also to not EVER comment on an article or social media post you haven't read in full.
Deal?
- Comment on Street Fighter II: It sounds dumb but they really fixed a typo with a human leg 1 month ago:
They didn't, they used a sprite with a single pixel to hack together a visual tweak (that just happens to be part of Guile's leg).
But watch the video anyway. Despite the clickbaity thumbnail (blame Google) it's a passable account of an example of having to fix a visual bug in code after an asset lock because of how the production process of old games was structured.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 1 month ago:
Oh, so there literally is no practical reason? Just pure aesthetics, OCD-ish stuff?
So does that extend to the lid and people just say "toilet seat" as a catch-all or is there a specifically cultural predilection for the seat down/lid up configuration? Because that one looks messy to me. If the goal is for the toilet/bathroom to look tidy surely the lid down is a must, right?
- Comment on I have no respect for people whose only motivation for refraining from drunk driving is because of the law 1 month ago:
I don't give a crap, honestly. Follow the rules for whatever reason. That's why laws are laws, so people don't need to agree on whether something is a good idea or not, they just... have to do it and at least wait a few years to whine about how it's a bad idea.
I don't need to respect people doing dangerous shit in my vicinity. Not getting turned into people pulp by a ton of hurling metal isn't a morality test for me to pick my friends or find people to admire. It's a legal requirement so that me and... you know, children, get to remain attached to all our limbs for as long as possible.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 1 month ago:
You guys keep coming back with glib answers meant to comment on the question, and you're missing the point.
I genuinely don't know what the complaint is. I need someone to tell me that it's about people finding it gross to be within 30 cm of something previously exposed to a naked butt cheek for cultural reasons or something. I genuinely don't get it. Like, in practical terms. It's not a rhetorical question.
- Comment on Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore 1 month ago:
Nobody ever cheered for Windows. I was there at the Windows 95 launch and everybody hated it and its problems were "impossible to ignore" and it was an embarrassing failure in tech circles and the BSOD was a meme.
Remind me again how that went.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 1 month ago:
Yeah, with a semi-large household there's a fairly even chance of anybody needing or wanting any sort of configuration on the toilet. But mostly you just... you know, put the whole lid down. For one so you don't spray your poop all over when you flush, for another because it... you know, looks nice.
I get wiping the edge if you're a peer-stander-upper. I get making sure there's paper left. I get cleaning the bowl (which Americans don't get because they poo in swimming pools, as it turns out). I don't get the argument about the toilet seat position specfiically.
Incidentally, I used to think the argument was about dudes not putting the seat up to pee and spraying their stuff all over the seat, plus the mist then leaking under and drying at the bottom, so if you don't wipe after yourself it ends up getting all crusty under there. For the longest time I assumed the argument was that people were mad at dudes peeing witht he seat down, and only later realized that's apparently not what people are mad about?
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 1 month ago:
They care about what? What do these people want to happen that is not happening and why?
This is a conversation I've literally never had about an issue I've never heard being an issue outside of that one joke in The Big Lebowski and other US media. I genuinely don't know what sort of cultural or personal context this "caring" is supposed to be about.
- Comment on The whole "toilet seat up, toilet seat down" gender debate could be solved by everybody putting the seat and lid down. 1 month ago:
Why is this a debate? I'm always confused by this one and how everybody assumes it's a huge argument. Why are people annoyed at either? I don't even register what state the toilet seat is at when I arrive. I'll just adjust it based on whatever it is I need. What is the supposed annoyance at lowering (or raising) the seat? Is that not what you do before doing your business regardless? Don't you mostly leave the whole lid down anyway? Why is this such a cliche? I do not get it.
- Comment on Steam survey for December 2025 shows Linux holding to 3.19% 1 month ago:
Also Windows 11 up 5%, including seemingly all of Win10's 2.5% drop and a bunch more over, with Windows overall growing slghtly by .16% (holiday purchased new hardware, presumably?).
Maybe I can just link people to this first one in all the upcoming "told you so"s regarding the crazy disproportionate hype from Linux advocates about Win10's EoL, how fast that was going to go and in what direction.
Expect with more expensive hardware coming up and no holiday sales that move to continue to be largely towards Win11 and very slow, as people continue to not give much of a crap about security patches.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 1 month ago:
I think they do probably think that having SteamOS perpetually be the holder for the "most popular" slot in the Linux category is not what the survey slot is for.
But then, they could have also finally provided a historical chart of OS usage, or a different category of SteamOS altogether.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 1 month ago:
Oh, hey, it is. Why the hell would it work that way? It seems to be manually excluded from the unfiltered list despite being by far the biggest usage.
So the data exists but it's weirdly buried for no reason.
Still, thanks for the pointer. I genuinely didn't know they had it set up that way.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 2 months ago:
I mean, you do you, but I don't see any of the things that you want requiring active surveillance. That all seems very attainable by having decent search, filtering and categorization tools.
If anything, I find myself now seeking "hidden gems on Steam" despite Steam knowing everything about my gaming habits. And that's on Steam, which does have a semi-decent crowdsourced tagging and categorization system. Their main page recommendations for e have consistently been either generically popular shovelware or insistent recommendations for games I do like but already own in other platforms that I can't tell Steam to stop shoving down my throat.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 2 months ago:
Is it listed? Do you have a link to that? Checking the latest survey the Linux section shows
"Arch Linux" 64 bit
0.32%
+0.01%Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
0.24%
+0.04%Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit
0.14%
0.00%Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit
0.12%
+0.01%I don't see a SteamOS segment listed as a non-Linux OS anywhere, either. If they do provide the info I'd love to see it, but it doesn't seem to be shown at a glance in the OS Version category.
Tracking game use by device isn't any more or less "crazy" than anything else they store. It's just telemetry. It's noteworthy that they share it in the format that they share it.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 2 months ago:
Nnnnah, the hardware survey is a wildly different number. That's what OS each account was using when they filled the survey.
This shows they have data on what OS each user is using at the time of running each game, on both a per-game and a per-hour basis and that they can tie all of it to each account across games and OSs. Which raises the question of why they run the hardware survey OS numbers in the first place, but I suppose if you're sharing the survey results you share the survey results, even if you have more accurate data on the same stats elsewhere.
That'd be a very interesting, very different stat, though, because it means they know what percentage of Windows/Linux users go back and forth, and CAN separate Linux usage from Deck from other OSs, which they very pointedly do not do on the survey, where SteamOS doesn't have its own entry. That's unsurprising but notable, along with the fact that they don't really report on their own hardware sales, either, despite being a main source of info about GPU and CPU vendors.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 2 months ago:
I'd say I'm more lenient about big data profiles than most people around here. I'd also say I understand why the reaction to the very real, very obvious overreach in the process of creating and using those profiles is radically opposed to any sort of personal recorded info.
The part that's weird is the cute little exception we make around the December holidays to get weirdly invasive infographics to share on social media.
For the record, I'd dispute that I prefer personalized recs to general ads. I already know the things I like that I want to buy. I'd much rather get a poke on things "I'd never consider".
I was on some social media site today and noted that there are some controversies going on where I only ever see the pushback and entirely infer that the people holding the opposite stance do exist, but they never show up in my channels. This is not unexpected in an algorithmically curated info landscape... but it's kind of bad and dangerous.
Ditto for only ever being served media based on the media I already like. Again, obvious but important: that's decidedly NOT how I got to like the media I already like.
- Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases 2 months ago:
I've said this elsewhere, but December is quickly becoming the time of the year when all the corpos tell us just exactly how much they spy on us and we all collectively go "Cool!" and tell each other about it for some reason.
FWIW, the median number of games played is four. Not forty, not fourteen, just four. If we're going to get spyware stats, at least let's put them in context. As it turns out, half of all Steam users are only playing the one game (given the numbers we know on concurrents, that'd be CS2/DOTA/PUBG or Apex, in most cases.
The play-everything, strong opinion haver user is a fraction of the userbase.
Also interesting, Steam is telling people how their playtime splits between Windows/Deck/Non-Deck Linux... but they pointedly don't share those stats platform-wide. Sometimes silence is data, too.
- Comment on UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones 2 months ago:
I genuinely don't know that I follow that explanation. For one thing, what reasons would there be to ban paid blind boxes, online or offline, while allowing outright games of chance with a monetary payout? In what world is a Magic the Gathering blister more of a problem (for a consenting adult, anyway) than an online casino?
But also, by the larger point you're making it seems like you'd be fine with a government saying "porn is banned for everybody because reasons" but not with "porn is banned for kids", at least in a scenario where that comes with age verification.
To be clear, I agree that both of those are... not good. I just don't know that I can wrap my head around the logic of thinking the more extensive issue is more acceptable than the alternative. You could argue that the porn ban is an excuse to add mass surveillance, but at that point we're not talking about the porn ban, we're talking about the mass surveillance.
Oh, and for the record, there is plenty of will someone think of the children regarding loot boxes. Both on its own and bundled together with a blanket assessment that gambling is immoral and/or illegal. It's actually a fairly close match to the porn issue, where concerns about children are being wrapped around a more targeted hostility around the concept from both sides of the political spectrum.