I am more than happy to "take my coffee and fuck off". But I'll do it with a 50 cent instant coffee from a supermarket, not pay 10$ for it just to not be able to relax in a coffee shop.
My main issue is that they're now slowly testing the waters to see if they can make you watch ads while still paying for the subscription, and at that point, might as well take advantage of Romania's lack of law enforcement and hit the torrent websites.
It already came full circle some years ago when we started seeing new streaming services every year, and those companies pulling their content from other platforms to put on their own. Then you had to start thinking about what servces you need, whether you still want those services, etc. Just like cable!
True, although I guess this is sort of understandable. It's the "you're paying us, but here are some ads" that really gets me.
Either way, 5 bucks a month to Emby, a really easy to get membership to a large private torrent site, and a 16TB hard drive solves these problems for me, and will continue to.
Thanks for the tips!
Could you explain how can one get about "getting a membership to a large private torrent site"?
Also, why Emby rather than, say, Jellyfin or Plex?
The private trackers tend to be a pain in the butt to remain active enough on to keep your account, as they tend to require a certain amount of upload:download ratio. This can be difficult to achieve since so many members have high-speed seedboxes.
Just use https://1337x.to/ or any other public tracker. You'll be able to find 99% of whatever you want.
I was a Plex user, but gave up on it when it started to suck. This was years ago. Emby was the other option at the time and I'm a big fan of it. I've never tried jellyfin. If you want to, email me and I can get you an invite.
It really doesn't seem like it has to be that complicated, yet somehow we've gone from channels with markedly anti-consumer fixed bundles to a massively fragmented ecosystem where it genuinely seems like the streaming services _don't_ actually want you to subscribe by the amount of the effort that goes into making things hard to watch or doing everything that could make the streaming experience worse (region availability, paid tier ads, lower bitrate stream quality, and so on).
Seems you were not chasing the launch enough. I've been guilty of that before, missing the development of a demo that was meant to be presented to big clients. You may wanna explore why you lacked commitment and drive for the development.
Shout out to Stanford that made it possible to start a CS education for free, for a Romanian kid who could not afford it (me). The free video course they have had up there since about 20 years was one of the foundations of my programming career now.
This is really cool, I love how you planned the entire development before with graphs.
When I was 16, I developed an mp3 player in C (I cheated and used mpg123 library). Audio players are a great way to learn about low level stuff and as a first project.
First of all, your situation is completely normal for the time period we live in. A few people I thought would never become homeless (web3 engineers who used to make 300K a month etc) are on the verge of it now. Pretty insane combination of a mental health and economic crisis we have going on.
>I’m willing to work. I know I can earn 3-4x more doing freelance tech, but I can’t do that from a car.
Why not? There are homeless people doing Amazon Turk from cafes in Hong Kong.
Second, you need to focus on fast money making sources. That's Lyft, shoveling snow, micro-tasks (I help people with Solana developer questions in the Raydium Discord for example, earning 100-200$ per small script), food stamps, church handouts, it does not matter. Cash quick. You need some quick money to ease up the stress so you can focus on the next big leap. You'll get to the big tech job, but until then, you need to focus on your current reality.
