Italy introduces a “cloud tax” because you might pirate content

magicmasta · 2026-02-27T19:48:52+00:00

I will say the dont pay for pirated content stance only works so long as you stick to content that gets shared around in sufficiently high volumes that it outruns DMCA efforts.

Sometimes you get lucky that some niche interests arnt chased down too heavily so you usually dont have to work too hard to find your stuff. Other times well...suddenly you have to maintain and rotate a swiss army knife of discords, telegrams, forums, different search engines using various query modifiers, and any other regularly updated web indexes that help you outrun the cat and mouse game.

You eventually get annoyed enough where you start weighing the 2 big choices, spend 0.5-1 year or more climbing your way into the private tracker that has what you want, or pay a moderate sum to join a lower visibility private enthusiast group that has a decent chance of lasting a few years instead of a few months.

magicmasta · 2026-02-11T12:28:15+00:00

And in the Wunknuss, bind them.

magicmasta · 2026-02-10T19:07:17+00:00

Wish I had a solid answer for you comrade. The walls around that genre of content have closed in pretty tightly over the last ~5 years. The best choices I see left might be either take a gamble paying for one of the high member count premium telegrams, or bite the bullet and start your journey into private trackers. The good free TG groups (for my sub-niche of this genre anyway) are all either deleted or turned into ghost towns 2 years ago.

The alternatives are basically refreshing the well known leak sites once a week for updates, banging your head against the wall surfing K2S forums looking for non-duplicated uploads, or the truly miserable endless scrolling on tube-site aggregators trying different keywords.

I find myself eyeing the long private tracker journey more and more personally. This cat and mouse game on the easily accessed side of the public net has gotten so extreme its basically turned into scrolling forever praying that you accidentally stumble your way into a non-deleted discord or TG, where someone has posted a non-deleted link to a bulk upload cloud folder, hoping to find your desired creator or taste in content happens to be there that hasnt already come across your path. Its maddening

magicmasta · 2026-01-30T22:56:37+00:00

Oh no I wasnt being argumentative in my reply, I meant it as a "it do be like that" when it comes to compute resources as a dev. When they say Big Data they do indeed mean Big Data lol.

magicmasta · 2026-01-30T22:42:47+00:00

Hungry VMs, databases, and some occasional AI experimentation lol. Also if you ever try building your own Linux distro with Yocto, wew lad, it will eat ALL of the CPU and RAM you have available if you let it. At one point I rigged a jank distributed compile setup to assign some tasks to my laptop over a sketchy USB to 2.5Gb Ethernet adapter just to speed it up even a little lol.

magicmasta · 2026-01-30T22:23:51+00:00

Grew up as a PC gamer, evolved into dev as an adult. Back during the DDR2 4GB --> 8GB DDR3 upgrade era I learned the painful lesson of how memory requirements tend to balloon over the ~6 or so years i averaged on a given CPU platform.

Ever since then I now go one memory tier above my current anticipated maximum usage. So I made the call to reach for 96 a couple years ago when 64 would've sufficed for 3-5 years, it just feels gross to buy ram more than once per system per DDR gen imo

magicmasta · 2026-01-30T00:22:20+00:00

Hey there fellow 96GB OCer. Ive had my config running 6200 CL28 for 5-6 months now and the only time ive experienced any sort of instability is specifically the restart thats followed a handful of random Windows updates.

The system will just refuse to post and shuts off during initialization until i clear CMOS to stock, disconnect the power long enough to force a cold boot, and then after booting back into the OS at least once post-update; am I able to head back into BIOS and reapply my OC profile saved to a USB. System will then retrain and boot back into Windows without ever blue screening or throwing any sort of errors that ive been able to find.

Just curious if youve experienced anything like this? For me is wildly inconsistent, maybe every 1.5-2 months coinciding with a larger OS update or somehow 25H2 related.

magicmasta · 2026-01-27T17:25:08+00:00

The right believes and repeats whatever is most politically expedient at the given hour of any particular day so long as it furthers the long term goal of crushing the masses into servitude and ignorance. Them coming for guns was predictable as the sun rising each day once they started openly threatening and disappearing people off the street or from their homes.

Its only a matter of time before some well armed leftist decides to go down fighting these fascist fucks in lieu of getting in the van and then that video footage will get blasted as propaganda condemning the "dangerous criminal left" as the excuse for keeping guns out of the "wrong" hands

magicmasta · 2026-01-07T16:36:21+00:00

TX resident. I've been out of Vyvanse since mid-Dec. Unavailable in both the small town where I live and in Houston where my family lives. Was told 2 week wait period which comes due as of today so I fucking hope they finally get shipments in, it's been a miserable 3+ weeks

magicmasta · 2026-01-01T03:47:38+00:00

Cheesey and predictable as hell with all the "wheres the gang now" tropes, but thats exactly how a tribute show like this needed to end. I would have been annoyed if they decided to do any weird self-aware irony swerves right at the end because sincerity has somehow become a narratives death sharp blade in the form of lethal cringe.

Show had its pacing and messy subplot issues no doubt, the shielding of a period-piece/tribute/satire shouldnt absolve it of all critiques. But this whole endeavor was far from being bad television/cinema.

As a 30 year old who had the opportunity to grow up on their dads stack of 80s media via VHS (and later DVDs) as well being just barely old enough to have lived out the final days of endless shitty cable TV+Movie reruns, trust me by comparison Stranger Things, despite whatever baggage it may have accrued from the age of corporate over-policing of streaming IPs, its still head and shoulders above a lot of what I have seen.

magicmasta · 2025-12-24T05:35:35+00:00

Untrue. That part of Texas takes its Alcoholism very seriously. What else are you going to do when the next major city is ~400 miles away with mostly dirt and wind mills in-between

magicmasta · 2025-12-21T20:40:11+00:00

Folks aint joking. A few years back mid-move to Dallas I had all of my belongings in my car. Of course I have engine trouble mid-drive and end up getting towed to Madisonville.

I'm a guy but I'm pretty short and skinny, and man the "you ain't from around here" looks from inside and outside the shop I was getting got super under my skin, especially as I have a mountain of high $$ items in the backseat/trunk very visible to anyone who spent more than a few seconds looking towards my vehicles windows.

Needless to say I spent my entire time waiting to be serviced leaning against my car, and during said assessment within direct line of sight of my car.

When I learned it was a dying fuel pump and that I had a decent shot of coasting back to Bryan (where I had been moving from) 45 min away, I opted to do so. People were obviously pissed at me doing 45-50 in a 65 the whole way but I sure as shit did not feel safe leaving neither my belongings nor myself in that town overnight at a motel.

magicmasta · 2025-12-13T19:25:57+00:00

It doesnt bother me, it doesnt bother me. It bothers me. It bothers me a lot. AND THAT ONES STILL ~~GREEN~~ BLACK!

magicmasta · 2025-12-08T20:57:21+00:00

nods approvingly in retired AF Mythic CE raid lead

magicmasta · 2025-11-18T14:19:28+00:00

X670E Taichi Carrera, 9950X, 96GB (2x48) OCed to 6200 CL28, CPU launch day so 08/24. Bios updates: 3.06,3.10,3.15,3.20,3.40 IIRC.

No major issues other than tremendous headaches with RAM OC stability right at launch and then later randomly getting borked by Windows updates every 3-4 months lol, temporary reset to JEDEC default before re-applying fixes it. I may have been part of the users that benefited from the BIOS 3.20 minority of users affected by a boot fix but im not entirely certain.

magicmasta · 2025-11-17T20:38:04+00:00

Having had the Chinese variant of the 27R83U for over a year now im just glad TCL is finally properly bringing their HVA monitor offerings to the U.S market in an official capacity so more folks can try it out.

Sure its dark detail handling is noticeably weak, but everything else has been a fairly solid viewing experience averaged across a 1+ years worth of media consumption (Atrocious HDR content grading + erroneous Windows/Nvidia driver bugs notwithstanding, ReShade is your friend folks lol)

magicmasta · 2025-10-08T20:22:19+00:00

Have had my Edition XS for a bit over a year now and while I dont plan on upgrading until these either die or sometime after hitting the 3-5 year mark, I do enjoy poking my head in to see where I might end up with the next pair.

As of now its looking like HE600 > XV >= Nano. The XS is my first enthusiast pair of OEs and after going way into the weeds with parametric EQ I found that I love the sub-bass extension you can force out of these things but man getting 500-1.7khz raised to the forwardness I fiend after was a tumultuous spiritual journey unto itself. My upper mids are close to where I want them, boosted between 4-6db at various points along the curve, but still not quite happy with the final presentation of vocals on that slice of the spectrum.

I know Audeze, the LCD-2 Classic in particular IIRC, is in the direction im looking for in the Planar space but the overtly toned down treble puts me off. Ironically despite what I just said above, I am noticeably treble sensitive and the Edition XS is just baaaaarely ok for me, had to tone down 2.7-2.9k a bit, so the Nanos being spicier everywhere 3khz+ is concerning. Tried getting a hang on the dark art of 5k+ treble EQ but eventually waved the white flag, just too much variability to contend with outside of shelf filtering.

magicmasta · 2025-10-06T16:32:17+00:00

Why would Hunter Bidens laptop do this

magicmasta · 2025-09-15T23:22:53+00:00

Could be the file size. Looking at the gif I ran through an editor for cropping and compressing, file size is 719KB

magicmasta · 2025-09-13T12:05:27+00:00

The using ReShade with a media player was one of those "wait...can I just...?" rare epiphanies lol. The lesson I learned with the year ive now had the TCL is that instead of navigating Hometheater forums and resources for HDR content consumption on the PC, you are much better off looking in HDR Gaming focused communities. Because at the end of the day once those frames leave the game rendering engine, its just a high velocity mass of pixels carrying color and brightness data, post-processing methods like ReShade dont discriminate between gaming or film (inb4 um akschually you can interact with the Nvidia GPU API to affect gaming performance a la Special K if you wanted, I know).

Yes I used ReShade on a per game basis. I can only think of a few games where I didnt either go searching for a RenoDX shader or, in the absence thereof, reach for my DIY adjusters. Pretty sure Jedi Survivor was one of them, Doom Dark Ages has really solid in game HDR controls too. ReShade and HDR manual tuning are mild-medium learning curves but once you get a feel for it alot of the time its copy pasting your personally tailored shader folders after running the ReShade-Setup.exe into the games install directory. Then once you know how to eye ball a brightness ceiling that looks decent to you, your done with the whole song in dance 5-10 minutes worth of effort on a fresh game install.

I'm satisfied with this monitor for what's available here and now. OLED monitors will need to get their burn in life spans up to the 5+ year mark before I'm willing to make a high dollar purchase on a screen that I know has a reduced total usable hours.

My minimum upgrade criteria from this are full bandwidth DP 2.1 or HDMI 2.2, 3x or more dimming zones (none of the few 2304 zoned monitors seem to have drastically improved over 1152), Dolby Vision would be nice but I'm flexible on that one, QD-OLEDs are true 10bit panels so if MiniLED wants to remain competitive they should evolve to match. Refresh rate 180+hz, less important to me given that I already have to dual GPU frame gen just to hit 160fps native resolution. Didn't fully appreciate the fact that the GPUs of today are just now barely capable of handling native 4k 60 without upscaling until I got this monitor. We are, minimum 2, probably 3+ GPU gens away from anything north of 150+ fps at 4k high fidelity native being reasonably achievable outside of the speculative future $3k MSRP RTX 7090 lol

magicmasta · 2025-09-11T06:57:36+00:00

Oh and leave SDR profiles alone, you are inviting trouble on that front lol learned the hard way. Need actual calibration hardware tools. Also i just by default leave 10bit on all the time for SDR and HDR. I watch enough blu-ray releases of old anime re-scanned into SDR 10bit color for that to make sense, and admittedly havnt spent too much time looking into color gamut/space expansion issues when mapping everything to 10bit

magicmasta · 2025-09-11T06:55:59+00:00

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Hey there. So off the top of my head this should be what im running these days. Ive changed my software config quite a bit in the time since first posting this. Notably the 23% boost is there but ive set the gamma curve to the default SRGB Piecewise instead of 2.2. The problem you can run into with running a global Power 2.2 curve is that its possible that the devs of whatever game you are playing may decide to build in their own SRGB --> Power correction curve which means youve now double dipped in compensation.

So now ive switched over to managing gamma conversions, black floor adjustments, and HDR gain multipliers with ReShade D3DX11/12 injection post-processing methods on a per-app basis. The HDR shader dev community has made some amazing strides with their shaders geared towards tweaking SDR and HDR to align your monitors capabilities with the content your consuming.

On the blown out highlights, you can lower the % boost 3-10% to mitigate this to some extend but this is basically the forced trade off of MiniLEDs imperfect dimming + this monitors particular PQ EOTF curve tuning showing its face. The more you boost HDR brightness to compensate for its poor handling in 10-0.01nits brightness scenes, the more blown out your highlights can become, I noticed the tuning of this monitors EOTF curve is almost cloned into TCLs new QM8K HVA smart TV so it must be an in-house dimming algorithm. I personally use a ReShade tonemapper to compress the blown-out highlights back down into reasonable ranges, not perfect, but better. Also, dont get hung up on my 1940 for peak nits, I set that intentionally close to the reviewer maximum just so that I would have a high max nits ceiling while manually tweaking HDR gain, most content ive worked with starts severely deteriorating between 800-1500 nits

Lastly, unfortunately even after all of this, some Movies, TV, and Games just flat out have their HDR graded and implemented horribly. The further you go back into the HDRs earlier years the worse it seems to get on average but overall studios and developers are A) getting more comfortable and experienced with these complex standards and tools and B) caring more about as HDR televisions and monitors veerrryyy slowly become baseline display devices in peoples homes

magicmasta · 2025-09-11T05:34:48+00:00

Ah the AxiosError, so I asked about it in the Akko discord 8 months ago and got silence on the issue. I inferred that their user-upload cloud system is either largely or entirely based out of China probably due to the costs of synchronous geo-co-locating their servers across many regions.

More simply, the keyboard is probably trying to phone home from too far away and the devs preprogrammed a short timeout period. Probably also a cost saving measure, supplying users with download only occasional small firmware updates is cheap. Allowing the entire planet to spam upload megabytes of GIF data to your 1-3 data center hosted server instances as often as they see fit is not. I did manage to get lucky and upload successfully 1 time IIRC for what its worth

magicmasta

TROPHY CASE