I took the easy way out, similarly - got an ArcadeVGA pci board, which is basically an ancient Radeon that supports 15khz well. I drive it with a groovy arcade Linux install and a pc2Jamma adapter that maps jamma buttons to keyboard input and VGA to the crt.
While I can TOTALLY believe that TikTok might be doing classification and censoring of uploads - tech issues that happen during notable events will INEVITABLY be interpreted as partisan censorship.
A personal brush with this was with Scientology Protests around 2008 if I recall - I was at YouTube and there was a great kerfuffle among many of the top personalities who uploaded videos siding against Scientology. Their videos were not making it into the top rankings or getting the expected visibility. To them the obvious answer is that they were being deliberately suppressed - after all Scientology was a paying advertiser and brand on YT.
The reality was that the entire viewcount pipeline, and downstream aggregations were busted for about a day. Nobody was getting their full views counted in a timely way for that time.
My quick rebuttal is that gaming is pretty close to 'there' if you pick a distro that prioritizes it.
I run bazzite-DX (nvidia rtx4070) for dev and pleasure and gaming there is ON POINT. I don't play any anti-cheat games, but Cities Skylines, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk (with full raytracing and HDR), GTA5-Remaster, etc, all run like champs. As of last month, full HDR10 mode started working in chrome and video players too, so hdr videos get those popping brights.
I haven't _needed_ windows in over 5 years, and I game pretty hard (though not much in the realm of anti-cheat compatibility drama). Bazzite is my daily driver now for development and pleasure.
Interestingly, I had the exact same experience leaving Shanghai - I had picked up some nifty lighters at the wholesale markets. They took me to the room, had me take them out, and I was lucky enough to be able to hand them off to a friend who was staying. No fuss, waiting, or intimidation. They just took care of my honest mistake.
Seconding Roborock - we have a mid range one and it's effective and a huge step up in smartness from my old Samsung. I love being able to dispatch it to one or two different rooms and walk away knowing that it will get the job done.
As a bonus, there are open source drop in replacements for the mfg's cloud service so you can self host your floor maps and stats, if that's your jam. (this isn't roborock exclusive though).
Valetudo is what I was referring to. For the vacuum, it's the Roborock Q5+ back from 2023. Not top of the line, but it works well on our mixed hardood+ rug floors.
I had just recently factory reset my samsung S90C QDOLED - and had to work through the annoying process of dialing the settings back to something sane and tasteful. Filmmaker mode only got it part of the way there. The white balance was still set to warm, and inexplicably HDR was static (ignoring the content 'hints'), and even then the contrast seemed off, and I had to set the dynamic contrast to 'low' (whatever that means) to keep everything from looking overly dark.
It makes me wish that there was something like an industry standard 'calibrated' mode that everyone could target - let all the other garbage features be a divergence from that. Hell, there probably is, but they'd never suggest a consumer use that and not all of their value-add tackey DSP.
"Warm" or "Warm 2" or "Warm 50" is the correct white point on most TVs. Yes, it would make sense if some "Neutral" setting was where they put the standards-compliant setting, but in practice nobody ever wants it to be warmer than D6500, and lots of people want it some degree of cooler, so they anchor the proper setting to the warm side of their adjustment.
When you say that "HDR is static" you probably mean that "Dynamic tone-mapping" was turned off. This is also correct behavior. Dynamic tone-mapping isn't about using content settings to do per-scene tone-mapping (that's HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, though Samsung doesn't support the latter), it's about just yoloing the image to be brighter and more vivid than it should be rather than sticking to the accurate rendering.
What you're discovering here is that the reason TV makers put these "garbage features" in is that a lot of people like a TV picture that's too vivid, too blue, too bright. If you set it to the true standard settings, people's first impression is that it looks bad, as yours was. (But if you live with it for a while, it'll quickly start to look good, and then when you look at a blown-out picture, it'll look gross.)
“Filmmaker Mode” on LG OLED was horrible. Yes, all of the “extra” features were off, but it was overly warm and unbalanced as hell. I either don’t understand “Filmmakers” or that mode is intended to be so bad that you will need to fix it yourself.
Filmmaker is warm because it follows the standardized D6500 whitepoint. But that's the monitor whitepoint it is mastered against, and how it's intended to be seen.
TV producers always set their sets to way higher by default because blue tones show off colors better.
As a result of both that familiarity and the better saturation, most people don't like filmmaker when they try to use it at first. After a few weeks, though, you'll be wondering why you ever liked the oversaturated neons and severely off brightness curve of other modes.
YouTube is one from my experience. The team there had a pretty strong anti-orm stance. DB performance was an existential necessity during the early scaling. The object fetching and writing tended to be focused through a small number of function calls with well scrutinized queries and write through memcaching.
I get it... but you can pry my cloudflare-tunnel from my cold dead hands.
I'm no stranger to hosting things 'the hard way', but I am not going back from my happy casual hosting where I just spin up a docker container, and point the cloudflare tunnel at the local port and opt out of worrying over DDOS, SSL termination and certs, and everything else that goes with it.
With tailscale, I don't even keep port 22 open to the world.
I did a pro bono analysis of a ddos against a dolphin protection non profit, probably a lashing out from a butthurt fishing concern. A significant amount of traffic in that attack originated from the stark asn. Interesting to see them here.
