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Do you have external users (outside your network)? My understanding (and the last time I tried) is that Jellyfin lacks in this department quite a bit. That and ubiquitous clients.

Plex client is available almost everywhere and overall, Plex mostly "just works". The latest Apple TV client changes have me hot and there are things I don't love but that's what's kept me in the Plex ecosystem. I am looking around now though since I'm so disappointed with the new clients/UI.


I have my friends and family using tailscale + jellyfin. Their only complaint is not having an easy way to watch on Xboxes. I convinced a few of them to plug old laptops into their TVs which is working fine.

I have, after setting things up this year. Any user problems were always due to server-side or bad media files. Or on networking on the server side.

As far as I understand it Jellyfin has been improving client availability and to me seems to work well for friends.


I’ll probably be trialing it and Silo over the next little bit. Thanks!

I don't want to be a jerk and I know engineers writing the code don't always make the decisions but the new Apple TV Player was dog shit. Just horrible. 10 steps back in UI/UX and frustrating to use. I've been using Plex for well over a decade and to throw that all away on that new player... Just damn.

Not sure why Plex laid off the team, was it the response to the new updates (doubt it), was it "AI", are they planning on going in a new direction?


I think it's past time we stop letting the doers of an org pass off responsibility for their actions. The engineers coded this. It is on them as much as it's on some nameless exec

I don't agree. There's a limit on how much you can influence things, and as a dev (or product owner or whatever) you need to pick your battles.

How a decision is made, what gets released etc. are all opaque processes and blaming the devs from the outside is not productive.

That said, I'm all for it for devs becoming more responsible for the end result, evaluated within the org boundaries. Especially these days when people tend to cop out with "oh cloude did it / didn't catch it" responses (before, it was "oh I had to come up with something quick and couldn't check everything").


> Not sure why Plex laid off the team, was it the response to the new updates (doubt it), was it "AI", are they planning on going in a new direction?

Pure speculation - maybe it was the kind of response you're definitely not hoping for. Get ready for more dog shit apps :)


More than likely Plex realizes where their money comes from. It's not streamlining personal video content playback. That's how they built their reputation, but they make their money on integration deals and filling your home screen with other people's content. I paid for Plex Pass and they still feel entitled to put advertisements in front of my local media content. I've since switched to Jellyfin.

Yeah, I can't believe how bad the UI/UX is for the new Apple TV Plex app. I switched to Plezy as a client (still Plex server) but don't love it either. I really did like the old Plex UI on ATV.

I don't know what I'll do going forward. Jellyfin is rough (I've tried!) and especially for external users (family).


I found Dots to be both worse than I expected and better. Worse in every way when asking it to do anything coding related (just kept running into issue after issue) but very nice as a "Monitor my communication channels for me" tool.

It's surfaced a few buried/filtered email messages that actually were important and I like having a second set of eyes watching incoming messages.

That said, for only that task, I could probably make my own tool I just haven't had the time to play with it.

Looking forward to checking out Duet once it launches as I prefer Anthropic models over OpenAI and that's where I already have a bigger subscription.


Yeah, it caught an AWS bill on a random account I had made earlier in the month that was pushing $50+. That's been about the most useful thing so far.

Makes sense though. The use case for these always-on assistants (Muse, Dot, Instinct) isn’t coding and complex technical projects but more benign stuff like email and appointments.

I don't favor X models much but Grok Bot has been worth every penny for me so far.

I need to see if my cursor subscription would let me use Grok Bot. They don't have the best models at the moment, but I'm really curious about the ergonomics of their approach. It's pretty different from the other labs and I could see it taking off for non-technical users.

> It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy.

Ha! I had this exact quote on a slide I presented last week on this very subject (internally at my company).

I enjoyed finding a number of older references that I could apply to LLMs and this was one of the best ones.


So rich to have them post this when just this morning I had to switch to GLM 5.3 so I could mitigate the PHP CVEs (both Claude and Codex balked at the early investigation work). Once I was further along I was able to switch back to Claude to implement the fix but it refused to look at any POC's or test them against my dev servers, so freaking annoying.

The only things worse than the CVE getting dropped in our laps with little warning was having Claude run into its safeguards which slowed my progress in actually protecting our customers.

Last week Claude (and Codex) also refused to help write unit tests around existing code because it touched on authentication. I was able to ladder between them past everywhere they got stuck but today I went straight to GLM after hitting safeguards.


Yep, had to switch to GLM 5.3 to help protect our platform. So annoying. Claude and Codex crashed out.

This assumes way too much about your average consumer. Most of them from talking to them seem to like their smart TVs.

For myself, I buy the smart TV and then just never connect it to the internet. Mostly because commercial digital signage is either way more expensive or is worse technology (and also more expensive).


I beat Jev and only failed on the dart board, I have zero idea how to read a dart board.

Well, good that you beat Jev anyway , not many do :)

What Steam users want is a way to filter out crap but crap existed well before AI (trust me, I've spent a _lot_ of time scrolling through games on Steam both for "Fests" and just in general). And unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to filter "crap" out. There as good games that use AI, there are bad games that use AI, there are good games that don't use AI, there are bad games that don't use AI. I don't think "AI" is a good filter.

Thankfully Steam has easy refunds if you don't like a game or it doesn't live up to it's marketing page.


This is such a tedious argument, "<bad thing> existed before AI too". Yes it did, but there was like 0.1% of it compared to today. Sometimes, a substantial enough different of degree becomes a difference of kind.

Even if the ratio was better for AI, the volume means the filtering has to be better:

Before: 1e6 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 100, but the filter is only 90% accurate so 10 bad games get through.

Now: 1e7 games, filter out 99.99% to get the top 1k, and even if the filter is now 95% accurate (or equally if the content is on average twice as likely to be in the "good" range) there's still 50 bad games.

Unfortunately the filtering is also AI, and the filter is at best(!) of a similar kind as will have been used to train the AI which made the slop, so this necessarily goes much worse, and is reasonably likely to pass all 9e6 new vibe-generated games.


0.1%?

If I had to guess, bad games to good games ratio has always been like 99 to 1.

Issue is there are more games nowadays obviously, so more slop, though I'd be surprised if the ratio has moved much.

Human made trash has always polluted Steam.


The screenshots and description used to be a good filter - stock unity assets and poor copyediting meant low-effort game. This is no longer the case.

Now there is an an infinite amount more crap to filter through...

Why doesn't Steam's rating system work to filter out the crap? Does this problem only exist for new games, are the ratings being gamed, or is something else going on?

I really like small indie games, sometimes there just aren't enough reviews or the reviews are inconclusive. Sometimes when I read reviews that are negative they're actually something that I _do_ want in a game, and so it's actually a sign that I do want to play that. So you can't just trust the review #/rating alone. And they're probably being gamed as well.

Ratings are indeed being gamed now, yes. Not sure how long this has been going on, I've started to see it be obvious in the last 6 months.

It's very obvious when looking at the reviews for certain new indie games. All LLM written comments, most short, most low playtime.

Then actual customers come along and buy the game and over the next few weeks the game craters from Mostly Positive to Mostly Negative.


Steam Next Fest is unique in that the first two days of it have the default view for the page be random. This is intended to give more games exposure, and then two days into the Fest they have enough data to start personalizing recommendations. So the event format's design makes slop particularly bad compared to most other places in the storefront.

Someone has to buy the game before they can rate it and there is a threshold before a consensus rating is shown, by which time the slop submitter has already gotten what they want.

There is an easy way to filter crap out: crank up the fee charged to developers to submit a game to Steam in order to deter slop and also use the proceeds to cover the cost of more human curation of submissions, also to deter slop. Sometimes the gate does need to be kept.

Aren't devs on Steam required to disclose use of AI? If yes, then there is a way to filter crap.

> There as good games that use AI

[citation needed]

There theoretically could be - and I don't have an issue with an otherwise competent dev/artist making use of AI tools - but I know no examples of good games that also deserve a "made with AI"/"uses AI" badge.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/3312030/AI_Learns_To_Driv...

It’s not exactly what you meant, but I enjoyed this for several hours.


I'm sure this is a logical facility, so I apologize, I don't have an exact example but I imagine most developers are not eager to stick their hands up to say "Hey, I use AI!" given how consumers have treated games that they think use AI.

> most developers are not eager to stick their hands up to say "Hey, I use AI!" given how consumers have treated games that they think use AI.

They could always take the bold step of listening to what their customers want, and eliminating use of AI. Then they wouldn't need to hide it.


> They could always take the bold step of listening to what their customers want

Customers don't know what they want. Sorry but it's just true. They are anti-AI because of a multitude of reasons, only some of those reasons are based in reality. Most of them will give up their anti-AI stance once the dust settles and they will not reward the creators who "stuck to their guns".

It's the same way customers beg restaurants for healthy options then when the restaurant puts those items on the menu they don't sell. Right now mob mentality might sink a game that people think AI was involved in but give it a year and they won't care.

Thinking that not using AI will be a winning play (today) is just fighting the last war.


Here goes a case:

Paradox publicly admit use of AI in various places, yet their games are good.


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