Devil’s advocate: if you do things the legit way, absorb the ads or go for the pay tiers, do you think there’s ever a point the advertisers and platforms say “this is the right amount of ads.” ? Seems like it’s an infinite process of cramming in more garbage. Personally I’m happy to engage in the arms race because it’s not bothersome to me personally, and I’m fine with some “theft” as long as I’m paying back into the creators by whatever their preferred support structure is.

I’ve been running an n100 box as my main everything box for about 1.5 years. I capture metrics on it and can say the thing is nowhere near capacity. This box is running jellyfin, a dozen or so nfs mounts that are heavily utilized, a dozen or so lightly used samba mounts, grafana, prometheus, jenkins, and a handful of mysql instances. I maxed out the ram (32gb) from the start and it averages 8gb usage, and has never exceeded 10gb. Historically, the CPU usage averages 28% utilization. I think as long as the board has nvme storage you’ll not feel constrained by these little hosts for many years.

Similar thing applies to music. There are still web radio stations and web broadcasts of good FM stations out there, and what a relief it is to fall back on these, especially i f you’re getting playlist burnout. There’s something to be said for a queue of music that some person has just slapped together for the day that fits whatever the overall feeling of a station is. The original algorithms before the final algorithms took over, I suppose.