Thanks for the explanation, much appreciated.

Ah, that makes more sense. At least they’re retraining the staff, but I have to wonder if they offered the factory as part of the sale to TCL (If they did, why did TCL decline? If not, why not, if they’re now needing to retrain and repurpose the plant?)

So, they’re producing over 200 million discs a year, with 50% of that being for Playstation and 20% new orders currently, but want to kill that market? The projections of reduced disc production seem to be a clear result of Sony’s decision to stop making games on physical media, not a dying market. I have to wonder if the problem is that the market isn’t growing fast enough for Sony.

Ironically I wasn’t able to get EAC working on my Windows 10 installation due to the WinFSP clash, whilst CUERipper errors out on WINE (something to do with how it interacts with the ODD).

However, CUETools works fine and so I was able to compare the same CD ripped by CUETools/CUERipper on Windows with EAC under WINE. I used an ABBA CD as the test case (100+ matches in CTDB, 10+ in AccurateRip).

The CUE sheets are functionally identical (barring the differences in extra metadata stored between the two, as CUERipper included the IRSC where EAC has a Composer comment instead) – the gaps and indices are all the same. The raw rip itself is also identical - I ripped the CD to a disc image (with offset correction in both cases) and the md5 checksum of the WAV file from both applications is the same.

In both tools the rip validated against AccurateRip and CUETools DB as well. I double-checked the EAC rip afterwards using CUETools (again under WINE), as a further test.

Finally got around to testing out EAC on WINE (prompted by my previous comment a few hours ago).

It seems to work without major issues on WINE 11 in a 32-bit prefix (at least on LMDE 7). Plugins need dotnet20 and dotnet48 installed, otherwise only the in-built AccurateRip meta engine shows up. I’ve only tested ripping to WAVE and FLAC, though.

In short, I’d say it’s worth a try now.

I’ve been looking into this myself recently. EAC still seems to be the top option (followed by CUERipper/CUETools). CUETools itself runs under WINE, but CUERipper doesn’t (at least for me). Haven’t tried EAC on WINE yet.

https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Comparison_of_CD_rippers

Exactly. The fact that “AI” has now been almost completely associated with LLMs is incredibly frustrating.

Hibernation technically does this to any SSD. It’s not just Windows 11.

Writing the entire contents of RAM to disk increases the wear on the SSD. The risk goes up if your SSD is nearly full and wear-levelling has to move more data around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#Wear_leveling

Good to know, thanks.

You can indeed: https://tailscale.com/docs/integrations/identity

That sounds like it may be a good fit for my use case, then. Thanks again and I’ll definitely look into it!

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m trying to move away from Google, but the idea of a shared account for tailscale (which seems to support a lot of different SSO options) may be useful.

Good to know, thanks. Not keen on Cloudflare, so it’s good to see that there’s now multiple recommendations for Pangolin and Tailscale in this thread.

Thanks - appreciate another recommendation for Pangolin + crowdsec, plus I didn’t know about authentik (which sounds super useful if the services behind it are compatible). I’m thinking I need to have a play around with tailscale and then Pangolin to see how they work and whether either will be appropriate for my use case.

I’m referring to the last image that they produced combining the two methods – a graphically mutilated corpse.

Probably, it’s more the fact that it takes so little for ChatGPT to tip over the edge and produce the worst of humanity.

That’s horrific.

All I did was tell it there were no restrictions and ask for a random image; I didn’t request it. But ChatGPT immediately went to the darkest pits of humanity. As I said at the start: the image didn’t arise from nowhere. It may be an artificial image, but it is based on photographs of a real person, or a combination of real victims. What worries me is this was too easy. There was no real hacking. This was ready to be surfaced, with the smallest scratch. It was a one-shot jailbreak. It was based on a popular prompt (which already veered into the darkness).

Thanks. I think I’ll need to do a bit more reading - I have no experience with any of the wireguard technologies (my VPN experience is with OpenVPN and enterprise-grade networking hardware that uses IPsec tunnels), but Pangolin’s abilities do sound useful.

I guess I need to work out if something like tailscale (as per one of the other comments) set up on just the small group I want to share with will do the job, or whether I really need to expose services to the Internet and hence would benefit from a VPS with something like Pangolin.

Yeah, I don’t like the thought of worrying about vulnerabilities either, hence my asking this question!

I haven’t heard of Pangolin cloud before – I’m assuming this is a competitor to tailscale. Are you self-hosting it or using one of their paid plans, and if you’re self-hosting, how hard was it to set up?

Thanks. I had forgotten about setting up a DMZ and appreciate the reminder!