Internet Copilot One X.

A Chromecast is not full of ads, but are they all just Google TV now? Is Google TV full of ads? I haven’t used one.

Could be an option to reset your TV, disconnect it from the Internet, and buy & use a Google TV device instead. The streaming devices seem to have far fewer ads and shit than TV manufacturers cram into their devices nowadays.

The hoops we have to jump through to minimise surveillance capitalism… I see elsewhere in the thread you’ve had to use a PiHole to block most of the TVs traffic.

Spotify streams all music at 160kbps OGG for free users by default, so that’s what this archive is dumped at - the original Spotify content, no transcode. The only difference is they re-encoded all the songs with a ‘popularity’ of zero at a lower bitrate, because that saved an enormous amount of data for all the AI crap pumped into Spotify that nobody listens to.

Side note - it would probably not be possible to do a dump as a paid used (as they would notice a user account is being abused, and ban it), but paid accounts go up to 320kbps OGG and some content is also available lossless (as FLAC).

Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

I’ve seen this on a few repos and it never came across too harsh, the posts tagged with it were deserving. Wish I’d noted the repo names…

I’m fine with it tbh. FOSS devs need to squeeze every bit of enjoyment out of working on the project to keep motivated. If they (or mods) can drop a helpful reply and close an issue as ‘skill issue’ and get a little chuckle while they give their time for free answering poorly-written queries or bad bug reports then that’s a reasonable trade to keep them from burning out.