You can get a cheap Android TV Player for about $50 that will connect to your TV via HDMI, connect to your network via Wi-Fi or even Ethernet (I suggest you the latter if you can - much better performance, no hiccups if the Wi-Fi channel you’re using is also used by a lot of other stuff) and play any MKV videos it can access on your network (so, for example, you could share them in a Windows share).

This is kinda the setup I had maybe a decade and a half ago (only back then they were called TV Media Players and it was before Android).

You can get a TV Stick which is sorta the same but smaller, hangs from the HDMI port on your TV and those never have Ethernet.

You can get any of the hardware supported by LibreELEC - the cheapest being ARM-based Single Board Computers like Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi - and install LibreELEC in it and use that. Basically works like the Android TV Player only less bloated and you control that device fully.

Personally I now have an N100 Mini-PC on my living room with Lubutu (I installed Lubunto because I thought that it would be too little PC for a more normal distro, but frankly that thing can run a normal distro just fine) with Kodi always ON and on front (so from the TV side it just looks like a Media browsing and playing interface). The reason for having a bit more generic hardware there is that the machine is ALSO my Torrent server (with QBittorrent, which you can remotey add torrents to from your personal PC using a browser plugin and remotely manage from a browser) AND it’s also my home NAS (so, same place were the media files end up stored).

It’s connected directly to my router via Ethernet so it downloads and uploads at 1Gbps. I generally manage it remotely via SSH from my own PC and have a wireless remote for it (which works just like a normal remote, except that you can’t use it to switch the machine ON, only OFF, plus do other buttons just do the normal play, stop and all the other standard functions in Kodi) so for using it as a media player in my living room it works like a dedicated TV Media Player or a Smart TV and doesn’t at all look like there’s a PC in my living room connected to my TV, but I have full control over what’s running there and it isn’t selling my personal data to anybody or shoving adverts in front of me.

That’s actually not especially good in the EU as far as I can tell (also in the EU, have the same, €15 a month).

That said, it’s pretty easy and cheap to get the rest of one’s setup (router, Ethernet cables, the actual torrent machine) with Gigabit-Ethernet so that it all actual works at 1Gbps end-to-end but costs a bit more to upgrade one’s internal network and download machines (I use a MiniPC next to the router) to go above that - everything pretty much supports 1Gbps by default nowadays, whilst only some stuff supports 2.5Gbps, and you definitely have to pay quite a bit extra for 10Gbps.

The kit I had for years already supported Gigabit Ethernet all the way and I would need newer kit to really use properly a fibre Internet connection above 1Gbps, which is why I personally did not go for the 2.5Gbps or even 10Gbps (the latter would be €45/month). That and downloading an x265 1080p torrent of a 1h episode of a TV series from a popular public tracker taking between 30s and a minute is good enough for me and I don’t really want to spend more money to bring that down to 10-20s or less.

Anybody who is a genuine Liberal would be against things which overall reduced people’s Freedom, such as most Land Ownership and excessive accumulation of claims on goods, assets and services (i.e. Money).

Land Ownership reduces the Liberty of those who are born landless (who can’t just choose to survive by growing their own food and building their own place to live and instead have to work for those who own all the productive assets - including Land - in a mathematically rigged environment were Ownership yields money faster than Work, to try and climb their way to ownership) and excessive wealth accumulation increased the Liberty of a few by decreasing the Liberty of many, many more people - if somebody can pay more for some shit, others won’t get that shit unless its availability is infinite or close enough to it to make no difference.

I doubt there is a single genuine Liberal party anywhere - they all defend land ownership and maximizing Liberty for money in an environment where Mathematically there is a positive feedback cycle where the more the Money one has the more Money one makes, so invariably reducing the Liberty of people.

At best you could say they’re genuinelly liberal representatives of Money, not of human beings.

Carney, a faithfull minion of the ultra-rich, same as always.

It’s not just “usage without discernment”, it’s that AI flattens some costs which are very obvious and very measurable (coding) in such a way that it introduces or amplifies other costs which are much more diffused and hard to measure (code and design reviewing, bug fixing, maintenance, adding new requirements), plus AI is totally incapable of doing the higher level tasks that shape what code needs to be done (technical analysis, requirements analysis and in bigger companies technical architecture).

People who are non-experts, aren’t really senior domain experts or have some kinds of unbalanced expertise (they’ve never really progressed beyond being a coder, or they don’t have full life-cycle experience with big projects or they’re in an industry or position where they just make the code, shove it out the door and it’s not their problem anymore) just look at the one thing they in their ignorance think is THE cost in programming - coding - and go “hey, this AI thing is amazing” even while AI is creating all sorts of much more time consuming problems which they don’t really understand formally (they think those things are just “bad luck”, “there’s nothing we can do about avoiding this” and “it’s just the way things are in programming”) that require the time of people with higher expertise levels (i.e. who are more costly) to solve and AI doesn’t even help with the kind of stuff which if done wrongly or not at all can condemn a software project to fail before it even starts like just half-way decent Technical and Requirements Analysis.

That’s why you get some programmers going “this AI shit is amazing” whilst the really senior software development types are just nodding their heads and thinking “these people are ignorant as fuck juniors”.