I don’t know the details, and honestly I don’t really care for the drama, but if you’re not happy with the current options for servers and governance, just host your own?

You seem to have a pretty clear idea of what you want to operate like, and you said in another response, that you have experience building servers.

It’s not hard to get a server built that has enough compute and storage to support the kind of capacity you’re talking about. Any used, corporate desktop from the last 7-10 years has more than enough compute to handle hundreds of active users. Storage is the main issue, but that’s not unattainable either. As of a week ago, Server Monkey was selling certified refurbished Dell enterprise 6TB HDDs for $175 each. $700 gets you around 18TB with one disk for redundancy using ZFS. 18TB will hold quite a bit of dank memes, especially if you limit the max resolution to something reasonable.

1,500 new pictures per day, all 50 megapixel JPEGs is roughly 670GB per month, so even at that pretty crazy rate (by Lemmy standards) your 18TB server would last two years before getting totally full.

Backblaze archival storage is $1,500 per year for 18TB if you want long term secure cloud backups for your entire server, that’s just $125 a month that you’d need to fund yourself or get donations for. Not nothing, but hardly unattainable for a small instance. I used to play on a tiny Minecraft server that had maybe 20 active players, and they made more than $125 per month on donations.

I mean, again, all of this code is FOSS. If you really feel that your approach would be significantly more successful, dive in and build out your own instance. Get some friends involved, split up the costs, market yourselves, get some nice branding, build alliances and partnerships with other instances, etc. There is literally nothing stopping you.

“Alternative” doesn’t necessarily mean “competitor.”

Sure, how and what you ask does make a difference, especially on lower power models. But it’s generally not really significant, like learning how to write more effective prompts takes maybe a few hours of total time? Honestly, probably an hour at most for 95% of people using LLMs in a corporate environment.

The irony of all this, is that one of the supposed biggest advantages of LLMs is that you can just talk to them with natural language in a conversational format. The more people have to use special rules of conversation, format their prompts in specific ways, take advantage or avoid subtleties of the model’s preferred syntactic style, etc. The more LLMs become a technical tool that can only produce high quality results if you use it in very specific, skilled ways.

And one of the big risks with LLMs is staff who can recognise bullshit or questionable results being replaced with staff who unquestioningly accept whatever results they get. And people reading an “AI summary” of something and assuming it’s actually accurate.

That’s exactly the point from people who are making systemic critiques of the “AI” craze. LLMs by their very nature, encourage people to become lazy. I’m not worried about a machine that’s constantly wrong, depending on the application, I can control for that. I am worried about a machine that is almost always right. That’s really dangerous, because it lulls its users into a false sense of confidence and security.

There’s a saying I heard from an old sys-admin once, “It’s better to be broadly right, than precisely wrong.” Modern LLMs are a perfect example of the latter, they will get 95% of a task correct, but then mess up that last 5%. But it messes up that 5% in a way that is very subtle and convincing, and requires somebody with deep, technical knowledge to catch and mitigate. That fact, combined with how lazy people are incentivized to be when using them, is the deadly combo imo.

Eh, more like generalizations based on observations of my own, and many other corporate workplaces that people I am close to, work in.

Has Linus been screeching about how everybody must use AI or get left behind?

Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.

Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.

If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.

Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.

It’s really not for most people. You ask a question, the LLM answers. You ask it to do a task, it does it. Most people are not using these things for anything advanced or technically difficult.

I work in a big corporate office, if you exclude the IT staff and software devs, here’s a pretty exhaustive list of what everybody else is using LLMs for:

• Organizing emails.
• Drafting memos and auto-responses in Teams.
• Organizing cluttered files.
• Adding “artwork” to company fliers.
• Doing web searches.
• Summarizing emails and Teams messages and creating to-do lists from them.
• Searching large documents for key terms.

It’s grunt work, that’s what these things excel at, and that’s how most people use them. That’s fine, but acting like most people are somehow not able to unlock the “true potential” of these LLMs unless they have special training and skills is a marketing ploy to sell overpriced “AI” courses to gullible and ignorant executives and upper managers.

It’s like those stupid DEI courses that corporations have everybody take so they can “learn to not be problematic.” But all the quizzes are filled with stupid stuff like:

Your manager, Sarah finishes briefing you and your coworker, Phil on an upcoming project. After she leaves, Phil says to you, “That Sarah sure is a real juicy piece of meat, I’d love to get taste of her!” What should you do? A. High-five Phil and tell him you call dibs on her secretary. B. Tell Phil that his comment was not appropriate, then report it to HR.

It’s just there to check boxes for compliance and provide an excuse for other companies to charge outrageous prices to tell people that sexually assaulting your coworkers or pulling your eyelids tight and calling yourself “Ching Chong” isn’t appropriate office behavior.

It’s another way Capitalism poisons and hollows out substantive discussions about topics like systemic racism, multiculturalism, and gender relationships, in favor of standardized quizzes that cost thousands of dollars a year to administer.

The amount of “AI consultants” and “AI integration” firms that have popped up overnight is staggering. Just like with the crypto/blockchain craze a few years ago, everybody is trying to get rich quick off the hype.

People who are vehemently against any form of blockchain technology will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth. Blockchain is a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that blockchain has none, **you will be left behind**. You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use blockchain or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt. If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use blockchain now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may *removed* and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group. I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate blockchain myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.

Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!

Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?

Sure, if you’re trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that’s a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.

I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using “AI” in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about “Project ABC” into a new Outlook folder called, “Project ABC” or asking a chatbot to, “draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site.”

It’s not the next industrial revolution, it’s not the beginning of the Singularity, it’s not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people’s critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.

The same thing they gain from investing in Leprechaun gold mining companies.

Pick up as many uncensored models as you can store ASAP. Those will absolutely be the first to go.

Very true, but it’s better to use and support a fully FOSS platform if possible.

Buy a Fully FOSS 3D printer. It’s pointless to purchase any peice of tech to “avoid future regulation” if it still runs proprietary software you don’t control. I would highly recommend checking out Voron printers. Fully FOSS at every level, firmware, hardware, schematics, etc. Voron Design

The catch is that you have to build it from scratch yourself. However, there are many places online to buy high quality premade kits, and the community is massive and thriving, you’ll be able to follow guides easily.

I would also buy some bulk, long term digital storage if you don’t have it already, and build yourself a simple NAS. The digital crackdowns are coming soon, and you’re going to thank yourself for having terabytes of digital media and software that is impossible to get down the line.

ServerMonkey currently has 6TB refurbished enterprise HDDs for $175, and 24TB Seagate Exos CMR HDDs for $625 (even cheaper per TB.) if you don’t need crazy performance, you can throw a few of those in an old PC with a few hundred bucks of hardware and be totally fine using it as a NAS/home media server.

Learn how to securely torrent if you don’t already. If you’re into LLMs at all, download current LLM models that are good at different sizes, even if you can’t currently run them on your hardware, they will likely be banned in the near future because they represent a “threat” to the USA’s corporate power and influence.

Download a local copy of Wikipedia and other online sites with something like Kiwix. Purchase pre-LLM era physical books on foraging, cooking, home and auto repair, electronics, child care, etc. Highly practical skills that will be useful to know as the general population becomes further dumbed down and reliant on proprietary, corporate slopware.

For those on a very tight budget, used is your friend. Old computer equipment is still quite affordable. You can pick up used t480 Thinkpads on Ebay for $175-$300. If you’ve got kids who need a laptop for school, pick one of those up and throw Linux on it.

If you’re willing to swap, haggle, and hunt locally, you can get even better deals. Check if your area has a government surplus warehouse. When I was a kid, my family lived 15 minutes from one. They had literal pallets of government mini-pcs you could buy, 40 towers for a few hundred bucks. You could buy individual machines for $40-$75 there. Yeah they were old, beat up, janky, but they worked. And as a 14 year old kid who’s only money came from doing random yard work for friends and family, it was a gold mine.

Check with your local businesses and schools and ask somebody there if they have “e-waste computers” they are looking to get rid of. Often times they do, and they will happily give you them for free. Normally, they have to pay a company to take those off their hands, so they will have no issue with you just taking them for nothing. I’ve gotten a bunch of old computers this way over the years. Don’t be afraid to even ask the IT department where you work too. Some places have strict e-waste policies, but most don’t. As long as there’s no storage installed that could contain company/organizational data, they usually couldn’t care less if an employee wants to take an old “junk” PC home with them.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo flatpak update -y

Get mad, bro. 😌

Get mad, bro. 😌

Dang, I keep forgetting that suckers still pay for this…

There’s a bunch of dirty corporate boots that need a good licking, I’ve heard you’re just the person for the job!

Hey, there’s some corporate boots that need licking, get to it.

Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding what you’re saying with those boots in your mouth.