What’s the encryption and signing on a hardware level for? I mean dependent on what’s that good for and who controls it, it’s trusted computing, or treacherous computing as Stallman calls it…

I think the overall idea is nice, though. We had these project ideas to just plug in a box and be self sufficient in the self-hosting community since the SheevaPlug. Or the FreedomBox. There are some niche hardware projects as well like the Home Assistant Green. But none of those match exactly with your proposal.

Btw, the proper place to mount filesystems is either /media or /mnt. I wouldn’t create a directory called /Volumes in Linux. And pay attention, these are case-sensitive and most (not all) system directories have agreed on using lower-case letters only. And “volume” is kind of a Windows and MacOS-term anyway, I rarely see Linux-people refer to media and filesystems that way.

Yeah, looks like a coordinated effort. They’re re-aligning other things as well. They also forfeited their pledge not to develop AI for weapons and surveillance. Joined that “age restriction” effort to collect people’s IDs. And I’ve seen a massive crackdown on Youtube, from ramping up advertisements, making it harder to circumvent these, or download videos, to what they pay to creators which has also reportedly changed substantially.

I guess Android is amongst the more annoying ones, because we all rely on smartphones and the operating system on there.

I suppose it’s “we” the crypto bros? The articles on that blog look to me like they’re either aimed at - or written by such people. And it’s also embedded in some Ethereum based social network. But I have no good insight on the perspective of Web3 people. I guess they’re allowed to have an opinion on RMS and the Free Software movement. I can only imagine their perspective is very different from mine.

Lol. I guess they’re speaking from own experience? I mean even being the cautionary tale is a valid way to teach people something?? They do other stuff as well which they outline as bad. For example use Cloudflare, which has an even worse effect than rely on AWS. And this “Farcaster social network reimagined” which they have everywhere on their site has some open-source code and surprise most of it is MIT licensed, they got venture funding… So… I’d say they’re ticking all the boxes of what (they said) is bad.

To be fair, they don’t really claim to be any better. They seem to specifically omit mentioning it. And they conclude “dance with it” is the right course of action…

Yes, somewhat accurate. And a big issue these days. I don’t really see how Web3/crypto-stuff comes into play. To my knowledge it’s a niche on the decline. And has always been part of different dynamics. These projects are often aimed to mine some theoretical pile of money from the start. There is some crossover with the open-source world, but that’s rarely what it’s about.

Btw, community-owned infrastructure with Web3 would be nice. But I think there are several other ways to operate community-owned infrastructure. Many applications don’t need a blockchain to work just fine.

That’s your motivation to buy a new TV with the most expensive OLED out there, high contrast and a smarthome with nice automatic blinds for the windows.

But seriously, I thought that was mainly over by now? I had a lot of those shows 5-10 years ago. But seems they still do it.

I’d say that depends on exactly what you’re trying to protect. They’re both large American companies with control over your data and your data and metadata will end up in their respective clouds. Push notifications will be handled by Google services if you use Android, but there’s an equivalent mechanism for iOS just that it uses their servers. They handle some details differently, but I don’t think any of those options deserve the word privacy.

Great. I’m still disgruntled by them restricting device-trees, AOSP development and app installation in the future.

There’s always a possibility of someone posting arbitrary content when a platform allows user content or combines content from many sources. I mean we do have moderation here and illegal content is supposed to be removed or flagged. However as the operator of some internet service, you are ultimately responsible for what’s on your instance. So you definitely do need to make an effort to stay in control. Btw, there are possible compromises, such as using an allow-list of instances you federate with, so you don’t pull content from sources you don’t trust and didn’t approve.

I think the entire origin story of Amazon and why they outcompeted other bookstores, online- and mail-order companies was automation and their more streamlined processes. Afaik they’ve made sure to implement it as an entire chain from end to end, and that’s been their huge advantage from early on.

I think they should be roughly in a similar range for selfhosting?! They’re both power-efficient. And probably have enough speed for the average task. There might be a few perks with the ThinkCentre Tiny. I haven’t looked it up but I think you should be able to fit an SSD and a harddrive and maybe swap the RAM if you need more. And they’re sometimes on sale somewhere and should be cheaper than a RasPI 5 plus required extras.

I’m a bit below 20W. But I custom-built the computer a long time ago with an energy-efficient mainboard and a PicoPSU. I think other options for people who don’t need a lot of harddisks or a graphics card include old laptops or Mini-PCs. Those should idle at somewhat like 10-15W. It stretches the definition of “desktop pc” a bit, but I guess you could place them on a desk as well 😉

[…] said the company has now been able to mitigate the serious mental health risks and […]

Wow. So they don’t just ignore all the warnings about detected suicidal thoughts any longer? As far as I remember from the news stories, that specific teenager got flagged hundreds of times by their systems for spiralling towards suicide. It’s just that OpenAI didn’t do anything…

There’s another community for this: [email protected]
Though we mostly discuss the news and specific questions there, beginner questions are a bit more rare.

I think you already got a lot of good answers here, LMStudio, OpenWebUI, LocalAI…
I’d like to add KoboldCpp that’s kind of made for gaming/dialogue, but it can do everything. And from my experience it’s very easy to set up and bundles everything into one program.

Yes. Waydroid is very nice. What do you use it for? I’ve come to the realization I don’t really need a lot of Android apps on my laptop, I have good Linux software for 99.9% of the stuff I do. So Waydroid mostly sits there, unused, while I use a regular Linux messenger client and Google Maps on the website.

Is this just your personal opinion? Or did any expert have a look at it and analyze the video? Surely there must be some third-party fact-check out there?! I mean not that TRT is a trustworthy news outlet to begin with. But it’d be nice to cite some source, not just do wild speculation.

Reportedly, this training of bots is a thing of the past. Google used to do this, make people put in the street numbers from Street View or blurred words from book scans. But from what I read this isn’t really necessary any more, AI and computer vision got better and what we see these days is just wasted effort, it doesn’t contribute to anything except tell if you’re able to solve the challenge and how you move your mouse while doing it. I wonder why they still do all the zebra crossings and motorcycles and fire hydrants, though. Looks like a synthetic dataset to me, because pictures repeat on a regular basis and they’re not that hard… I’d certainly expect less repeating pictures and more occlusion and weird ones if this was training for something.

Is there any tool to make this easy and back up the app data, wifi credentials, settings, calendar etc? Or do you just copy the files you’re able to access with the file manager?

Fair enough. I mean I’d pay about 200€ a year in electricity to run 3 efficient computers. And my VPS is only 73€ and I never have to pay for replacement parts (SSDs, harddisks) which I had to replace at home. And then they have gigabit network, low latency, a proper IP address, it didn’t fail yet so their reliability >99.6% seems to be correct. And that’s all way better than what I have at home. So it’s a no-brainer to go for that. But your calculation might be different.

I mean ultimately there is no harm in trying. If you have 3 old computers laying around, you might as well try setting up a kubernetes cluster. I think it’s going to prove difficult to handle the IP addresses but I’m not an expert on high availability and gaming clients.