APU board? They are going EOL soon, but these devices are built like a tank. Full Linux x86_64 support, coreboot bios. https://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm A few sellers in the EU still have them.

In case you get stuck again and need more games:

• DevilutionX (free, open source, needs gamedata) lets you play Diablo1 on Android, very good time killer (you might need to fetch the gamedata somewhere)
• Out There: Omega (paid but one time purchase) is a relaxed starship roguelite
• Battle For Wesnoth (free, open source) fantasy style tactical game
• Jagged Alliance 2 Stracciatella (free, open source, needs gamedata) - Jagged Alliance 2 on Android, tactical RPG, great timekiller like classic UFO or the old Fallout games.

Notable mentions: WorldOfGoo, Human Resource Machine

SSDs are not really good for long lasting backups. They hold data by electric charge, if you unplug your SSD and store it, then it might loose its data after just a couple of years. HDD “spinning rust” still has its merits when it comes to long term data storage, they hold their magnetic data longer without fresh power.

where?

Do not expect you can offer this service for a competive price against cloud prices. Caring for a company IT system is a big challenge and requires more work the more users there are.

For a company this size: make a clear contract. Consider how much time you need for setup/installation, monthly hours for maintenance, monitoring and at least daily(!) backups. Let them choose if they want it with a failover and charge for the required hours and material. Also put in the contract when they can expect support from you, including a clause for a holiday substitute admin (if needed). Then put a pricetag on support hours for holding people’s hands when they “can’t find that file they uploaded a week ago and it is surely a server issue” and put a pricetag on engineering hours for any modifications they might want, like installing any plugins they deem useful for themselves. Hardware prices, traffic, rack space and power should be included as well. Have a good plan for updates, choose your distro wisely, do not rely on autoupdates.

Play all this through in your head, add up the hours, choose a fair rate and then you have your pricetag.

Cloud will always be cheaper, because they have their infrastructure already deployed. Building from the ground up is more expensive, but I think it is worth it. Will they?

But…isn’t unsupervised backfeeding the same as simply overtraining the same dataset? We already know overtraining causes broken models.

Besides, the next AI models will be fed with the interactions from humans with AI, not just it’s own content. ChatGPT already works like this, it learns with every interaction, every chat.

And the generative image models will be fed with AI-assisted images where humans will have fixed flaws like anatomy (the famous hands) or other glitches.

So as interesting as this is, as long as humans interact with AI the hybrid output used for training will contain enough new “input” to keep the models on track. There are already refined image generators trained with their own but human-assisted output that are better than their predecessor.

GoogleTalk once federated with XMPP/jabber, good times until their userbase was big enough to deferedate again, crippling the jabber network. It will happen again if we let it.

Metas plan is to draw users into their network and use the fediverse as an initial catalyst (“look! so much content already there!”). Once their userbase is large enough, they will deferate again claiming protocol difficulties or something equally vague, but they will just want to start rolling out advertising which would not be displayed to users from other instances. Most users will not keep two accounts and jusy stay with the big corp and leave the original fediverse again.

I still like reading manga on the kindle paperwhite, the eink display is much more easy on the eyes and the weight and battery life are far better than any full blown tablet. Calibre can easily transfer/encode the comics to it, so no proprietary software needed.

i never knew! fantastic!

Pandora’s box has been opened. AI will not go away and any attempt to enforce regulation to it will only harm the public and open source development while big corporations will just train their models off-shore in secrecy.

Society has to adapt to this new technology that is altering our every lives. We did this before, we will do it again. The only thing we must watch out for is for AI to become only available to big corporations; no company (and preferably no government) must be allowed to have sole reign over such a powerful technology. If everybody has access, then everybody will know what to watch out for when they see it.

Do not fear technology, fear those who do not want to share it.

Set it to airplane mode the day it arrives and never let it go online with the stock firmware if you value privacy - these beasts even send amazon the page you are reading currently on. Calibre is the best tool, it autoconverts anything if needed. It also has an RSS-to-newspaper feature that can create a custom newspaperlike magazine from your favorite feeds for you. Reading manga on Kindle is really fun.

smoked bell pepper powder, chilli powder, MSG, salt and maybe some powdered onion/garlic.

tortilla flavoured popcorn, low on calories if made with a hot air popcorn machine.

Disappointing that 2/3 of the remaining users seem to vote for reopening.

Wait, so if I am from A and comment on a post on B and a user@c from C (which A has defedrated) comments on my comment, I get a message/notification indirectly from user@c via B?

So defederation blocks direct interaction but not discourse on “neutral ground (B in this case)”?

if you enjoy this, there are various CTF “crackme” challenges available - the most famous one being the radare2 tutorial crackmes. The have different diffuculties from really easy to mind-bendingly difficult.

Yes a council will form and I think it is very bad for everyone.

I stand by my word, admin controlled choice of individual federation weakens the network. I understand the motivation and the need for a solution, but we will only really thrive if the choice is to either federate every instance or none.

Oh, it will work to keep spam out - I’m just not sure if it will ultimately become the border keeping the fediverse from growing when a “council of elders from the big instances” has first established itself. If the council is not diverse enough, it will be able to dictate the rules for “trust” beyond mere spam. All with good intentions of course.

From an admin’s point of view, I do not want this “power” because it will corrupt me. From a user’s point of view, I would rather be able to decide this for myself.

You asked for oppinions…

Yes, but this opens up another problem with a federation controlled by the server admins and not the communities. Trust can be withdrawn as a punishment or due to a disagreement or just different views.

We just saw that with instances defederating others due to incompatible views on politics. I expect more of that for much smaller disagreements until its just clusters of like-minded people in their own bubble. At least I want to see what others say that does not agree with my own views and values - how would I keep a realistic perception of reality otherwise? If I stay in my bubble too long then I might start thinking “everyone” thinks foo=good and bar=bad, while it might be the opposite.

Other networks like freenet use a wot, but for each user. TOR does not filter out relays, but allows its users to do so. And, yes, they all have their own issues with their approach.

What I am trying to say is: I had hoped for the fediverse instance admins to not consider themselves as lords of each their own feudalistic dukedom with “trade agreements”, but instead to consider themselves as mere service providers for the greater good, sworn to neutrality when it comes to opinions being discussed (abiding to law where required to not get sued or worse of course). Our strength lies in the federation network itself, without it we would just be a bunch of forums. If we allow the network to fragment more and stop talking to each other, the monolithic pseudonetworks of the big corporations will stay in power.

I know this might be unachievable, or even undesired, but at least a web of trust that is controlled by its users, instead of the admins, is much more appealing to me.

Hashcash would slow spammers down without troubling regular users too much. It would be scalable and with a meld-based algrithm it might be future proof. It could even complement a wot.

I saw that. But I’m having flashbacks from email WOT and it did not converge to the interconnected mesh we had hoped it to be. Sooner or later larger nodes will exists who will not simply trust a key signed by a mere “tier3” instance. If a selfhoster wants to federate with their tiny 1-user instance, how do we differentiate between bot instance and genuine user instance?

I’m still very concerned a whitelist scenario will ultimately lead to just a few megalithic instances without a chance for new, small instances to ever join the federation.

Like the nightmare scenario for email where the big providers just decide one day to drop any mail that does not come from another large corp or from someone who paid money for some id certification. Even now running your own mailserver is a major pain and requires a lot of attention, receiving mail is fine, but sending… oh my.

So the hashcash solution proposed elsewhere still seems better to me. If I wanted to host my own instance I still could federate without begging the “council” for admission. The thought of burning energy just to prevent spam is repulsive but walling ourselves in and creating a gated community sounds even worse…