I think an old laptop is a good choice if you have access to some. Laptops are built to be power efficient. And with the screen off you should be in the same ballpark with a Raspberry Pi. And you can keep using your workflow with Deja Dup or whatever you like. Letting them go to sleep and waking them up for example via Wake on LAN depends on the exact model. Some can do it, some can’t.

For the remote access, you’d need some access from the outside of your network. Either do a port forward on your router (and DynDNS) or install a VPN tunnel to get in.

I’ve had a similar setup running for some time. The only downside I can see is the external disk via USB. I don’t think it’s as reliable as an internal drive… I ended up connecting two or three external drives and some other hardware. And every few months, the USB would have some hiccups and reset the bus, occasionally disconnecting a device or an harddrive. Maybe that was my setup, maybe you sholdn’t be running several disks 24/7 over a cheap USB hub, idk. I just lived with the occasinal hang and restarted the abomination every few months. After some years I built a proper NAS and now they’re connected via SATA. But my first solution was super cheap and it did the job so I can’t complain.

I mean “officially” you’re not doing it right. You’re supposed to follow the 3-2-1 rule and use enterprise hardware for important data.

And keep in mind there are other options. You could buy a dedicated NAS. (They usually consume more power than a laptop or Raspi.) Or just use an external disk and connect it directly to your machine once a week and let DejaDup write the files there without any servers involved. Or maybe your internet router has an option to plug in an USB stick or disk and share it within the network. Some do.

One last thing on cloud vs local: Both protects you from a simple harddrive crash. But if your house burns down, you should pay attention to have your backups stored at a different location. If the backup sits next to your computer on your desk, they might both be gone.

Sounds like standard practice. First embrace as long as something helps you grow and then wait for the right moment and extinguish.

I don’t think this will be received well in the western market. But that might not be their main criterion.

Fair enough. Yeah, the article was about the future and hypothetical advancements in science in the next decades to come. But I’d agree. As of now I wouldn’t call it intelligent. I tried letting ChatGPT write my emails and despite everyone hyping AI to no end and calling the newest one on a PhD level student… I don’t see that at all.

Sure. What I’m referring to is that they just don’t generate any random garbage. But actually store knowledge and have the ability to combine and apply that. Sure they get trained on some datasets. That’s what AI and machine learning is all about. But it has complex implications and consequences. LLMs work very unlike “intelligent” living creatures. However that doesn’t mean they can’t generate “intelligent” text. They do it a different way. There are some severe limitations as of now and I didn’t find good use for my real-world tasks yet as they’re just not intelligent enough to do anything useful. Except translation and role-play games. That works very well and I’m glad I have something outperforming google translate by quite some degree. Intelligence isn’t well defined. And it’s not set in stone that you need human-like intelligence for lots of tasks… And I mean even a human can only do things they’ve learned before. Or infer things from other things they’ve learned. So fundamentally it’s not that different. For example I’m not a lawyer. If I wanted to write some legal document, I’d need to read a lot of stuff and study that matter. An LLM would need to do exactly the same to be enabled to generate text that sounds like a legal document. And the “intelligence” part we’re talking about is finally understanding the subject and be able to connect things, so to speak. Infer, and apply learned knowledge to new things. And we have some evidence that AI can do exactly that. So… It’s a bit crude, and not there yet. But it’s more than a stochastic parrot. The fundamental parts to a subarea of intelligence is there. And not by accident. Machine learning was invented to infer patterns from some datasets.

And I’m not sure about the sentience part either. Sure it’s completely impossible with the current approach. But is there a fundamental barrier? Didn’t nature already “code” it into existence with the structure of our brains? And we found out it’s just physics? A bit of chemistry and electricity in a complex structure of interconnected cells? It’s utter sci-fi, but why wouldn’t we be able to the same with silicone chips? I know people regularly deny the possibility. But I’ve never seen a good argument or a scientific paper ruling it out. I think it’s still debated whether there are fundamental barriers. Or what makes sentience in the first place. Just stating some uninformed opinion on that doesn’t proove anything. And for a positive proof we’re missing a good idea, research and even any hardware that’d be remotely capable of doing the calculations, lots of money and energy. So we’re far away from even thinking about it. So maybe we’ll know in 100 years. Or you give me some mathematical proof that rules it out?!

Use a password manager, a spam email address, uBlock, pay attention to app permissions… Don’t rely on algorithms shaping what you see from the world and confining you in a filter bubble. Have some secrets you don’t share with everyone. Be aware of things and learn about the platforms and software you use often, and what they do behind the scenes. Also be aware of alternatives and free and open-source software. Don’t give away your identifiers to everyone (phone number for sign-up, credit card number, real name and address, …)

You’re right. They’re more than stochastic parrots. And some people here don’t realize that. They can do a lot of things. But as is, they lack any substancial internal state hence things like consciousness, the ability to learn while in operation and a body. So while AI content can harm people and society, we’re still far away from the robot apocalypse.

I think that strategy is called “Chain of thought” reasoning. You might find some preexisting tutorials, prompts and papers. I think it’s been around since 2022, at least well before the new ChatGPT.

Sure. You need to be qualified to do that. A doctor can do that for the short term. And then a judge and a court has to make such decisions. I think in the real world they’re the only ones allowed to do that, to adults at least. And it involves lots of paperwork, hearing experts and so on. But also in real life, captains get some extra rights and duties, if they’re far out there, on their own. They can definitely lock up unruly people or make difficult decisions that need to be made on the spot. For everyone else, not so much. However, I think there are some exceptions. I’m not a native english speaker so I don’t know the exact legal term… But next to self-defense, there are other laws concerning emergencies, justifiable emergency, necessity as justification, good samaritan law…? I don’t know how we call that. But I’m pretty sure I could stop someone harming themselves, against their will. In dire circumstances. It wouldn’t be fun though, and the last resort to avert serious damage. It’s certainly problematic. And I think it has to meet objective standards. It can’t be construed, or it won’t apply. It’s complicated. And on the other side we also have failure to provide assistance where I live, which I’m not sure if it’s a law in the States.

Usually that’s done by the network routing. Add a default(?) route(?) or make the software bind to the vpn interface. I’m not sure. I think firewall rules can do the same thing. If you’re using docker, I’d advise you to use “gluetun” that seems to do everything for you.

Usually people do copyright violation with bittorrent. That means they tend to make sure the routing or dns doesn’t leak anything. I think that’s usually done by running the software inside of some containers or virtualization. If you do that your setup becomes simpler than inventing a dozen or so firewall rules. Either use gluetun or make the container bind to the vpn in its entirety. So practically the same setup everyone uses for pirating, just that you don’t pay for a VPN service, but do that (server) part yourself on your virtual server. Everything else is a good bit more elaborate and complicated…

I think what you’re trying to do is called a VPN. Set up a VPN that tunnels all the torrent traffic to and from the virtual server.

There are conditions like being certifiable insane. That certainly applies if someones brain isn’t working alright or got messed with. And makes it morally right to make decisions on their behalf. At least decisions in their interest. Because they themselves are unable to act in their own interest.

Wasn’t MediaTek abusing the GPL and bad for custom roms, meaning no aftermarket support possible for those devices?

Thanks. I’ll try lmsys, but ultimately I do mind privacy. But I also fool around.

Yeah, I know about AMD GPUs. Nvidia has quite a monopoly on AI and as everyone uses their hardware and software frameworks, that’s what’s supported best. At least currently. My predicion is: that’s about to change. But their competitors didn’t do a great job. But I’ve been annoyed with Nvidia’s stupid Linux drivers for so long, (I mean that also changed,) but I’d like to give my money to someone else, and swallow that pill. If I decide to do it anyways.

Thanks for the info. I think I can do something with that. Mistral-Nemo is pretty awesome for its size. Intelligent, can write prose, dialogue or answer questions, it’s completely uncensored out of the box…

Most people use either Matrix or XMPP. Both work.

There is a nice overview of chat protocols here: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/

I mostly use matrix as of today. I think it’s alright. It’s a bit difficult to explain encryption and device verification to other people… I think that could be designed better. But apart from that it works very well. So does XMPP which I’ve used before that. Have a look at the messenger matrix and all the options before deciding on an ecosystem. I’d take one of the friends and do some evaluation before dragging the whole group in. You can do that with some pre-existing servers before learning how to host the server part.

And btw: With most of them you can just use some public servers. You should do that unless you’re willing to put in the effort to maintain an own server. That’d give you complete control over the infrastructure… But it’s also a liability to maintain a server, do the updates etc for a group of friends and maybe years to come… End to end encryption will keep the content of your messages private, anyways. (If you use it.)

We need uncensored models. Eric Hartford wrote a good blog article in May 2023 about the whole topic: https://erichartford.com/uncensored-models

I think that also applies to biology reasearch and a variety of topics. And also in the adult industry AI can contribute new “art” or take away and flood everything with low quality content. We also have fights about copyright everywhere. I don’t see the adult industry in a different position than other industries… We’re going to see how AI changes things. Having a say certainly helps. I don’t like things being forced on people.

Good point. I think it’s super important to make this decision early on. Whether you want to invest time and do self hosting, or not and you’ll want to use managed services or regular non-free platforms. Doing things by yourself certainly teaches a lot. I do it. And I gain knowledge, independence and I think it’s important to understand the tools I use on a regular basis and not let Apple/Google take care of my life. And since I do a lot of things with computers, I can make good use of the gained knowledge. However I can also feel how someone wouldn’t want to do that. They might have other hobbies, a stressful job or a family and it’s quite some time that I spend digging through configuration files, reading documentation and maintaining stuff. It has to be worth it in some way, or it becomes a liability. And I think that’s not super obvious when starting the journey. I’m glad we have managed services which give independence without spending too much time. But I also prefer going all the way and learning lots of stuff.

Hmmh, I lately use mistral-nemo which is 12B parameters. Since I’m more a programmer than a gamer, I didn’t put a graphics card into my PC, and I believe it’s too old to accomodate any recent one. (older PCIe generation, only x8 ports) I’d have to replace everything. And then I might as well go for a Radeon RX 7900 XTS or something. That’s $1.000(?) but has 24GB of VRAM. I don’t think buying an entire PC and then going for an old GPU will make me happy. And thanks to llama.cpp I get about 2 tokens per second just on the CPU. It’d have to be a considerable step up to be worth it. And last time I checked even a P40 was like $300+ and it’s super old and unclear if it’ll continue to be supported in the major frameworks. I’m not sure. I still lean towards paying for cloud GPU compute.

Thanks for the numbers on your setup. That certainly helps weighing my options. Maybe some of my friends have some upgrades planned and want to give me their older 8GB NVidia cards…

Sure. I usually do the same thing. The laptop on which I’m typing right now is a refurbished Dell one and I really prefer a bit older enterprise hardware to new consumer hardware. Nice build quality, no nonsense and Linux runs great on that device. And it cost me a fraction of a new machine. However… with the intended use-case of a media center I’m not sure. Intel always adds hardware acceleration in their iGPUs and the modern codecs are quite demanding. I wouldn’t buy an older generation that doesn’t really support AV1. I’m not sure if hardware from 2 years ago can do that. And if someone buys a new TV set which supports HDR or something and then the recently bought, refurbished media center is out of date again… that also doesn’t help. Maybe I’d buy a new one in this case and just use it for the next 10 years. That’s also sustainable. But yeah, you have to pay attention to the details if you’re buying off-brand. But that also applies to most computer hardware, regardless. It’s a bit more of a lottery with cheap and off-brand devices.

Add some googly eyes if it “lives” in the living room. They fit right above the switch which would then become the nose.

Yeah back when I needed storage (quite some years ago) the mini pcs were less capable and more pricey, so I ended up building a NAS myself. It’s a regular, yet very power efficient PC. But due to size, it doesn’t fit next to the TV. If I’d do the same thing today, I’d certainly consider a machine like this. And $200 doesn’t sound much for a 2-bay NAS.

Uuhh, that’s a cute little trash can. Now fit that with the maximum of RAM it supports and two 12TB harddrives… And it’ll do more media center and NAS than the average person needs.