This is why I do a lot of my Internet searches with perplexity.ai now. It tells me exactly what it searched to get the answer, and provides inline citations as well as a list of its sources at the end. I’ve never used it for anything in depth, but in my experience, the answer it gives me is typically consistent with the sources it cites.

I’ve used nextcloud for a while now, but it does suffer from jack of all trades syndrome. I’ve started offloading the things I use it for to other services that do a particular thing better. Syncthing for general file syncing across my devices, Immich for managing photos, Radicale for contacts and calendar sync…

If you’re just looking for an all in one Google Drive like experience for your files though, Nextcloud is as good as it gets.

Interesting. Thanks for the information!

I use Portainer and it’s a good UI, but I find the way they market business edition pretty scummy. Like having a banner ad constantly visible on the page, and having half the features visible but disabled with a big bright “upgrade to Business Edition” message next to them, and directly refusing to add any mechanism to opt out. I respect that they need funding for development, but they need to realize that a lot of their users simply don’t need a business license and aren’t going to buy one no matter how much advertisement you throw at them. The fact that they don’t realize that and refuse to budge indicates to me that they’ve stopped caring about the user experience of their product.

Sorry for the rant, I’ve been annoyed by this for a long time. Some day I’ll set up my own gitops pipeline, but that pesky day job keeps getting in the way.

I was kind of afraid that would be the answer. Do you still need a separate Apple device to set it up? I’m not necessarily morally opposed to buying an Apple product, but I am morally opposed to buying two to use one.

Related question: what’s everyone using to stream from their Jellyfin server these days?

I have a shield pro, but it’s definitely starting to age, and with Nvidia neglecting it for years and finally ending support, I don’t think I’ll be getting a new one. My TV OS doesn’t have an app without side loading, and even if it did, I don’t think I’d want to use it.

Android has a similar feature. It’s called “Lockdown mode” on the shutdown menu. Locks the phone and turns off any biometric unlocks.

Honestly, because Windows is a steaming pile of garbage and using Mac feels like swimming with pool floaties.

I recently started using NixOS as my distro and it has been phenomenal. Saying the learning curve is a little steep is like calling a hurricane a little bit of rain, but once you start to get it, it’s extremely powerful and delivers on the promise of “all of your configuration in one place.” It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know that every time I tweak or fix something, it’s reliably making it into a version controlled and backed up repository. I could throw my laptop out the window, pick up a new one, and have all my applications installed and configured within half an hour.

it also means the need for societal shift to support people outside of capitalism is needed.

Exactly. This is why I think arguing about whether AI is stealing content from human artists isn’t productive. There’s no logical argument you can really make that a theft is happening. It’s a foregone conclusion.

Instead, we need to start thinking about what a world looks like where a large portion of commercially viable art doesn’t require a human to make it. Or, for that matter, what does a world look like where most jobs don’t require a human to do them? There are so many more pressing and more interesting conversations we could be having about AI, but instead we keep circling around this fundamental misunderstanding of what the technology is.

I can definitely see why OpenAI is controversial. I don’t think you can argue that they didn’t do an immediate heel turn on their mission statement once they realized how much money they could make. But they’re not the only player in town. There are many open source models out there that can be run by anyone on varying levels of hardware.

As far as “stealing,” I feel like people imagine GPT sitting on top of this massive collection of data and acting like a glorified search engine, just sifting through that data and handing you stuff it found that sounds like what you want, which isn’t the case. The real process is, intentionally, similar to how humans learn things. So, if you ask it for something that it’s seen before, especially if it’s seen it many times, it’s going to know what you’re talking about, even if it doesn’t have access to the real thing. That, combined with the fact that the models are trained to be as helpful as they possibly can be, means that if you tell it to plagiarize something, intentionally or not, it probably will. But, if we condemned any tool that’s capable of plagiarism without acknowledging that they’re also helpful in the creation process, we’d still be living in caves drawing stick figures on the walls.

Right. Why do I have to submit a retinal scan and 3 forms of ID to watch porn because parents can’t be bothered to learn basic computer skills and monitor their own children?

Not as long as there are minorities to blame for everything.

Kind of crazy that Vietnam can provide better Internet service to their citizens than the US. Not to disparage Vietnam in any way, but you’d think a country with the largest economy in human history would be able to keep up.

Do you own the house? Both coaxial cable and CAT6 (or CAT5) cable is extremely cheap and doesn’t really require any special tools or know-how to run. Obviously I have no idea what your situation is, but it might be worth replacing the cable yourself.

Because people are afraid of things they don’t understand. AI is a very new and very powerful technology, so people are going to see what they want to see from it. Of course, it doesn’t help that a lot of people see “a shit load of cash” from it, so companies want to shove it into anything and everything.

AI models are rapidly becoming more advanced, and some of the new models are showing sparks of metacognition. Calling that “plagiarism” is being willfully ignorant of its capabilities, and it’s just not productive to the conversation.

Yeah, the notion that no one uses torrents anymore is hilarious. I use both frequently. Usenet is great and has a lot of benefits, but it doesn’t hold a candle to torrents as far as breadth of available content.

One factor I haven’t seen mentioned is that because of rising interest rates, tech companies have had to shift from being focused on growth to actually turning a profit. Because of this, companies are having to shed employees because they over hired in anticipation of that continued growth. People are expensive so that’s an “easy” way to try to get the line closer to positive.

This is kind of a rough overview and I’m by no means an expert on economics. Just someone who works in tech and so has been following things closely.

One of the things I like about containers is how central the IaC methodology is. There are certainly tools to codify VMs, but with Docker, right out of the gate, you’ll be defining your containers through a Dockerfile, or docker-compose.yml, or whatever other orchestration platform. With a VM, I’m always tempted to just make on the fly config changes directly on the box, since it’s so heavy to rebuild them, but with containers, I’m more driven to properly update the container definition and then rebuild the container. Because of that, you have an inherent backup that you can easily push to a remote git server or something similar. Maybe that’s not as much of a benefit if you have a good system already, but containers make it easier imo.

I’ve always been hesitant to host any services on a device with a non-removable battery. Having a battery constantly charging and discharging isn’t great for it and could potentially be a fire hazard. I know modern devices have gotten much smarter about how they charge, so maybe it’s not as much of an issue anymore, but still something to be aware of depending on how old your phone is or how you modify the firmware.

Personally, with how cheap you can find a mini PC or SBC, I would just save up a bit (maybe even sell the device you’re planning to host on) and keep an eye out for deals. You’re going to get a lot more freedom and power with those devices, and not have to try to hack around the limitations of a mobile OS.

My advice for security is don’t expose anything to the Internet unless you’re sure you know how to secure it. If you want to be able to access self-hosted services remotely, setting up a VPN is the way to go. OpenVPN is gonna be the most widely supported way of doing that. In fact, based on a quick Google search, it looks like your router has an OpenVPN server built in. If you’re willing to put in some effort for something more modern and performant, look into WireGuard.

Another benefit of having a VPN is that if you set it up to allow access back out to the Internet, you can use it to mask your internet traffic while you’re connected to an untrusted network.