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.

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

Yeah, that’s what got me confused. To my knowledge, we’re missing a unified theory and quantum gravity. So, the premise of this doesn’t exist. Maybe for a good reason. And even if it did, we do models to describe reality, that isn’t necessarily reality itself.

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.

Lame. “[…] using a theory of quantum gravity”. So… Maybe it’s a different theory? Have they looked if competing theories or not yet discovered ones rule out simulation?

Good question. I was planning to start fresh as well. At least at some point. I think I’m going to first add the devices and do a better job documenting what I have, what firmware I modified how and pay attention to naming things in a coordinated manner, set the areas… And then think about what automations I need, what blueprints are available and newer methods to achieve the same thing. And throw overboard all the testing relics, HACS integrations and ESPhome configs and automations I don’t need anymore and for some reason keep around for reference. And then I’m bad at UI. I think I’d have to watch some Youtube tutorials to see how other people structure it in a sane way. I heard the bubble cards are popular these days.

Wtf? I thought this wasn’t possible with the silicon in older ESPs. Is this a proprietary piece of software? I’d need access to the ESPhome component to use it in my house. (Edit: Ah I see, they use massive amounts of microcontrollers, so probably something basic like signal strength, not anything fancy like the modern Wifi-Sensing.)

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 😉

Wouldn’t you or any other addon manager get hit by the same rate-limiting by Github that caused HACS to implement the API key thing?

https://github.com/OHF-voice/speech-to-phrase

This is what I use, and I believe a successor to one of the Rhasspy projects. That addon builds a database of sentences it needs and then does speech recognition on those only. It’s faster and doesn’t have the downsides you mentioned. And I tend to get that a lot in German language, Whisper always struggles with the composite words… speech-to-phrase It has other downsides, though. It doesn’t understand phrases it wasn’t configured for. So you need to pre-define what items you want it to add to the todo list. And you have to say the correct phrases, a sentence with the same meaning but a different grammer won’t be recognized.

[…] 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: !localllama@sh.itjust.works
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.

Thanks, and that’s the right thing to do… I deliberately phrased it so you can’t tell if it’s sarcasm. I mean the “weirdness” is a bit due to how it works very differently than the usual Linux distribution. I mean it’s not really objectively weird, these things are there for a reason. But it’s subjectively very weird and confusing to anyone who dares to apply their pre-existing Linux knowledge… Because there’s a lot of additional stuff to factor in.

And I didn’t mention the upsides. You can easily define and manage reproducible development environments. Roll something out to 500 servers or workstations without any effort and it’ll install your Firefox addons and bookmarks and favorite shell customizations while at it. It’s highly customizable. And if it’s in there, you can install a mailserver or Nextcloud with 10 lines of code and one command. And it’ll usually be very easy to maintain after that. It can roll back the system and a few nice things.

So it’s gonna save a lot of time as well, if you use things to your advantage. But I highly doubt that’s going to be someone’s average desktop Linux install. Other than that I think my portrayal of the underlying complexity, the disorganized documentation and the learning curve (which is as steep as a wall) is somewhat accurate.

I’m glad we have all the options available with Linux. And there’s some valid niche for all of them. Just think twice whether those highly specialized ones are what you need. I think NixOS is quite an investment in learning things, poking at stuff and getting lost in side-quests. Whether that’s wasted time in total, entirely depends on what you do with it later. I tried it. And I like it and hate it at the same time. And I wasted more time on it than I’m willing to admit… It’s not bad, just a lot. And the average admin or user might not need all the things it’s good at.

NixOS is kind of awesome. It has a crazy amount of stuff packaged compared to other distros. And the declarative approach is super nice. And you get to learn a lot of things. First of all a completely new programming language to write these configurations. And lots of weird concepts and its internals which enable it to do what it does. And it’s mandatory to know about that stuff or you can’t do basic things. And then it also made me read a good amount of source code, because there’s often not enough documentation available, and I had to figure it out on my own (by reading the sources). So I’d say if you like learning new things… It’ll definitely make you do it. 😄

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.

But doesn’t that require some software-defined networking or a special network setup? I’m pretty sure with the average home internet connection, you’ll fail over to the replica at your friend’s home. But that has an entirely different IP address and the game client will not handle that gracefully. It’s going to disconnect. And you need to do some DNS as well to always point at the active server and forbid caching. In a datacenter or enterprise setting, sure. you’ll just reroute the traffic and nobody will notice.

I’d rent one (small) VPS for $10 a month and split the bill. As far as I know that’s how most people do it. It’s going to have >99.6% uptime, a fast datacenter internet connection at some central location and runs on enterprise hardware… The Kubernetes approach adds a lot of complexity, you’ll have your games disconnect anyway once it fails over as you can’t migrate the IP addresses. And there will be some additional traffic between the locations to keep everything in sync. And 4x chance of some of the hardware failing and someone needs to fix it. Unless I’m mistaken about how Kubernetes works.