Me, during my free time after a long day of barely managing to do the minimum…

Every day…

My new headcanon is now that this is what aliens say, as a meme, whenever they see a human do anything they don’t understand.

Virtual private network,i know, i know, but i just wrote the wrong thing on accident.

Since its been up for so long feels dishonest to change it. I am owning up to my mistakes and my sentiment that the post is about providers only still stands.

Honestly i wish these kind of vpns had a different name.

Wireguard isnt even on the list and its entirely free, but also it doesn’t serve this same purpose.

Vpn stands for private personal network, selfhosted vpns do exactly that, i can use my Phone to connect to all my home services which replace expensive subscriptions without actually exposing those services to the net or requiring a domain for them.

Vpns are amazing, but most people i know irl that use them barely understand what they are or what they can be used for.

Dont knows for these two but the enterprise version of copilot for office workers is so damn awefull its embarrassing.

It literally suggests to do stuff that it is incapable of doing.

I tried to get some doc as a flowchart using mermaid script, i know for a fact other llms have no problems with that:

After 3 attempts of it trying to code but resulting in an actual error it gives me,

Do you want me to provide this flowchart in visio format instead.

yes, if you can do that, it would be useful.

Generates a powerpoint about the topic.

that is a powerpoint, not a flowchart.

Tries to generate an image of a flowchart with not a single word spelled correctly and arrows going nowhere.

i didn’t ask to generate an image i need a flowchart

Sorry, if you want i can provide a flowchart in viso file format instead.

sure, give it another go

Generates a brand new bad PowerPoint.

I copy pasted the entire conversation to claude and it instantly gave me what i asked.

I regret not including this as an option now but I contemplated adding this part:

The majority of our (subjective-my) internet nowadays follows patterns of the same places, new places are often found on the old places.

Most of my sites are bookmarked trusted websites. (Increasingly more self hosted also) wikipedia for facts, wolfram alpha for math, sites i have an account on.

Part of the crux is when is the last time you googled in the hope to find a new website you don’t already know yet? Even ads direct you using QR.

I find i rarely need a search engine anymore and when often when i do i can’t find anything anyway. Stuff has gotten so buried under search engine optimisation you are better of using ai for a first responds to obtain the terminology to search for how wrong ai got it then by searching for a question directly.

I am hoping to try this thing soon and if its good it might replace 90% of my browser activity. -> https://github.com/glanceapp/glance

This used to be not the case.

Duckduck is just a wrapper for bing (and gives microsoft trackers a free pass)

Startpage is a similar thing that uses google. Considering how hated bing is believe Duck only got more popular because of privacy marketing.

The safest alternative is running your own searxng client, it still relies on bing and google but at least you can verify that its actually stopping all trackers.

If you can boot an os from usb (basically the same for all distros) you can try proxmox.

There are these incredibly useful helper scripts that setup entire services in 1-2 copy pasted commands.

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/

To explain what proxmox is its basicly virtualisation software, it can run vms but also lxc (light linux containers) and share resources very efficiently between all of them

Jellyfin, radarr, sonar. They are all included in the helper scripts, each will be a dedicated lxc.

Its also very easy to setup raid and there own storage format is very efficient.

Its well documented to the point that any decent llm can help you learn whatever you need. In fact its claude that helped me setup my own proper raid on proxmox, also tought me about datasets and how i can make those available to different lxc

Personally i am very hands off with my server, the hardest part is often choosing what ip i want to give a service, i rarely update or mess with it if not strictly necessary.

For hardware i recommend plenty of ram (can Be bought and installed seperatly), more cores is usually better and internal graphics can save you some hassle depending on what you are doing (also allows you to dedicate a Big gpu to some services).

A warning on second hand corporate machines, the performance is often good But quite fans are often an afterthought. I onxe got a beast of machine for free but you could hear it spin from anywhere in my house.

A good practical case is always a blessing when you need to check the insides.

Never heard of this one but i might try it. Looks very clean and practical.

https://github.com/glanceapp/glance

The pattern are “we have this. we did this, now we believe this that is wrong” and “says what it is not, says what it is instead”

Sometimes a combination of the two

On premise there is nothing wrong with such sentences but llms tend to heavily overuse it and it becomes very formulatic.

Ask an llm to explain any concept and you are bound to find examples of it. Tell it how it made a logical error and your almost guaranteed to see an example of it.

Over the entire text i note about 10 variations of that pattern.

Thats fair,

In irony i probably could have worded my criticism better myself.

Its not because its ai that i don’t like it but rather because it has all the sloppy patterns i started to recognize that are prevalent in ai.

Some of those become increasingly jarring but only because i pay a subjective amount of attention to them. Bad human writers have an advantage in that their bad writing structure is still more unique to only their own writings.

A piece of writing being thoughtfully put together is far from inconsequential for me.

I use a premium tier ai myself and am not against using it for assistance, it can craft a decent snippet (that still needs multiple manual edits) But not at all a full coherent text that reads efficiently.

Its applies structure without understanding the goal of the text resulting in a paragraph salad.

It simultaneously treats the reader like a toddler with oversimplified metaphors while also overcomplicating things for no other apparent reason than filling a word quota.

Above article is twice the length it needs to be. Its lazy, lacks actual understanding and feels “sloppy” in the original meaning of the word.

Having read more of the text i feel my original comment was way too forgiving. Even the opener does not make sense if you try and digest it. Silicon. It even includes misinformation, stack management existed before C was a thing.

Don’t get me wrong, i like using dashes too.

I actually have a contract to sign which requires an em dash that changes the interpretation drastically. I am struggling to get the author to realise its importance because i received 3 updated versions that did not include it. And this is after i replied with a self-fixed document the first time.

But this article really does use them a lot, and thats not the only tell, just a more obvious one.

I dont know how accurate zerogpt is but i gave it the full text and they returned 100% ai writen, not even a mix.

Sorry but even if this was written by a human, ai has ruined this kind of sentences for me:

“This is Hardware Stockholm Syndrome: we optimized the hardware for C, then pointed at the hardware and said “see, C is efficient!” We forgot we made it that way.”

Also, so-many-dashes. Even if the “human author” fact checked all the details, it reads like slop and i cant get trough it.

The technical term seems to be a JBOD bay. (Just a Bunch Of Disks)

Basic ones are probably usb, ideally you have something that has a SFF port. Modern ones might also have thunderbolt.

Finding a micropc that supports SFF out of the box might be a challenge but some do support pci express cards.

Apparently there also exists something like Oculink which is pci over cable but i know even less about that one.

EDIT: if you look for “Nas enclosure 4bay” you actually do find plenty of options (Jonsbro N3 per example) that allow you to build it all in one unit with a mini-itx board. A nas pretty much just is a pc with special software so this would be what i recommend.

Maybe i miss some perspective here because i never had the spare money to consider a storebought nass. The convenience never sounded like it was worth being locked down to its software.

My server is “just a pc”

I got a case with external drive slots (it also needed to fit a gpu), but i suppose external drive cases also exist that can connect to a micro computer build.

The software is proxmox, which imo is amazing. Its virtualisation and backup software and performs really well and has a proper gui.

I have numerous lxc (linux container that is not a full vm) that each run their own docker with a single service. I can ssh into those from my main system or visit the terminal and other panels in the proxmox gui. Many services host a gui to my network and i could probably make it so cli is minimal but i personally am comfortable with that so…

I also run a few full vms on it, including some windows desktops.

You could probably also host actual Nass software this way.

All of these work well next to eachother and share resources. Snapshots and backups of individual systems or data can be made with ease.

If it doesn’t fit your usecases you can get the off the shelf ones i guess but for others interested here, maybe this helps.

Argo Tuulik was a minor shareholder and part of the coup of Ilmar Compos who ousted the original creators and inventors of the elysium universe using legal exploits.

Robert Kurvitz the actual creative force behind disco Elysium has been barred from telling stories of this own world because he no longer holds the copyright.

The people who are trying to sell this “successors” are the people who robbed us from learning more about this world.

my dream of hosting a few services mostly for personal use is alive and kicking tyvm

Continue to self host, create a yearly backup on external harddrive which you keep offline at a trusted family members house.