MudMan

That’s not true at all. Synology will sell you 24 bay rack mounted devices and 12 bay towers, as well as expansion modules for both with more bays you can daisy chain to them.

Granted, I believe those are technically marketed as enterprise solutions, but you can buy a 12 bay unit off of Amazon for like two grand diskless, so… I mean, it’s a thing.

Not saying you should, and it’s definitely less cost effective (and less powerful, depending on what you have laying around) than reusing old hardware, but it does exist.

I’m currently running some stuff out of an old laptop which I also have tucked away somewhere and just… remote desktop in for most of the same functionality. And even if you can’t be bothered to flip it open in the rare occassion you can’t get to the points where the OS will let you remote in, there are workarounds for that these days. And of course the solution to the “can’t hook it up to a keyboard and mouse” in that case is the thing comes with both (and its own built-in UPS) out of the box.

Nobody is saying that server grade solutions aren’t functional or convenient. They exist for a reason. The argument is that a home/family server you don’t need to use at scale can run perfectly fine without them only losing minor quality of life features and is a perfectly valid solution to upcycle old or discarded consumer hardware.

I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.

You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.

That calculation changes a bit if you’re trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you’re running a hosting business, at which point it’s not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.

I mean… my old PC burns through 50-100W, even at idle and even without a bunch of spinning hard drives. My actual NAS barely breaks that under load with all bays full.

I could scrounge up enough SATA inputs on it to make for a decent NAS if I didn’t care about that, and I could still run a few other services with the spare cycles, but… maybe not the best use of power.

I am genuinely considering turning it into a backup box I turn on under automation to run a backup and then turn off after completion. That’s feasible and would do quite well, as opposed to paying for a dedicated backup unit.

No.

I had that laptop before I tried to move it to Linux and I’m not buying a new one. It does work under Windows.

This is not my laptop not supporting Linux, this is Linux not supporting my laptop. Because I already own the laptop. If people weren’t trying to cheerlead for their preferred OS for other reasons than… you know, whether it’s good or not, this wouldn’t even be a discussion. In fact, half the “Windows sucks” angles these days are down to “Windows 11 doesn’t support specific pieces of pre-existing hardware”. Which, you know, is the exact problem I’m having here.

Now, would ASUS finally paying attention to the ecosystem make it easier for a whole bunch of people to move over? Sure. Of course. But that doesn’t contradict my previous statements.

I have an ASUS laptop that maps its multiple speakers incorrectly under Linux, it’s been killing me for months and I’m now considering it. I was not prepared for the realization that the Linux path forward would be to just pay by the bug fix.

“Popsci author repeats claim he’s been using for decades to sell books that most anthropologists question”.

Man, sometimes I think newspapers and traditional media should be banned from reporting on science at all. I am very critical of social media and what Internet does to communication, but I’ll admit that the extremely focused experts that communicate on a narrow field for a living do a much, much better job of parsing published claims than traditional generalist news ever did. I am exhausted of impossible galaxies, stars that “should not exist”, healthy superfood, cures for cancer and world-ending events.

Just to fast-forward this dumb cat-and-mouse thing, the next step is people go back to torrenting their porn and deeper down the rabbit hole of garbage “free” websites skirting the rules.

As always, the UK is useful on the international stage because sometimes you need to be able to point at some idiot trying dumb stuff to explain to people why dumb stuff is dumb.

This. People NEED to stop anthropomorphising chatbots. Both to hype them up and to criticise them.

I mean, I’d argue that you’re even assigned a loop that probably doesn’t exist by seeing this as a seed for future training. Most likely all of these responses are at most hallucinations based on the millions of bullshit tweets people make about the guy and his typical behavior and nothing else.

But fundamentally, if a reporter reports on a factual claim made by an AI on how it’s put together or trained, that reporter is most likely not a credible source of info about this tech.

Importantly, that’s not the same as a savvy reporter probing an AI to see which questions it’s been hardcoded to avoid responding or to respond a certain way. You can definitely identify guardrails by testing a chatbot. And I realize most people can’t tell the difference between both types of reporting, which is part of the problem… but there is one.

Presumably to minimize exposure while they add the announced security band-aids?

So… while I have you guys here, how do we feel about iOS having just announced basically the same feature? We angy about that one too or nah?

I mean, joking aside, I’m genuinely curious about what the reaction is going to be. On paper it’s a very similar concept, but it feels like routing it through Siri and not surfacing the stored data will legitimately kill some of the creepy factor even if what’s happening behind the scenes is very similar.