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.

In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.

So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.

It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?

I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.

Yeah, no, it’s not gonna be good.

But neither is Linux on phones.

Again, this is responding to the guy saying he’s willing to go to dumbphones or Linux phones. If he’s that desperate/aggressively ready to use sub-par solutions, degoogled Android IS an option and it will probably be more functional, despite not being good.

Yeeeah, maybe take your own advice there.

For the record, we’re still not disagreeing, technically. In that “All I did is expand on the other negative side effects of this measure that weren’t mentioned” is 100% “I couldn’t find a shill to argue with, so I had the argument all by my lonesome whether it made sense or not”.

It’s still bad.

Yeah, but… this isn’t that.

You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.

We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.

And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.

They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.

I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.

Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.

I said it because it’s… true? Well, in that this is what they announced anyway. Also, relevant to the post I was responding to.

So how is it downplaying anything? It’s not downplaying it, it’s not exaggerating it, it just… is.

Nobody is arguing with you on this being bad, friend. You just want to be mad at a shill and because you couldn’t find one you’re doing your bit at the first person that said anything other than “Google sucks” even if it was on an unrelated subject.

Don’t do that. That’s a bad thing to do.

So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…

…what’s with people being mad about it?

I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.

Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.

So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?

Yyyyes?

I mean, as opposed to what? Mainstream Linux phones? The guy is saying that if this goes through he may try dumbphones or Linux phones, I’m saying that degoogled Android may also be able to bypass the problem. How is what I’m saying in conflict with what you responded?

Sorry, I know I’m grumpy, but on this subject it’s been super frustrating the degree to which people just respond to isolated stimuli like a dog seeing a ball go by. Like, zero ability or attempt to grasp context or meaning, just see a word, type the thing they wanted to say regardless of whether it fits. It gets grating after a while.

I believe they confirmed uncertified devices will not have these requirements, so technically degoogled Android should still be fine.

You don’t get Google services, but then again that’s also true of every other alternative.

It’s all jumping the gun for now. We’ll see where this goes.

So there’s nothing new here other than a link to their Q&A video.

And perhaps more importantly a subtle reminder that the Q&A blog post in question includes a link to a Google survey for developers you can freely add feedback to by entering your email.

Following the links instead of reacting to the headline has its perks.

I mean… this. Supermarkets aren’t that big. If you’re recording where everything is shelved (and that’s a big IF, I doubt it’s worth it), then a good old search will do the trick just fine.

But also, forget even asking. I would assume supermarkets want you to roam around the store looking for things, because… well, that’s how you bump into crap you don’t need and buy it anyway. Seems like a weird lose/lose.

I imagine being convinced that a loved one is trapped inside ChatGPT the same way I imagine believing they’re trapped on the TV or the telephone. I mean, yeah, ChatGPT can generate text claiming this is the case, but ultimately the whole thing requires a fundamental disconnect with the technology at play.

I’m less concerned with the people who are in that situation and more with the current dynamic where corporate shills are pushing fictions around that idea while media and private opposition is buying into that possibility and accepting the wild narrative being passed by the other side because it’s more effective to oppose the corpse-trapping semi-sentient robot that makes you go mad than it is to educate people about the pretty good chatbot.

The shills aren’t helping, the people who made their entire personality to fearmonger about this online aren’t helping, the press sure as hell isn’t helping. This is mostly noise in the background of a pretty crappy state of the world in general, but it sure is loud.

I’m perpetually mad at having a global conversation about a thing without understanding how it works despite how it works not being a secret or that complicated to conceptualize.

I am now also mad at having a global conversation about a thing without understanding how we work despite how we work not being a secret or that complicated to conceptualize.

I mean, less so, because we’re more complicated and if you want to test things out you need to deal with all the squishy bits and people keep complaining about how you need to follow “ethics” and you can’t keep control groups in cages unless they agree to it and stuff, but… you know, more or less.

I mean, of the fictions you can build around this tech this is one of the least harmful ones, except when it’s GenAI corpos hyping their stuff up unreasonably.

I’ll say that the concern is people not understanding what they’re using, which honestly has been the case since the Internet went mainstream and I just don’t have good solutions for it.

I suppose it makes more sense the less you want to do and the older your hardware is. Even when repurposing old laptops and stuff like that I find the smallest apps I’d want to run were orders of magnitude more costly than any OS overhead. This was even true that one time I got lazy and started running stuff on an older Windows machine without reinstalling the OS, so I’m guessing anything Linux-side would be fine.