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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Yes, but self-hosting does whatever the HOWTO, YouTube vid or AI slop the user follows tells them to do. If the user doesn’t know the basics, how could they know what an instruction for activating UPnP does or opening a NAT port does and why that might expose their data? Laymen don’t even understand what making theie stuff publicly accessible means. It might simply mean “Yay I can access my stuff on the go.” 😄

    If on the other had the user learns the basics, they can tell when a doc instructs them to do something dangerous and they can do something about it to avoid disaster.





  • “If you can’t configure Docker, reverse proxies, and Yaml files, you shouldn’t be self-hosting.”

    If this is an example of gatekeeping, I think you are misjudging.

    Whenever self-hosting there’s a very real risk of exposing your private data to the internet. Potentially a lot more private data than you’d otherwise expose via cloud providers. This risk necessitates a basic understanding of some of the importand bits and how to operate them securely. If not for that, then anything would go.

    Understanding docker, reverse proxy, and YAML which is used to configure those is part of probably the simplest way to get to secure self-hosting. I’d add a self-hosted VPN to access local resources. I’m not aware of a magic UI solution that does it all and securely. Docker compose files are very accessible. A couple of those followed by docker compose up -d and you have a basic env up and running.

    Generally the lack of knowledge in X or Y doesn’t mean there’s necessarily an easier path than learning X and Y and that you’re being gatekept by being told you have to learn X and Y. Some things are harder than others. Buying Apple Cloud and setting it up is easier than self-hosting Nextcloud. I don’t think that should be the case, but today it is as far as I’m aware.









  • Dear sir/madam, NVIDIA 550 is available in the Debian stable repo itself so no need for third party repos and therefore no significant risk of breakage. If that driver works well enough you’re good. Ubuntu LTS has NVIDIA 580 in its official repo. I’m running in on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as I write. Then of course if you’re on Debian and NVIDIA 550 does not work for you, you could grab the official driver installer from NVIDIA which would very likely work fine on Debian stable, and it won’t break on its own via Debian updates since Debian stable doesn’t ship major version changes of its packages between releases. You’d likely have to uninstall, then reinstall every few years when you upgrade to the next stable Debian release, but that’s best practice for anything that was installed outside of Debian’s repo.

    There’s always a possibility for unintended fuckups but these methods are fairly safe and stable. Using 3rd party repos is significantly more risky to break things one of those days as you innocently apt upgrade.






  • Of course he does. But false dichotomy aside, China has a good chance “winning the AI race” anyway. Given their existing work, the investment they’re doing in higher education, the additional internationally trained talent they get every year, and the industrial base that lets them make cheap energy and hardware, I think at the very least China has a decent chance to create equivalent tools at a lower price than whatever the US AI industry creates. If they come out with a competitive hardware and sell it at lower margins, along with free models as they already offer… I think a lot of firms and governments would opt for that instead of paying for NVIDIA and OpenAI.



  • As another software guy, I second this advice. Resolving a driver issue on Debian Stable or a Debian-based distro (for example) is typically much easier and would cause many fewer problems down the road than going to a less predictable OS to solve a driver problem. The underlying OS contains so much more software than a driver that the likelihood of introducing problems when changing the OS is way higher. I used to solve hardware issues by changing OS back in the 2000s when I didn’t know any better. Once I learned enough to keep a stable base OS and modify just the bits that need modifying, I stopped reinstalling. My main machine was last reinstalled in 2014. It’s been running Ubuntu LTS since then. Its hardware platform has been changed multiple times.