Is the .gl domain down as well? Or is my DNS messing with me? I can open the newer ones, though.

Hmmh. I’m not entirely satisfied with any of them. Crowdsec is a bit too complex and involved for my taste. And oftentimes there’s no good application config floating around on the internet, neither do I get any sane defaults from my Linux distribution. Whereas fail2ban is old and eats up way too much resources for what it’s doing. And all of it is a bit too error-prone(?) As far as I remember I had several instances when I thought I had set it up correctly, but it didn’t match anything. Or it was looking for some logfile per default but my program wrote to the SystemD journal. So nowadays, I’ll double-check everything. I wish programs like sshd and webapps came with that kind of security built in in some foolproof way.

For remote management, I just enable SSH, configure it to run on some non-standard port and enable Fail2ban… Make sure I use certificates or secure passwords and also check if fail2ban is actually doing its job. Never had any issues with that setup.

For the services I’ll either use a reverse proxy, plus configure the applications not to allow infinite login attempts, or Wireguard / a VPN.

Normal DVD-R max out at 4.7GB. Wikipedia says there are double layer recordable DVDs with 8.5 GB, I’ve just never seen one of them. But they’re available on Amazon.

Idk. I usually just copy files onto USB thumbdrives these days.

I know. What helps is to learn which buttons to click and which ones to avoid. A good adblocker (uBlock for example) and some downloader. Not sure what people use these days, I have JDownloader2.
Still sucks, but it works. Not sure if there’s better options out there, I’m not aware of any.

I never buy premium accounts either. I don’t want to support their business model. IMO piracy needs to be free. Once I want to pay money, that goes towards the artists who created the content.

Hehe. It depends a bit on the social group. But most people will be aware of it before I even open my mouth… Dunno, maybe it’s the long hair, or Debian t-shirt or something like that. But I rarely have to (verbally) disclose the fact I’m a nerd 😉 There’s some danger of confusion with the metalheads, but you know, people can fulfill several stereotypes simultaneously, so… confusion avoided…

“Hey, I never liked Office 365, Microsoft as a company and all the Cloud shenanigans… And have you noticed how their products all become shittier and more invasive by the day? All while they increase subscription price each year now to finance all the AI stuff I rarely use? I’m a long-term fan of this other product, called XYZ which is just better in every aspect. No offense. If you want me to send you a link…”

(Edit: It’ll become easier after a while. At some point they all know you’re a Linux nerd and disassembled your wifi router at home, dishwasher… To get rid of proprietary spy components. And people will deliberately decide to listen to your opinion and lengthy rant, or make an effort to not bring up the topic 😆 At that point, you’re relatively free to speak your mind… Just read the room a bit. The goal isn’t to annoy people.)

Well, I’ve listened to audiobooks on Spotify (and Tidal) for a while, but that’s not piracy. You could try “hoerbuch” followed by the top-level domain of the United States. And the local library here has several shelves filled with audiobooks. I might have ripped a few to listen to them on modern devices…

I follow a similar strategy. I back up my important stuff. And I’m gonna have to re-rip my DVD collection and redownload the Linux ISOs in the unlikely case the RAID falls apart. That massively cuts down on the amount of storage needed.

Hmmh, thanks. Yeah, I read the Readme. And they claim it performs better than other methods. I guess I’ll find out soon.

Thanks! I’ll wait a few days, maybe one of these pops up on Huggingface. Are “abliterated” versions alright these days? Last time I downloaded something with that word in the name, it wasn’t very good.

Nice one. Is there a modern way of “jailbraking” these models? I’ve put in a request to write a story, and it generates like 2500 tokens of “thinking” text, philosophising about how the system prompt and its internal safety guidelines relate. And it gets lost in some internal dialogue. Ultimately deciding to find ways to weasel out of my prompt. And provide a “safe” version. Same thing with doubling as a coding assistant and security-related stuff. I can edit its “thoughts” and that seems to help a bit for a few paragraphs, but it’s pretty adamant on its weird rules, no matter what I do. I mean ultimately it at least provided the requested test case for the SQL injection. After reasoning to no end how it shouldn’t do it. But it’s a bit hard to squeeze things like that out of it.

Yeah, they often get quite warm. Some day I’ll be in the same situation as OP. And I can’t wait to throw out that supid modem. No clue, though what kind of SFP the fiber provider requires. I mean there’s quite a selection available…

Maybe correct? Though my cable modem gobbles down some 15W… Without even doing the Wifi… So, I bet this isn’t a universal truth, as a Mini-PC will comsume less and provide all kinds of extra services, networking, NAS…

You should have all kinds of options on Lemmy… You can edit a post and change it to whatever you like. Or delete it and optionally post a new one…

Just delete the post if it’s a mess-up.

Livekit can be used to build voice assistants. But it’s more a framework to build an agent yourself, not a ready-made solution.

And there’s another custom component, integrating all servers with an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint: https://github.com/jekalmin/extended_openai_conversation

I think there’s a lot of nuance here. I mean the Fediverse isn’t super efficient. But it manages to do what it’s supposed to do. And it really depends. Which Fediverse software. How many people are on those servers, how are they distributed. Do groups of people mingle on certain servers. Do they all subscribe to all the same content out there. Are there really big groups on servers with happen to have a slow internet connection… And then of course can we come up with improvements if we need to.
I think we’re going to find out once (or if) the Fediverse grows substantially. Some design decisions of the Fediverse are indeed a bit of a challenge for unlimited growth. Oftentimes technical challenges can be overcome, though. With clever solutions. Or things turn ot differently than we anticipated. So I don’t think there’s a good practical and straightforward answer to the question.

Good blog post.

I couldn’t think of a clever response to that. I still can’t.

I think it’s central to the issue they’re talking about. There’s demand for quick, cheap stuff. There’s also demand for quality stuff. But they’re not the same.

I mean, I’m sometimes sad nothing lasts anymore. Or means anything. We buy clothes, appliances, software, phones… just to throw it out a year later. Same with AI. We could do intricate art. Commission someone to draw our company logo or come up with a good advertisement video. But why? Everyone has a attention span of 30s these days and pretty much anything will do for Instagram. So rubbish it is. And we’re done in 5 minutes.

I think it’s more that society doesn’t value quality and sophisticated things any more. We rather have plenty cheap and superficial things. And for a lot of applications, it’ll do. Same with art, same with some software and webdesign. Also works the same way without AI. The consumer will do the beta test. And any random messenger uses 150 dependencies and Electron, and two Gigabyte of memory. That’s hardly artistry either.