And now, everyone!

“IN THE LAND OF THE FREE
AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE!”

That’s the thing: if constituents only get their info (or opinions) through chatbots…

…by axing or redirecting (read: embezzling) funds once spent on actual science?

True, although we must concede there is a difference between the simple machine learning already present in paperless and LLMs where, depending on quantization, CPU-based inference doesn’t get you very far.

Hook up the TikTok repos and you’ll get downgrades every 20 seconds.

I do understand and share people’s hatred of corporate-owned, centralised cloud AI.

I understand (though share to a lesser degree) people’s ethical concerns about how these models were trained (copyright has been broken for a while now, this just exacerbates it).

But this level of outrage about using local models on an opt-in basis strikes me as hysterical.

Feel free to change my mind.

Man, that is so outdated! /s

The critical part is: how many supposed “quality” alternatives have been proven not to do any logging? Mullvad has been proven to be solid. They were raided and had jolly little to hand over to authorities on their customers.

How many of the other VPN services can say that about themselves?

So… Here’s another resource that will become available again once the bubble pops?

I’ve seen Immich mentioned around here before, but I’ve honestly never set up even a real homelab or sever before, so that’s a bit daunting.

I haven’t been in this space for too long either, but immich is what brought me here. I tried it out locally - no deecated server, just spun up immich on my desktop machine to try it out. And it was just so good it made me want to have a server and learn the ropes.

I’d recommend you try it out this way too. We’ll see each other on the other side of that rabbit hole. ;)

I’m the violence.

they forgot what actual competition is

That’s an accurate diagnosis. U.S. big tech companies all follow the same playbook: use VC to buy off or price-dump to death all of your competitors. Become a monopoly. Then enshittify and extract the maximum amount of wealth from b2b and retail customers by increasing the cost of your services.

Any sane country would have drowned these companies in anti-trust cases and carved them up. But political leadership at the time was too high on neoliberal free market ideology and the fairytales these self-styled “tech geniuses” wove around themselves. Now big tech has effectively bought off the U.S. government.

They’re in for a nasty surprise when they find out that the U.S. is not the world, and the rest of the world can do pretty well without the U.S…

Good luck expanding that to the rest of the world which is just discovering that, while not perfect, China’s open weights models are

a) good enough for 95% or all companies out there
b) a lot cheaper, also because they’re
c) self-hostable, meaning: they’ll always be available, unlike U.S. cloud AI which you’ll be cut off from whenever Diaper Donnie feels it’s time for yet another bribe.

I second this. Firmware on these controllers is really hit and miss. My first controller (gen 5, iirc) worked flawlessly out of the gate. My second (gen 6 (?)) would co connect and then disconnect again. A firmware update (on Windows, grml) did the trick back then (and now I’m not touching that shit again).

It’s a mixed bag really. Disabling JavaScript thwarts a lot of tracking efforts. But at the same time it puts you into a very small niche of users that, combined with other data points (user agent, IP location) makes you pretty fingerprintable.

Coming from a fellow JS Disabler, mind you.

I feel you. Handoff was dodgy af. I’ve switched to BasicSync for this very reason. It’s a minimal Frontend, handling only execution conditions on Android. All config is done through the webUI. It works great and avoids some, if not all of the trust issues.

It feels like nitpicking, but there’s a relevant difference here. If you can only access the weights (and not the training data and the learning algorithms used), it’s hard to get (say) a Chinese model to freely talk about Tiananmen Square Massacre. (Just tried it locally on Deepseek R1; it’s doable, but takes some prompt hacking.) The models may be freely available, but there’s bias and censorship baked into them.

It’s nice that these things are open source

Open weights != open source

Well, they do have that fruit basket, so…

Immich is dead-easy to set up on its own. I’m a great fan and have been running it for >2 years now.

That said, I don’t think it’ll work for you because:

• I gather you have little experience in self-hosting services. Sure, one can learn all that, but if you’re becoming a parent soon, your priorities will be elsewhere (as they should).
• self-hosting stuff isn’t a one-shot - it does come with maintenance costs. You need to keep your boxes up to date, swap out dead hardware, manage backups… You may not have time for that.
• Running immich itself is relatively easy. But running it securely is a different can of worms. Immich is a young project, written by enthusiasts, but not vetted for security like professionally-deployed software is. Thus, it’s not advisable to expose it to the open internet. Since you want to share access to others, you’d have to setup Wireguard VPN tunnels for your relatives, which complicates matters.

Obviously, I’m making a lot of assumptions about you. Whether these are true is up for you to decide.