Deliverer of ideas for a living. Believer in internet autonomy, dignity. I upkeep instances of FOSS platforms like this for the masses. Previously on Twitter under the same handle. I do software things, but also I don’t.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • You may have come across this already – and if you have, you are on the right path. Here is a solid list from the coreboot docs on mainboards they support.

    You should be able to derive a few vendors from this list, as well as compare any possible candidates you have found to it. Some vendors on this list produce hardware that is Linux-forward, such as System76 and Purism. Linux-forwad vendors are good place to start.

    System76 has laptops and small profile desktops, servers, etc. Purism has most of that, as well. Both are gonna be a little pricier than a typical vendor, but the hardware – and their respective missions – are worth it if you have the means. I have owned and / or used PCs from both these vendors, and they have been quality.

    Otherwise, that linked list above will be helpful to determine if what you are researching has a mainboard that works. Best of luck!



  • Although this has been heavily downvoted, the author has a point: what do private, safe AI experiences in a software mean for the common browser user? How does a company that was founded as an ‘alternative’ to a crummy default browser take the same approach? For those that do and will use the tech indiscriminately, what’s next for them?

    Just as cookie/site separation became a default setting in FF eventually, or the ability to force a more secure private DNS, what could Mozilla consider on its own to prevent abuse, slop, LLM-syncophantism / deception, undesired user data training, tracking, and more? All that stuff we know is bad, but nobody seems to be addressing all too well. These big AI companies certainly don’t seem to be.

    Rather than advocate for Not AI, how do we address it better for those who’ll simply hit up one of these big AI company websites like they would social media or Amazon?

    Is it anonymous tokenization systems that prevent a big AI company knowing who a user is, a kind of ‘privacy pass?’ Is it text re-obsfucation at the browser level that jarbles user input so that patterns can’t emerge? Is it even a straightforward warning to users about data hygiene?

    The above is silly, and speculative, and mostly for conversation. But: maybe there’s something here for your everyday browser user. And maybe we ought to consider how we help them.





  • Hello! I recently deployed GPUStack, a self-hosted GPU resource manager.

    It helps you deploy AI models across clusters of GPUs, regardless of network or device. Got a Mac? It can toss a model on there and route it into an interface. Got a VM on a sever somewhere? Same. How about your home PC, with that beefy gaming GPU? No prob. GPUStack is great at scaling what you have on hand, without having to deploy a bunch of independent instances of ollama, llama.ccp, etc.

    I use it to route pre-run LLMs into Open WebUI, another self-hosted interface for AI interactions, via the OpenAI API that both GPUStack and Open WebUI support!






  • What’s your hypervisor manager? Or are you just bare metal?

    For VMWare and Proxmox both, I would recommend the community edition of Veeam. It can handle up to 10 VMs for free.

    If you’ve got the funds as a small-to-large business, Veeam’s first paid tier, on a yearly basis, is a solid option to backup even more.

    Caveat emptor if you buy a license (or not): Veeam runs on Windows only. I have used, like, a single internal network Windows VM dedicated just to Veeam before. It has an easy to pick up UX after a little research, and the UI is clean.

    Bacula is deprecated, unfortunately.




  • There’s an internal age we feel personally, there’s an external age we present as – and then there’s an age that can brought out of us, based solely on circumstances.

    In the case of all three, for the sake of this idea gaining some traction with most folks reading, I might re-label ‘age’ as ‘identity’, or even some kind of part of ourselves, coming to the forefront out of necessity. This idea comes from Internal Family Systems Theory.

    When we are faced with circumstances that invite us to ‘act our age,’ such as knowing we need to get good rest for the next day, that’s the part of us that comes to the forefront to help because we have the experience to know so. That part of us is there to protect us from experiences we’ve had in the past that may have sucked, such as having to go into work after a late night of Mountain Dew and gaming. That part’s job might even be as a ‘protector,’ who supports us in taking responsibility seriously, practicing readiness, having some forethought.

    Likewise, when we are faced with circumstances that invite us to entertain children, such as playing pretend or being silly, that’s the part of us that we had at the forefront of that age, and we can call it up in a kind of way that doesn’t feel like ‘faking’ it. That part of us is there to continue a sort of ‘zone of play’ we all liked, where it was fun and easy to ‘yes and’ other kids into a made-up game with made-up rules, or do something goofy because we all felt goofy. That part’s job might be as a ‘joy-bringer,’ who supports us in exercising freedom, living out radical invitation, being creative. Simple, dumb joy.

    All parts are necessary, and the parts are neither good or bad. Just parts.

    Nothing ever disappears, either – nor should it disappear, regardless of whichever part of us is so drastically at the forefront as to convince all the other parts that they aren’t important to function in this life – even at 40.

    Hell, especially at 40.