Having electric stability issues this week in Bangkok - several 2-3 hour outages, which are too long for a UPS to cover the gap. I have several mid range but older PCs running docker, virtualbox, etc for various things including a postfix server for the family email, immich, QBittorrent, pihole, paperless, huly, postiz, a Minecraft bedrock server, a flightradar24 ads-b collector, and a variety of other homegrown projects.

Thinking about getting some or most of this over to a service like hetzner, perhaps even splurging on a baremetal dedicated system.

Recently I’ve been reading about/trying to learn qemu and proxmox, but don’t understand them yet. Is that where it’s at for managing a bunch of your own VMs? Or kubernetes/k8s?

I’ve been a little out of the loop for a few years and of course coming back up to speed IT wise judge take weeks. Looking for recommendations on offloading my home stuff to a cloud that I control.

This gives me an idea for a browser plug in that would show you the sellers direct store as you shop Amazon. Maybe something like that exists already.

Just about every serious seller on Amazon has a website or another direct sales channel. The bigger ones will even ship with a professional warehouse in about the same time. Some even give discounts or return incentives if you shop them regularly and can almost surely handle customer service or tech issues faster and more directly without going through Amazon. If they are honest in their dealings their return and exchange policies may even be better too.

Amazon really understands the lifetime value of a customer and benefits tremendously by having the biggest catalog in existence. They do a lot of stuff to keep buyers satisfied and sellers on edge. It’s a race to the bottom there and nobody wins except Amazon, while customers get cheaper and cheaper shit and sellers can have their livelihood and the funds to pay the salaries of their staff by a Monday morning email which could come after the slightest infraction.

Only downside is that you can more likely be compelled to give up biometric authentication than a password (as far as I understand)

I’ve heard of vibe coding but in the context of being able to identify music that fits a “vibe”. What are you talking about?

This is when you give some LLM a prompt such as “write a game like Minecraft except cooler” and the system will output some code that might run and might vaguely resemble a block game.

So then you go back ask for more, it does something to the code potentially improving or breaking it, go back again ask for more, and repeat over and over. I’m being a little bit sarcastic because most serious developers look down on this, but really this is how a lot of coding is happening these days. There are tools to make this process somewhat usable and they are getting better every day.

Interesting. I can buy that idea, a model that’s designed to be general and answer all questions is going to have to make compromises in a lot of ways.

So it’s possible that model benchmarking needs to be revised in some way to give more useful analysis of its capabilities.

The industry is quickly moving towards using agents, MCP connections (sources of real-time data for the model to pull from, and apis that allow the model to perform tasks, like putting things on a calendar), and RAGs (augmentation with sources of truth, such as a 100 page pdf guide for example), and models that seem to be more aware that they can get data from other sources.

The future might become specialized models all the way down.

Just today I’m playing with “vibe coding” and using one agent as an orchestrator that assigns and monitors tasks to other agents. The result is still slightly bullshit code but it’s amusing to watch it work. Not sure yet if this is a strategy to spend all my money through API fees or will result in something useful 😂

I’m not sure why the above comment was down voted so hard. This community should encourage insightful comments.

It seems like overall college degrees are still a worthwhile financial investment on average.

If you disagree, dialogue.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/03/01/college-degrees-lead-to-142-trillion-gain-in-career-earnings-study-finds/

Compared to the average high school graduate, the earnings premiums were:

$495,000 over a lifetime for people who completed an associate’s degree;
$1 million for those who completed a bachelor’s degree; and
$1.7 million for those with a graduate degree.

https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2021/data-on-display/education-pays.htm

For example, workers with a bachelor’s degree had median weekly earnings of $1,305 in 2020, compared with $781 for workers with a high school diploma. And the unemployment rate for bachelor’s-level workers was 5.5 percent, compared with 9.0 percent for those whose highest level of education was a high school diploma.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/18/median-return-on-investment-for-a-college-degree.html

the typical college graduate can expect a median 12.5% return on their investment in higher education

You can do due diligence as a buyer forever but if the seller lies or doesn’t disclose… Problems like these happen. Lawsuits are potentially incoming to figure that one out.

It kind of looks like the new owners of VPN Secure got screwed - the last owner made all these costly lifetime deals and didn’t tell them. The obligation/liability to service those deals wasn’t transferred to the new owners.

Which means the old owner is probably the bad guy here and still owes these customers for their lifetime subscriptions.

Just curious if you’re a developer or using LLMs often.

I like Anthropic’s sonnet 3.7 model for agent and code related tasks more than the Open AI models at the moment.

Deepseek and LLama can be run offline, which is great for certain uses especially the aforementioned BS tasks that can perhaps burn through API tokens. Quality of output doesn’t match the top models but this is second to privacy for many.

Not sure where things are at with Dall-E 3 image generation but the last time I was looking it seemed like Stable Diffusion has gotten damn good and is extensible in ways that dall-e is not.

Voice recognition, and TTS output w/emotion OpenAI has the best I’ve ever heard.

Image recognition openAI might lead but the llama4 multimodal stuff is pretty awesome

Anyways I’m just some rando but my observation is that OpenAI better get on that IPO fast unless they have some magic in the pipeline because they are being attacked by competent solutions from every side in a niche that is showing diminshing promise to change everything the father we go.

Aren’t such posts getting people banned online?

A lot of their staff will be finished with needing to make any money ever again in their lives if they IPO.

But that will also throw OpenAI into the public sphere of needing to make money quarter after quarter forever, which inevitably leads to them sucking and no longer being innovative. Actually OpenAI is already teetering on this already as others are catching up. Sam and other top guys will leave because they hate people telling them what to do and don’t need it.

Facebook and Deepseek are literally giving it away for free now to kill the competition and in some areas other competitors are producing better products already.

It’s a weird space. I used to think we were on the verge of entering a whole new era of technology but now I think it’s going to be muted. Perhaps AI (as we know it now) eased some tasks and eliminated some BS stuff that used to waste our time, but we’ve not yet completely eliminated most professional jobs - if anything I think we just added more for them to learn and do to remain competitive.

I had a LaserJet 4M until just a few years ago. It still had a BNC port on the back.

Damn that printer was the goat.

Is it possible to use a voip based SMS for registration?

Those are a little easier to get anonymously then physical sim cards.

I use a cronjob with cerbot to renew

I also have Uptime Kuma setup to alert if certificates are getting close to expiration

We need a decentralised search engine.

… Thats all the people outside. It’s really inefficient.

Damn, if these guys ever go out to sea again, I bet they pack a backup alternator. And maybe a few other spare parts too.

I think Google can never really hope to disrupt itself. The entire company is oriented towards selling those ads. So any other internal division that tries to eliminate the ads division is going to have a very uphill battle.

IMO the industry is ripening for disruption and someone will come along with a new idea for how to incentivize content generation and it will very likely continue to involve some heavy commercial marketing.

The state asserts its sovereignty and backs up the claim with the consensus of the people and a lot of guns.

A sovereign citizen makes the same claim but fails to convince or compel others to agree.

They very well might believe in some god-given authority but that’s not how any of this works.

But maybe an SC will uncover a deeply hidden loophole someday and win an argument. The law affords them the opportunity to try.

Don’t run down right after hopping out of the shower