Hey there! Sorry for the delay, I didn’t forget about you.

I didn’t know how to answer your questions, but they are very good questions that I wanted to know myself.

I’ve been working on a testing plan to figure this out. But life is got super busy and it’s been hard to focus on it.

Hopefully I’ll complete it before the weekend is over and will share the results.

I bought a wis block module and it came pre-flashed with Meshtastic. I didn’t see shit for days. Then I found michmesh and changed the settings up to what they suggested. Then I found a, I don’t know what you wanna call, it a router node in my area? It’s basically infrastructure connected to the Internet. They use MQTT to connect to other nodes that aren’t reachable by radio. Once I connected to that node my map lit up. I was seeing messages from Ann Arbor, Detroit, and all the way up into the UP.

But I kinda wanna take it a different direction. I think Meshtastic is cool, but there’s a lot left to be desired. It seems that reticulum is the protocol with the most potential.

So I found this repo that describes a build for a multi protocol interface/router. Basically I need a raspberry pi running reticulum. Connected to that will be the radio for whatever other protocols you want. So right now I have a T beam supreme, running reticulum attached to it. I want to reflash my wis block to Meshtastic, or mesh core and then connect to the raspberry pi. And then that would be my home node. Constantly and connected to the Internet. It is useful for my personal private network, but then can also be used as an infrastructure node for others.

Like a Rosetta Stone/translator, router, receiver and transmitter all in one.

Thank you for the rec! I’ll check him out!

Edit: oh heck yeah, this guy is great and exactly what I’m looking for!

Would love to hear your build!

What protocol are you running?

I really want to develop an always on car node. It will have a little solar panel, 2 LoRa radios for reticulum and meshtastic, an open source car computer, gps.

Self hosted map/navigation stack, off grid com, sync vehicle info to my home automation software, and most importantly be a mobile, always on infrastructure node.

But mostly, I want to live in a city where I can get reception almost anywhere in and around the city 🤣

I see your reasoning and it makes sense

But it seems that policy is very…one sided and not effective

Loopholes for the really bad shit. Regulations, penalties, and headache for the independent creator

This is probably a fools errand, but I really feel the need to connect with local-ish people to build and test mesh networks

It’s super fun and the possibilities are endless if you have an open mind

Anyway, I created a community in my own server. I’m envisioning something to enhance what michmesh is up to, not replace it. They are doing fantastic work and I am grateful.

Honestly, It’s a bit of a mess. I have no idea how to start a community and the fediverse quirks have added to that mess.

Im just doing this for the fuck of it. I want to connect with people near me into this stuff to build actual infrastructure. check it out and join if you are interested. I’m not looking for anything else other than what’s stated

Here is the community, would love to hear what you have set up currently and what your plans are

https://piefed.aurionblack.com/c/[email protected]/p/2205/roll-call-who-s-on-the-air-in-gr

There is a lot of this story you are leaving out, my guy 🤣🤣

But good to know in case Bluesky starts asking for my ID 😉

Oh man, so I’m on my 5th (and hopefully final) lemmy/piefed server. The interactions I had were on my previous accounts and I can’t remember exactly what communities they were, sadly

But I think most of them were related to local llama, which makes sense why they are a little more level headed about it

I really enjoy r/leftistforai on Reddit. I’ve been participating/watching it when it was super small. It’s nice to see it growing. Those are some of the most sane AI takes I’ve ever seen on the internet.

After reading some posts and comments on there, it becomes obvious how silly a lot of the “anti-ai” and “ai-bro” discourse/culture is

Kinda wish there was something like that on the fediverse. it took a while to get where it’s at now in Reddit, which has a much larger user base to pull from. Can’t imagine how long it would take to gain traction on the fediverse.

Bahahaha did NOT expect to see the word “gooner” in this post 🤣 thanks for the laugh

Beyond that, this looks useful as hell! I’ll have to dig into it a bit more.

If anything, your repo has inspired me. I spend wayyyy to much time manually doing things like this and having a solution, or at least the framework of a solution available to review is super valuable!

Yes! I’ve got quite a few projects going right now. Probably too many of them to keep track

I am the only user, so it’s relatively easy to run multiple models for what ever task. Ollama is pretty good at balancing which models are working at what time to not bog down they system

I’m running gpt-oss 120 for a general purpose Hermes agent. Out of the box, it was ok. Not very snappy, but it was one of the best ones for orchestrating other agents.

Glm flash (4.something?) does pretty good as well.

I’ve found a hybrid of cloud and local is the best solution. Use local for smaller or more defined tasks. Use cloud for orchestrating, planning, and…fixing the local agents mistakes lol

I’ve got an LLM maintained Obsidian wiki that is written and edited by a few Ollama agents based on chats via my own self hosted matrix instance. I’ve taken it to a point where I’m pretty happy with the results. But I think if I had enough time and energy, I could really dial it in.

One of my favorite use cases for this is when I’m researching topics like UFOs/high strangeness/conspiracy theories. I have my very own LLM maintained Obsidian vault filled with curated notes and links to sources.

Literally, no one cares about this and they think it’s stupid and I’m stupid and I should feel bad for spending time on this or having the audacity of sharing it… they just don’t appreciate the amount of work and knowledge it took to get what I have set up.

I think it’s cool as fuck. I geek out every time that it works.

Oh, forgot to mention I am running it on a Mac studio with 96 gig of unified memory. I think it’s an M3 ultra chip.

I guess having these rent-a-bikes in the city is better than nothing. And no one is stopping me from buying my own e-bike.

But like I said in the post, that’s a hefty upfront cost. A lot of our roads feel dangerous for bikers. There isn’t much bike friendly infrastructure in general. And getting an expensive e-bike stolen is a non zero risk.

If you are riding for pleasure, we’ve got great trails. But if you are using a bike to run errands throughout the city, that’s a different story.

I’ve been trying to think of ways to use my car less. The amount of effort and concessions needed are very discouraging.

And it’s not like we don’t have options…it’s just the options feel not enough to convince the average resident (including myself) to reduce car usage, especially in certain locations/neighborhoods

I can stand the weather. I don’t mind biking 15 miles in a day, especially with electric/assisted bikes. I don’t mind using a bus if I don’t have to wait 30 plus minutes for the next bus to arrive.

This seems like a common issue, nationwide. We have Car centric infrastructure and transportation funding policy because not enough people use buses/bikes unless you need to, which causes more people to drive, which causes more people to prefer car centric infrastructure and funding policy. A vicious (bi)cycle.

for real. Im starting to find it more frustrating than actual ai slop

Not to say they don’t have valid concerns. It just feels suffocating and counter productive is all. I even spent too much time and energy debating if I should respond to you wth my actual opinions…and that is so fucking stupid and a sign of something unhealthy going on.

I’ve found a few communities on here that are more level headed about it, but they are the minority it seems.

it’s amazing the types of discussions can pop up when you don’t have to worry about getting sniped for talking about doing ANYTHING with AI.

lol took me a minute

Oh was this posted on this sub?

Wait, nope. Not much is posted on this sub. Thought I would liven it up a bit with a submission.

If you have better shit to share, please do!

Hey there and welcome!

I finally had enough with r/grandrapids and Reddit in general.

But mostly r/grandrapids. I have no idea how there are so many subs. It is not a serious place and the trolls (and mod) make a very frustrating community

That’s about the 20th time I’ve said it…but I’m for real this time 😅

Anyway. I’ve messed around with lemmy/piefed before in this sub (or whatever they call it here) by posting an article related to the whole city comptroller situation. Got downvoted and no comments.

Then I made accounts on 5 different servers because those servers kept going down.

So I decided to run and host my very own piefed instance.

Not ideal, but much better than what ever is going on in r/grandrapids 😘

Normally my power sensor connected to my server rack hovers around 150 watts.

I’ve got mini hp pc, 2 HDD bay UGREEN NAS, ubiquity cloud Max router, home assistant green, 2 switches with Poe (2 WiFi AP, raspberry pi, and a mesh radio), and a dell r340.

I also have a dell t310 I’m using as a proxmox backup server that powers on every day around 2am to do backups. The power shoots up to 360 watts when that happens 😅

i know what you mean about r/grandrapids. It feels way off.

I have no way to prove this, but being the 2nd largest city in a swing state seems like it would be targeted by trolls/propaganda groups.

Where do you get your info about the Frantz situation? ive read some articles on woodtv, mackinac, and mlive...but they are all basically the same article. I didnt know about his MAGA tendencies, but that makes sense with how the media is portraying it.

Heck, any recommendations on where to read up on the local elections in general?