You clearly didn't read very far, but I guess I need to be more upfront about the details. The only thing I charge for is using my hardware, and I'm only doing that for people who can't do it for themselves. All of the software is open source. All of the software is self-hostable, and the three I built first don't even need an LLM to be useful. I'm building it with low-spec (8gb vram or less) as the priority deployment option so anyone who is capable can use these for free

I'm one engineer trying to democratize and federate AI

Trying to give a little of it back: https://circuitforge.tech/

(Everything is free for beta testers and self-hosters, which is basically everyone right now)

Happy to help!

Time to build a digital life raft, and privacy cooperatives among your friends

You're depleted and need time to recover before you try helping again. This is a perfect case of "secure your own mask before assisting others".

Go be with friends. Touch some grass. Do some art. Go visit a garden or plant something.

If you feel up to it, look into volunteering we local food banks or animal shelters.

On a larger scale, build a digital lifeboat and de-google/apple/fb. Form privacy cooperatives with your family and friends (whoever is the techiest runs a server for the cooperative and you all share a private cloud). This can act as a filter and a support group if managed well.

https://capitol-hill-riots.s3.us-east-1.wasabisys.com/directory.html

Like, is it covering up how miniscule his injury is and is mainly intended to drum up sympathy/anger? More than likely

Late stage capitalism. You can't expect year over year growth for eternity without running into a resource cap. Profit growth is all the shareholders care about because it's literally written into United States economics laws that investors get paid first. All these dirty tricks and bad decisions are coming from CEO's with limited understanding of the effects of their policies, trying to push for an extra 2% on top of their already obscene margins

Aren't there laws in place about consent and recording phone calls specifically?

Stephen Baxter has a ton of hard sci fi books with a similar aesthetic, expansive stories, and interesting philosophy

Why is it so hard for some people to just say "ok" and move on because it's important to the other person. ESPECIALLY if "it's no big deal" then just do it and see how much more your NB and trans friends feel comfortable

Get yourself a decent router capable of running OpenWRT, which will allow you to set up vlan's for your lab, and (I would also recommend) another separate vlan for your IoT and other "smart" devices.

The TP-Link Archer C7 is old but reliable and has a lot of open source support.

If you're feeling more adventurous You could also build your own router with any computer that's got two or more Ethernet ports using PFSense, Firewall-NG, or IPFire

Yup. Already working on a suite of local pipeline apps and an orchestration platform for this. Happy to share if interested! Source

badger badger badger badger

🍄🍄

The stepper drivers run directly of the main power supply through Vcc, so assuming you haven't added any extra heaters or other crazy amounts of power draw, you should be just fine adding another motor.

Using the second z for stability would be a more traditional use of those parts but your idea sounds like a lot of fun!

The pricing question assumes the current model (cloud inference, centralized compute, hyperscaler margins) is the only model.

Local inference flips that math entirely. If the model runs on your hardware, the marginal cost to the provider is close to zero. The pricing problem is a distribution problem, not a compute problem.

What I think actually happens: cloud AI settles at $20-50/month for power users who need the latest frontier models and don't want to manage hardware. That's sustainable. The "free tier" disappears or gets severely throttled.

But for a large chunk of use cases (summarization, classification, drafting, local assistants) models small enough to run on a consumer GPU are already good enough. That market doesn't need to pay $50/month to Anthropic. It needs a good local runner and a one-time hardware investment.

The companies that will survive the pricing correction are the ones who either have genuinely differentiated frontier capability, or who make local deployment easy enough that users own their own stack.

Is there anything a mildly competent electronics enthusiast could do to disable any outbound data?

And thereby lock it away from the underserved communities that need it most? Naw. Open source publishing is the way forward for a truly egalitarian system, which is what I'm aiming for

Sorry to break it to you bruh, but if Facebook owns the IP, they're harvesting and monetizing the account data, end of.

This includes all of the subsidiaries like Instagram and WhatsApp as well.

Let's also not forget that illegal activity exposes user data in addition to greed, and just the fact that your data is in yet another pot increases your risk. Also yes all corporations are greedy and evil but they're definitely not all equal in how bad they are, and FB is one of the worst

Are you willing to compromise on all of these intrusions into your life? Many people are, but I'm not one.