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thirdBreakfast

@ thirdBreakfast @lemmy.world

Posts
26
Comments
302
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Adding storage - Best options? (External USB drives, automatic decryption, media, etc.)

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  • Love the effort you've put into this question. You've clearly done some quality research and thinking.

    When I asked myself this same question a couple of years ago, I ended up just buying a second hand Synology NAS to use alongside my mini-pc. That would meet your criteria, and avoids the (I'm not sure what magnitude) reliability risk of using disks connected over USB. It's more proprietary than I'd like, but it's battle tested and reliable for me.

  • Question about Australian towns

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  • Yep, it'd have to be a tiny town to not have a war memorial. If there's no war memorial there's probably an honour bord with the names of the fallen in the hall or RSL. Since ANZAC it's been a part of Australian culture that those who died in service of their country is a sort of sacred thing. It's significance has ebbed and flowed a bit over the years. Our pride in the services was especially damaged in the Vietnam war years, when ANZAC day crowds shrunk quite a bit and you could have imagined at the time that it might all die out. It's had a bit of a resurgence since.

    After most big wars, the federal government has put a bit of money into war memorials, and it was pretty much just a matter of the local RSL or town council writing a letter to get a decommissioned artillery piece of some sort, or an old torpedo for the local park as a centrepiece for your ANZAC day ceremony. Also, if you read the plaques on 1950's or 60's buildings in the bush, you'll often see many of them are "War Memorials". War Memorial swimming pools and sports grounds are common ones. The reason communities did this is that at the time donations to "war memorials" were tax deductible.

    You've made an interesting observation. For Aussies this is probably something they've never noticed. It's probably not an indication that we're very war worshipping, just that for a small country, the deaths involved in the wars we've been part of were significant, and perhaps especially so for little country towns where the surnames on the honour board match some of the street names and the bloke you were just chatting to at the post office.

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  • Shoutout to Magic Earth, the (weirdly named) iOS app that uses OpenStreeMap data. Works on CarPlay, has reliable routing, and I get a buzz out of updating a changed a speed limit or something on OSM and then seeing the change implemented a few weeks later when I'm driving through there again.

  • Uses for local AI?

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  •  
        
starcoder2:latest       	f67ae0f64584	1.7 GB	3 days ago 	
phi3:latest             	d184c916657e	2.2 GB	3 weeks ago	
deepseek-coder-v2:latest	8577f96d693e	8.9 GB	3 weeks ago	
llama3:8b-instruct-q8_0 	1b8e49cece7f	8.5 GB	3 weeks ago	
dolphin-mistral:latest  	5dc8c5a2be65	4.1 GB	3 weeks ago	
codeqwen:latest         	df352abf55b1	4.2 GB	3 weeks ago	
llama3:latest           	365c0bd3c000	4.7 GB	4 weeks ago

    I mostly use starcoder2 with Continue for code autocomplete, the big deepseek coder is a bit slow (I can feel it thinking), but it and the regular llama3 are good for chatbot type programming questions.

    I don't really have anything to compare the M1 performance to. I guess the 8GB models output text a little slower than the web versions of the same models, and the 4GB ones about the same. Using ollama in the terminal, there's sometimes a 0.5-2 second pause before it starts outputting. Not with phi3 though - it's surprisingly snappy for the quality of answers.

  • What's the bang for the buck go to setup for AI image generation and LLM models?

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  • An M1 MacBook with 16GB cheerfully runs llama3:8b outputting about 5 words a second. A second hand MacBook like that probably costs half to a third of a secondhand RTX3090.

    It must suck to be a bargain hunting gamer. First bitcoin, and now AI.

    edit: a letter

  • Uses for local AI?

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  • I use the Continue VS Code plugin with Ollama to use a couple of different models (deepseek-coder-v2 & starcoder2) to recreate a local only Github Copilot type experience for coding. This is on an M1 Apple Silicon though. For autocomplete the generation needs to be pretty brisk - I'm not sure how that would go in a VM without a GPU.

  • 3ish hours left for canvas 2024!! also what countries are participating

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  • Thanks for your work on this grant, and especially for the fast work fixing the issues under pressure. I had fun benefiting from your efforts.

  • Monolithic setup vs dedicated devices

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  • Yep, I think there's sound arguments for separating out your storage (NAS) and network (router/DNS/PiHole) infrastructure. After that, whatever suits your purpose. I virtualise all my serious services on one machine under Proxmox (mostly for ease of snapshots) then have another machine for things I'm fiddling with, usually again under Proxmox so they are easy to move to production when I'm happy with them.

  • Do you poweroff your server during night / unused times?

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  • My NAS and production server run 24/7, I've got a dev server that I turn off if I'm not expecting to use it for a week or so. Usually when I do that, I immediately need it for something and I'm away from home. I have chosen equipment to try and minimize energy use to allow for constant running.

    My view on UPS is it's a crucial part of getting your availability percentage up. As my home lab turned into crucial services I used to replace commercial cloud options, that became more important to me. Whether it is to you will depend on what you're running and why.

    I've heard that one of the most likely times for hard drives to fail is on power up, and it also makes sense to me that the heating/cooling cycles would be bad for the magnetic coating, so my NAS is configured to keep them spinning, and it hasn't been turned off since I last did a drive change.

  • HTTPS on homelab (just locally)

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  • I agree. Get a domain name, point it to the internal address of your NGINX Proxy manager (or other reverse proxy that manages certificates that you are used to). A bit of work initially, then trivial to add services afterwards.

    I didn't really need encryption for my internal services (although I guess that's good), but I kept getting papercuts with browser warnings, not being able to save passwords, and some services (eg container repository on Forgejo) just flat out refusing to trust a http connection.

  • [Question] What should I look for in a mini PC to upgrade

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  • My step-up from Pi was to ebay HP 800 G1 minis then G2's. They are really well made, there's full repair manuals available, and they are just a pleasure to swap bits in and out. I've heard good things about, and expect similar build quality from the 1 liter Lenovos.

    I agree that RAM is a likely constraint rather than processor for self-hosting workloads. Particularly in my case as I'm on Proxmox and run all my docker containers in separate LXCs. I run 32GB in the G2's which was a straightforward upgrade (they take laptop like memory). One some of them I've upgraded the SSDs, or if not, I've added M.2 NVME drives (that the G2's have a slot for).

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    What's the most likely end of mankind and our world as we know it?

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    • Climate change contributing to
    • Climate refugees contributing to
    • Breakdown in social cohesion contributing to
    • Populism, oligarchs, and authoritarianism contributing to
    • Breakdown of international cooperation contributing to
    • Inter-nation conflict contributing to
    • GOTO 10

  • Is it practically impossible for a newcomer selfhost without using centralised services, and get DDOSed or hacked?

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  • Yeah na, put your home services in Tailscale, and for your VPS services set up the firewall for HTTP, HTTPS and SSH only, no root login, use keys, and run fail2ban to make hacking your SSH expensive. You're a much smaller target than you think - really it's just bots knocking on your door and they don't have a profit motive for a DDOS.

    From your description, I'd have the website on a VPS, and Immich at home behind TailScale. Job's a goodun.

  • Is it practically impossible for a newcomer selfhost without using centralised services, and get DDOSed or hacked?

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  • +1 for the main risk to my service reliability being me getting distracted by some other shiny thing and getting behind on maintenance.

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  • I love this idea (of just picking something I'm loving each month), it would help me overcome my decision paralysis about who to support.

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  • Yes, a few. Signal (daily use), LetsEncrypt & Certbot (EFF). It's not enough.

    One day I decided I'd spend $x every January (when I do all my other donations) on open source stuff I depend on, and roughly in the proportions I depend on them. It quickly became impossible - I can't just fund Debian (which I use a lot of in VMs), I'd need to think of all their dependencies, same with NGINX, Node etc etc. The mind boggles.

    I need something like a Spotify subscription for open source to assuage my guilt of the great value I extract for my personal use of open source.

  • Noob espresso experience (longish post)

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  • Thanks. I'll keep an eye out. Now I know that it gets daily use, a more expensive machine doesn't seem so crazy.

  • How did you acquire the first 1000 words?

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  • Yes, and it's very phrased based, so you sort of absorb the grammar without a lot of explicit rules.

  • Cat peeking out of a Nazi Sd.Kfz.222 armored car, date unknown, Interwar or WW2-era

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  • Or start scratching the shit out of your hand half way through a tummy rub.