• 2 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: May 14th, 2026
  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zonetoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•My Firewall was not putting out last night. So I could not get any pihole action.English
    1·
    58 minutes ago

    Nice! I use Redreader on my phone - and for some reason, it still actually works.

    https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader

    There are one or two very niche communities that I visit on reddit for technical know how (though I did visit their version of self hosted recently - typical endemic Reddit clusterfuck). I really should put the effort into posting on !LocalLlama more…I’m doing some shenanigans with LLMs that are probably worth a write up at some stage (if I can pull it all together). It’s probably relevant here too. Urgh…these rabbit hole / squeeze blood from stone projects will kill me one day.

    I’ve actually got to sit down today and do some coding…I know what needs doing but the task is a massive p.i.t.a. Best get the instant coffee brewing, Sisyphus…ain’t nobody writing this shit for you.

  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zonetoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Sometimes, when I am all alone i like to fantasize...English
    1·
    1 day ago

    I’m probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in “OK…shit’s expensive…what’s the MOST I can do with the LEAST?”.

    I think that comes from spending time in the lowspecgamer culture, where folks (hello!) will literally recode the game engine, bridge motherboard pins with paperclips and drill holes into the PC before buying new hardware.

    For example, I specced out a (very decent) “sneakernet” / internet mirror for myself, as an intellectual exercise…and every time I run the numbers, they go from 8TB on the low end to 16TB on the high.

    That includes mirroring somewhere around 3-5yrs of YouTube videos (in glorious 540-720p).

    I can (and do) host an obscene amount of stuff on a SBC with a 256GB M.2.

    Given narrow jobs like DNS, VPN, media, sync, search and automation and you can do a stupid amount with pi4 4GB.

    Same thing with LLMs. People try to solve the problem of LLMs with bigger models, bigger GPUs etc…and I’m over here thinking “actually, the LLM is really just the mouthpiece; everything else around it is just good old programming”.

    Memory, search, STT and TTS, OCR, file tools…none of that needs to live in the model or chew up a GPU…and once normal software handles that stuff, the question becomes: how small can the LLM be and still be useful middleware?

    Turns out…pretty fucking small.

    Honesty, I don’t think prices are coming down any time soon (RAM, 8TB NVMe drives, Threadrippers, 25GbE gear…hell, I saw a Blackwell yesterday on “sale” for $15K USD) so we might need to get creative.

    Personally, I’m building towards resilience and independence. My next DIY will be the solar system… and because I’m paring down my homelab significantly, I can get away with a micro-system for around $2K.

    Do wish hard drives were cheaper tho. Might have to go back to my “DVD as back up server” idea.

    TL;DR: the only way to win is not to play the game…or at least, play it by your own rules.

  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zonetoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•My Firewall was not putting out last night. So I could not get any pihole action.English
    2·
    2 days ago

    What are these ads you speak of? 😎

    Kidding aside…ya’ll go crazy with your piHoles and such and I’m over here using software that just…doesn’t serve ads. I think the most I’ve had to do is install Karma Firewall on the kids tablets and maybe change the front end on the TVs (which doesn’t connect to the net, though media stick does).

    That and uBlock on browser seems to give me 90% of the results of using pihole, pfsense etc. So, I just…stopped using them.

    Now, when I visit my folks…yeah…holy shit…but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.

    It’s a little bit like the four rules for winning a street fight.

    • Avoid stupid people.
    • Avoid people doing stupid things.
    • Avoid stupid places.
    • Avoid stupid times.