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> Then Mini pcs, you can get a good deal here and there, for a more capable machine with a little bit more flexibility.

This has been my hack for a while: eBay "NUC", reduce the price slider, select 'But it now' and get one with all internals included. But even that has now dried up.

An old Workstation I purchased for £400 2 years ago now sells for ~£1.5k. The old GPU [+] I purchased on Amazon for £45 now sells for £3k.

There is 100% a need for cheap Linux SBC's with enough compute to cause some trouble.

[+] Top top tip: For old GPU cards with old CUDA, just get <insert favourite LLM> to rewrite the CUDA stack for older CUDA. Fun times.

I really hope they can keep the cost down, it needs to be in the "it's so cheap just hack on it" price range for not just engineers but kids too. I'm excited to see low-cost hardware put in the hands of kids with LLMs in their sails.

I must have misread that, thanks. This seems like an entirely resolvable problem.

I think it is false to equate this to just two options:

    a) spend my valuable developer time (this is my free time) on reading machine
    output which indeed might be completely wrong and get angry and upset for
    reasons which have been listed in great detail by those opposed to LLM-use in
    Debian on debian-vote

    b) not read the machine-generate review and have the resources that were
    required to generate it not only be wasted, but let my upload become another
    item in a statistic which shows how many tokens Debian is using up because the
    more tokens we use the better our software, right?

The fix for this could just be an opt-in/out for automated LLM review. It's just an additional tool and consideration.

Has anybody tested this? Are there any available computed models to test?

> There’s also a nasty depreciation curve to contend with. Nobody wants a 10 year old Tesla, but a 10 year old well mentioned petrol car still has a ton of life left in it.

It's worse, there's almost no second hand market for the vehicles. There is barely anybody trained to repair them (even if they will sell you the parts) and if they are crashed significantly it's almost always a write-off.

> It still often ends up a bit cheaper across comparable vehicles but not a slam dunk and nowhere near as good as the headline suggests.

Only because of government meddling. Fuel is almost uniquely taxed 3 times, which pays for subsidies to pay for green energy initiatives.

I think I'll hold out with my diesels and petrols and see how this all goes.

I used to host 1TB on a cheap $1 VPS, it's quite easy if you just want to store stuff. The trick is to just connect to a networked drive at your home on the back-end. The VPS drive just acts as a buffer for the network. If low(-ish) bandwidth is acceptable, you can offer downloading too.

> Add to that the usage of AI. While I know I’m way more productive than during those first months, my thoughts are getting slower, less profound, lazier.

I have mostly stayed away from LLM usage, I think I am better for it. I use it just to offload things I wouldn't have had time for. I get more stuff done, but I am still doing what I did before.

> Plus, dopamine is available at just a tap on my phone. There’s a ton of content in shorts that interest me and require little to no investment on my end, both time and effort-wise.

If you have and Android phone, enable Developer Options and flick through to Simulated Color Space - set it to Monochrome. I only wish it was possible to automate colour space switching based on time, like is done for redshift.

> The internet is designed to not go offline.

Only somewhat true, but the fundamental assumption is that it is operating during mostly peaceful times. You have hostile countries cutting or dragging anchors across deep sea fiber optics, you have attacks on energy suppliers, etc. The most effective attacks for denying service are to infrastructure.

> The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.

An attack is not just limited to internet infrastructure, but even if it was: You would just have to take out a significant part of the backbone. It could be the backbone routers, the DNS servers, distribution boxes, home routers, etc, etc. Once the capacity is reduced, you may find the people themselves end up DoS'ing the remaining capacity.

> Systems well beyond what is publicly known are already circulating in Washington, he says: “They can basically hack just about anything. So you get this continuous attack surface just ramping up.” From that follows a simple budget calculation: “If you spend hundreds of millions, billions on a submarine, well, guess what, a frontier model costs a hundred million. You will see a diversion of defense capability towards defensive and offensive AI, towards drones and robots.”

Firstly, I think we need to stop connecting things to the internet that have no business being on there. There are literally millions of devices with little to no maintenance plan that are the weak parts of our networks. We can massively reduce the attack surface.

Secondly, everything needs to be robust against not having the internet. Russia for example purposefully turned off their external internet during peacetime to maintain robustness. I think the majority of the West would currently fall over instantly under such a situation. It becomes increasingly clear that all services are now under continuous attacks.

> He is equally blunt about the foundations underneath all of it: “Our infrastructure is held together by twigs. The internet is terrible.” A British power plant went down for days after a hack, he says, and Cloudflare and others have come under attack. “We have to assume that the internet will go offline in the next few years. Maybe it’s good.”

The really concerning part is that we only hear about what is discussed publicly, i.e. the attacks that are unavoidable to declare. It's well known that countries will hide breaches under the guise of national security, and companies will also do what they can to hide breaches (including paying ransoms to attackers).

But nothing will happen until it is far too late - this is the same pattern I see over and over again. And then the reaction will be over the top and likely make our lives more difficult. "Ah yes, we keep getting attacked via the internet - now you need to have an interview, get a license and pay a license holder fee just to surf the web."

I don't know how it can be argued towards the undemocratic end of the spectrum, it was possibly one of the most democratic processes the UK has undergone in a long time?