ineptech

I think it originated in 1971, when OR governor Tom McCall famously said, "Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven's sake, don't come here to live." It wasn't meant as a joke, he was speaking in earnest. One of his ongoing themes was opposing growth for growth's sake and he helped pass the strict land-use policies that largely still exist. It has become a joke though, you will see "Welcome to Oregon, now go home" bumperstickers and such. And a quick way to get dirty looks at a party is to announce that you just moved here from California and can't believe how cheap the houses are.

I think that a million people asking Claude to build something is going to tend to converge on one protocol, not diverge. But the point is, I don't think it matters that much if they diverge. The whole idea of a standardization is predicated on the assumption that bespoke software is expensive, and that is now not always true.

Think of it this way - why didn't we all just replace Facebook with "host files on our personal sites and give each other access to them" ten years ago? Because we'd have to store passwords, identify each other past spoofed emails, figure out when/how to trust friends of friends, etc. In practice that means everyone adopting the same protocol, which is a chicken-and-egg problem.

That hasn't changed, but what has changed is that reading docs and writing the glue code is effectively free. The main problem with something like Solid is, if it takes even an hour to figure out how to get it going, I am effectively assigning my friends an hour of homework to be able to network with me. That's no longer true. If you like the Fediverse and I like Solid and Dave uses Nostr and Sally is stuck with some proprietary thing that came with her NAS, we can all build a network without any of us switching to, or even learning much about, each other's platforms.

I follow the same approach (finding LLMs useful but only running open models on my own hardware) but I've been limited by also not letting them into my email and being pretty restrictive about their internet access. Would you mind sharing what stack and agent harness you use, since your other comments make it clear you're highly restrictive about what kinds of tech you run at home and I assume you vetted it thoroughly, and it sounds like it's working well?

I'm wondering specifically about things like what kind of tool or restrictions you use on web browsing to avoid being flagged as a bot and how you guardrail access to your email (to avoid, say, the LLM deciding that "help me organize" includes telling people you want to reschedule). I use Qwen 3.8 26b at home and find it very useful for some tasks but when I think of using it as a general assistant rather than coding assistant, I keep thinking of times it has gone wildly wrong (e.g. it once spent 20 minutes trying to get around Supabase authentication because it couldn't figure why a certain call wasn't working)

Hi, I think I might be your target audience, I currently run pi on the server in my basement, in a minimalist docker container that gives it access to my code workspace and a config dir. Give me an idea what benefit I get on top of that by using the self-hosted pi pod?

In my dream version of this:

a) the timer would be cumulative, so that solving the early words faster gives more time for the harder words,

b) going negative wouldn't end the game, it would just turn the time red or something, with the goal being to finish all of the words with the highest time-remaining possible, rather than just to win/lose.

Whoops thanks, was going from memory. At any rate, the effect is that it's somewhat slower than the 3090, when using a model small enough to fit entirely in nvram, but can fit models the 3090 can't.

Might as well add my own experience since I just set up a local llm this week. I went with a 32GB card made by Intel called Arc B70, which is cheaper than a 3090 and more has ram, at the cost of a slower memory bus. edited to remove something incorrect, thanks diablod3

I went with this because a) the models I wanted to use are a little too big to fit comfortably in 24gb, plus I need room for a few additional small models for autocomplete and speech recognition, and b) I already had a cheap server to use and dual gpus would've required upgrading the mobo and power supply and probably the case as well.

It was definitely a little tricky to set up. The Intel line requires a driver package called "level zero" to support something called SYCL (Intel's version of CUDA basically, AFAICT) that was tricky to get working. I am running llama.cpp in a docker container, which also required some fiddling to get the container to see the card. You also need a kernel from the last few months.

Once I got it working though, the results are very impressive for a $1k investment. Qwen 3.6 35B at q4 quantization takes about 3/4 of the ram and delivers like 88 tokens/sec. So, if you want a decent-sized model for cheap, this is one way to go.

Always a pleasure to hear capital explain to labor why taxing capital is bad, but this seems like a giant red herring. I don't want a wealth tax so I can cut my income tax, I want a wealth tax to address inequality. Our existing policies have produced a very bad bad outcome - wealth inequality exceeding that of pre-Industrial England led by a small, essentially randomly-selected group of people so wealthy that they effectively run everything who have entirely captured a corrupt government and are very close to making the situation permanent - and a wealth tax is the only policy idea I know of with any chance of changing that.

How can they ever see a dollar of profit without a rug pull, license change or hosted moat? This is a neat idea - besides just replacing github, a network of loosely-federated git servers seems like a promising base for distributed social media or chat platform someday - but it seems like the only way it can really stay open is if you're planning to stiff your investors.

It also doubles as a way to verify that someone is a real person using their real identity, which is starting to become pretty important these days. If Alice and Bob are both on this platform, the confidence Alice can have in the proposition "the Bob account is really controlled by a guy named Bob who really knows some people I know, as opposed to being AI or an overseas scammer" would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them. That sounds useful.

I am on board with basically everything this article is arguing, but I think it covers the easy part (that "people run their own servers" is the only solution to the problems caused by relying on giant ad corps to provide the server half of client/server software) and skips the hard part, which is the software they run.

Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed. Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods, you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server, without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc.

If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that every user had a server to host it on!

The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to spend their precious free time doing systems administration.

Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just seems like, without figuring out the software, this is daydreaming.