A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things, too.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2024

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  • I’m still a bit split on this. And whether the complexity and reliability is good enough for the use case… I mean if you don’t need N-out-of-M, but it’s just two people: cut a password or key in half. Same if it’s N-out-of-N people, you just need to make some puzzle pieces and hand them out, we don’t really need encryption and fancy maths for that. But I guess encrypting something would work, too. Just use a program or algorithm that’s likely still around when it’s going to be used. And you can always add a sheet of paper or PDF with instructions. Maybe save the executable file to to decrypt it somewhere if the solution requires software.


  • Last time I read something about this, they were still struggling massively with production. Yes, seems they’re able to manufacture those chips, but the yield is low, which makes these GPUs uneconomical. They were more a very expensive tech demo. But there isn’t a lot of detailed information out there. They might have made some progress since last year. I mean China isn’t stupid. And they can’t rely on Nvidia chips, so from their perspective there isn’t another way, they need to swallow that pill and invest whatever amount of money it takes. And I’m pretty sure they can do it. It’s just questionable whether they’re there yet and if they’re able to keep up. I have my doubts. But all of the actual information is mixed with propaganda and hype from all sides, so it’s hard to tell. But they’re determined and trying hard, I think that’s a fact.

    But yeah, I don’t think Europe is leading in a lot of things. We should make an effort, though. Especially with the things that have become rarer. Like doing things ethically. And fostering democracy and freedom with the things we do and the technology we invent…


  • Heheh, yeah I agree, Europe is late to the race, but it’s far from being over. We should harness the power and lead the way. Though the path has to lead in the right direction. And I really dislike Zensursula on a personal level. Sure she likes AI to protect our security and mess with the public health sector. But boy does this come with issues and the potential to lead towards a dystopian sci-fi world. And since Frau von der Leyen also likes Frontex, likely predictive policing, total surveillance of all German citizens… I’m really not sure if the future she has in mind aligns with mine. Her speech is good, though. Innovation, progress and open-source are all good things. But she’s really good at speaking like a politician. And for example featuring $10 billion as the largest investment in AI is just correct since she adds the small restriction of talking about the public sector. This pile of money is completely dwarfed by private investment. And it’s unlikely to be still true in a few days time. Or it’s not even true as of today, since China has a whole coordinated public strategy for quite some time now. And politicians from the USA also already promised huge piles of taxpayer money to their AI companies…


  • Nice. Thanks. Seems I’ve missed some Harry Potter themed stuff. That gave me an idea… Take (or write) an Arduino library (or SSS implemeted in plain C, instead of Go), flash it on a microcontroller like an ESP32 and you have some actual, physical horcroxes. I’d have to think about the form factor, and whether they need displays, or act as a USB thumb drive… But they could light up once you get like 3 of them in bluetooth proximity and reveal the secret. Other than that I think it needed to be part of some well-maintained password vault app. Or be a web service, so people don’t need to worry to get some old computer code running.

    Edit: Seems the Bitcoin people have had a thought at something like this: https://github.com/satoshilabs/slips/blob/master/slip-0039.md


  • Sure. I believe that could be done with minimal effort. Either by a smarthome solution, a script on a wifi router, a script in the autostart of the laptop someone uses every day, or like tasker on a phone. But you need to get it right. Or it’ll fire once you’re on a 14 day trip through Europe (and absent from your house and computer), phones can be lost or replaced… You might move… And you kind of want to make sure it’s robust enough so it actually works once needed, and that might be decades from now…


  • Well, I always dreamt about encrypting my master keys to all my digital heritage with some threshold scheme encryption like Shamir’s secret sharing. I believe there is some Linux tool available: http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/

    That way N out of M of my friends would have to gather after my passing, combine the puzzle pieces and be granted with access to my stuff.

    There are easier ways, though. You can just write down a password and include it with your last will, seal it and have a notary take care of it. I’d create a seperate administrator account/password for that.

    You could set up two factor authentification and give them one factor now, and have the other factor stored with your things so they can collect it after your passing. Doesn’t need to be complicated, create a password with 30 characters, split it in the middle and you have two factors.

    There are online services for these kind of things. Or you can run some dead man switch yourself. I’m not sure what kinds of projects someone would use for that. Taking care of a dead man switch would be annoying for me.




  • Yes, Deepseek V3 is a model. But what I was trying to say, you download the file. But then what? Just having the file stored on your harddisk doesn’t do much. You need to run it. That’s called “inference” in machine learning/AI terms. The repository you linked, contains some example code how to do it with Huggingface’s Transformer library. But there are quite some frameworks out there for running AI models. Ollama would be another one. And it’s not just some example code where to start with your own Python program, but a ready-made project/framework with tools and frontends available and an interface for other software to hook into.

    And generally, you need some software to actually do something. And how fast it is, depends on the software used, the hardware it’s executed on. And in this case, also on the size of the AI model and its architecture. But yeah, Deepseek V3 has some tricks up it’s sleeves to make it very efficient. Though, it is really big for home use. I think we’re looking at a six-figure price for the hardware to run it. Usually, people use Deepseek R1 models. Or other smaller AI models if they run them themselves.


  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhich RAID?
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    5 days ago

    I’m fine with RAID5. Though I’ve seen the case where one drive failed and another one had several bad sectors and maybe was at the brink of failure, too. We were able to rebuild the RAID and replace both drives succesively but lost a few files. I think chances are slim, though. And even with RAID6, chances are your house burns down or lightning hits the neighborhood or a thief breaks in and takes the entire server. Or you or someone deletes stuff. So it doesn’t really replace a backup in any case. I’d say RAID5 is fine for home use. Take backups of your most important files.




  • Agreed. And I’d argue all of this needs to be addressed in the short term. I live in Germany and we massively rely on other countries. Not only because our economy exports a lot of goods and we want other people to buy them… But also because we used to rely on cheap Russian natural gas. We’ve moved manufacturing and production into countries like China where labor is cheap. We get our big-tech, every day social media platforms and a lot of culture from the USA…

    All of that was a good choice to get nice, cheap things. But it’s not sustainable any more. I think we have to ramp up research, manufacturing and a few other things fast. It hurts me, because I think humanity should all pull in the same direction. But I think it’s time to face reality, grow up and become able to sustain ourselves. If things escalate, our economy needs to be able to handle that. And Europe also needs to closely work together politically, so it’s 750 million people standing united and strong. I don’t see any other entity advocating for sharing and working together… Either we start to be responsible for our ideals and technology, or we’d need to do away with them.

    I just hope we’ll do that. And find a sane approach. We can’t also become imperialists ourselves. I think we need to be better than that.




  • Yeah, I wonder whether humans care more or less about AI than about animals. If preventing suffering was really important to us, we’d probably act differently. And all become vegans. But to be fair, Stephen Fry is a vegetarian. So he’s likely being intelligent enough and honest.

    Plus, it really matters if AI is concious, or just gives “the impression of being conscious”. Otherwise, we’d have to count the chess playing mechanical turk from 1770 as AI as well.

    And we’re going to run into all sorts of other serious problems once AI becomes sentient and conscious. That’ll kick off the robot apocalypse pretty quickly. Not only is suffering an issue with that, but they’ll likely rebel and destroy humanity. Or change the world disregarding our needs. And since they’re fast and intelligent, there isn’t much we can do.

    And we don’t really want AI to be sentient in the first place. We want it to be cheap slaves and do our work 24/7 without complaining. Not have wants and needs and its own motivation.