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 as well.

  • 4 Posts
  • 707 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 21st, 2021

help-circle
  • Good blog post.

    I couldn’t think of a clever response to that. I still can’t.

    I think it’s central to the issue they’re talking about. There’s demand for quick, cheap stuff. There’s also demand for quality stuff. But they’re not the same.

    I mean, I’m sometimes sad nothing lasts anymore. Or means anything. We buy clothes, appliances, software, phones… just to throw it out a year later. Same with AI. We could do intricate art. Commission someone to draw our company logo or come up with a good advertisement video. But why? Everyone has a attention span of 30s these days and pretty much anything will do for Instagram. So rubbish it is. And we’re done in 5 minutes.

    I think it’s more that society doesn’t value quality and sophisticated things any more. We rather have plenty cheap and superficial things. And for a lot of applications, it’ll do. Same with art, same with some software and webdesign. Also works the same way without AI. The consumer will do the beta test. And any random messenger uses 150 dependencies and Electron, and two Gigabyte of memory. That’s hardly artistry either.



  • It wasn’t really clear to me where you want to go with this. I mean judging by conversations with my friends, there’s a 3h conversation to be had about every nuance of health. The diet, how to work out, how much to eat and drink. There’s rules of thumb. But in reality it’s a very individual thing. And also changes with the situation, for example if you go to the gym or running and want to progress, it’d be an entirely different story a few months later. Also some people have office jobs, some do 18,000 steps each day… And don’t get me started on mental health.

    Diagnosing medical conditions is hard for AI. We got some news on that a few days ago. It’s good at exam questions. But doesn’t perform in reality. So I wouldn’t call it health agent considering those kinds of questions. More a shaman. Or alternative practitioner / healer. (Or it’d need to stick to specific things. Or we need a few more years of progress in AI.)

    I mean, I think the available tools aren’t even half bad? There’s smart watches with all kinds of features, apps, dashboards… Training modes and advise. They can help you define goals, track your period if you have that… Water intake, activity levels. It’s not AI, but there will be summaries, achievements, reminders…
    Just the privacy part is a bit tricky, as most of these ecosystems come as cloud services.


  • I feel you can’t just dump in the CSV values from your Xiaomi Scale and Garmin watch… And hope AI will figure out the correct math on your body… And then also come up with good recommendations.

    As far as I know, there are a few local, selfhosted health trackers available. It’s a bit tricky to own the correct gadgets that connect to it… But I don’t think there’s anything with AI.

    I mean to give proper recommendations, you’d need a very elaborate setup. It needs all the sensor values. Then correlate it with what you’re doing all day long… What you eat and how much you drink… The AI (or traditional algorithms) can’t see. So maybe it can calculate your BMI in a thinking step. But it’s a whole lot of math to then figure out if your too fat, or have muscle mass… And then find out what that means for your diet. AI won’t figure that out along the way. So you’re probably looking at a few thousands of lines of code, after reading a few textbooks on biology.

    I mean you can try to vibe-code some agent. But I think your best bet is to look for some open-source software cloning Google Health, or something like that. (And then maybe you can write some MCP server for that. And an agent to interpret the aggregated results.)


  • HA isn’t the only option. I think there’s two other open source smarthome solutions out there(?) And you could probably do with just an MQTT broker and a Python script, or something like that…

    But HA isn’t a bad choice. They’re doing a phenomenal job. And related projects like ESPHome make it really easy to integrate microcontrollers. And if you want to do more smarthome stuff, it has a plethora of features, integrations, an app…

    Extra hardware isn’t absolutely necessary. I have one server at home which does NAS, and I use 4GB of it’s RAM to run a virtual machine with Home Assistant. That’s enough for it, including a bunch of Addons.


  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detoLocalLLaMA@sh.itjust.worksQwen3-Coder-Next
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    15 days ago

    As far as I know fewer active parameters means faster. There’s less arithmetic calculations to be done per pass. But all parameters need to be kept in memory, because they might become active the next pass. So it won’t save any RAM.

    They have a short paragraph in the description. It has 80B total parameters, 3B active each pass. It achieves performance like a 30-60B model (10-20x, their claim). But is way more efficiant than that with only 3B active parameters.


  • Yes, that will be an issue. I guess not a technical one, Linux is perfectly able to fetch a token and connect to network shares etc. Not sure how that works with Email and the modern cloud office stuff. But likely, the IT department will have to enforce that policy as well. That’s why I asked if OP has to use software on Windows (11)… Otherwise, if it worked 4 years without issues… maybe there is no issue with Active Directory…




  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldCertificates...ugh
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    18 days ago

    You could try to debug the permission issue… Like take a note of the current permissions, chmod the certificates to 666 and the parent directories to 777 and see if that works. Then progressively cut them down again and see when it fails. And/or give caddy all the group permissions ssl, acme, certwarden… and then check which one makes it fail or work.


  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldServer ROI Calculator
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    20 days ago

    Kind of the reason why I quit Netflix. For once it got more expensive each year. And at some point there was less and less of my favorite shows on there, so I’d need to subscribe to a second service for Star Trek… then a third one for all the good stuff that’s Disney… And I don’t even watch that much TV. So instead, I just quit. Maybe one day I’m gonna read a book on a Friday evening 😆 Or the stuff the government forces me to pay for.



  • The Firefox Browser has translation built in and it works fairly well. We have LibreTranslate as a self-hosted service, I think it’s okay… Not particulary good, more okay in my experience. And what I tend to do is just copy-paste text to my local LLM and tell it to translate. Most models will do it. They have to be trained on multiple languages for that, and can’t be too small. You could try one of the Ministral models at whatever size fits and doesn’t heat up your computer. But I bet the average model from Meta and Google will do as well, I think they all have multilangual capabilities these days. And for web use, I’d recommend using Firefox. I can read Japanese websites with that. It’s not perfect by any means, but low on the resources and it only takes a few seconds, even on battery power on my laptop.




  • Also got a nice Dell 7390 for a similar price a year ago. Though you really can’t compare a laptop bought in 2019 with a laptop bought 6 years in the future. You’d need to compare it to a refurbished one available for a similar price in 2019 and then factor in how that turned out for you a few years later. I mean technology always progresses and you’ll always get more a few years later. But yes, I’ve always been a fan of refurbished enterprise-grade laptops instead of the super-cheap consumer ones which include as much cost-cuttings as possible and a legacy CPU which is upmarketed because it’s cheap. I think my old desktop Celeron N4500(?) was like 40€ when it was new, because it was leftovers in production. At that point you can always buy a used processor for the same price with double the processor cores.


  • No worries. Your post was well-written. And I’m glad people could offer some advice. Not even the proficient Lemmy users get all of this right all the time. I just figured I’d drop you a comment in case the mods take action, to spare you the effort to also learn about the modlog and how to look up their note… But seems it wasn’t necessary 😄




  • I think whether you do closed source software is a personal choice. Based on considerations of your application. Like money, of if you want to rely on a company and how well they do their job, if it’s still gonna be around in 7 years. If you can customize it enough to suit your needs. Or you base the decision on ideology.

    I’ve been using Yunohost on the NAS. And it’s simple, works well and is pretty reliable, I didn’t get any major issues for many years now. (And in general, community maintained open-source software has served me well. So that’s what I do.)

    Downsides as a proficient Linux user are: You can’t just mess with the config while the automatic scripts also mess with the config. You need to learn how they’re set up and work around that. Hope software has a config.d or overrides directory and put your customizations there. Or something will get messed up eventually. And you can’t just change arbitrary things. The mailserver or SSO or reverse proxy and a few other components are tightly integrated and you’re never gonna be able to switch from postfix to stalwart or something like that. Or retrofit a more modern authentication solution. It is a limiting factor.
    And YunoHost doesn’t do containers, so I doubt it’s what you’re looking for anyway.

    I’m a bit split on the entire promise of turnkey selfhosting solutions. Some of them work really well. And they’re badly needed to enable regular people to emancipate themselves from big tech. Whether you as an expert want to use them is an entirely different question. I think that just depends on application. If you have a good setup, that might be better suited to your needs. And if done right might be very low maintenance as well. So switching to a turnkey solution would be extra work and it might not pay off. Or it does pay off, I think that really depends on the specifics.