The cat is out of the bag and one of the ways to fight for our rights is by owning as much of the tech as possible. Deprive the big AI firms from the revenue they expect for the services they sell. Make them mid-enough-to-fail. If we let them make the money they expect to make we can’t regulate them out of our lives without a major socioeconomic collapse like the great depression.

True.

Try radiance if you haven’t.

True but a system like that wouldn’t just rely on the model training. It’d also rely on the harness around it. The program that takes the text from the clanker’s output and executes it. It can have, as existing tools do, a hefty static ruleset that allows / disallows / asks for user confirmation before executing. The ruleset would have to be significant and well designed to catch most disasters. Still wouldn’t be foolproof, but neither are my own CLI commands, or my brain at all times of the day. A not-so-reliable operator can be further mitigated by using a snapshotting filesystem.

Quite possibly. But also possibly not. I’ve see plenty hosed systems by colleagues at work as they start using Ubuntu workstations with no experience.

Some years ago: “Why can’t do I get permission error, let me fix it good chmod -R 777 /. Hey Amoeba, my system doesn’t boot anymore.”

One could in principle create a model that knows the best practices, the no-nos, the dos and don’ts of Linux and try to stand in the way of the user holding the hose.

Given how open the traditional Linux desktop APIs are, how much functionality is exposed in CLI form, a “desktop” OpenCode-like system could transform a Linux desktop into something other OSes coild achieve with a lot more difficulty. For example, reducing the size of a video file is just a cryptic ffmpeg command on Ubuntu. If ffmpeg isn’t installed, it’s an apt command to get it. A “make this big video 4GB” prompt is trivial to execute by a local model. And yes, an “AI desktop” would only work for most of us if it can do it all on-device. Not throwing our trusted data to OpenAI’s servers. A system like that would also require a strong harness to prevent hallucinations from rm -rf-ing the wrong thing.

Invest in ZFS now and you’ll reap the benefits for a long time. It’ll do everything you need, the RAID, the volumes, the snapshots, custom performance tuning for different workloads, even efficient transfers to backup storage.

I think you’re assigning too much free will to people and societies. If you take the Marxist perspective that technology creates its own social infrastructure - who owns what, who does what, who gets the benefits, who receives power and who is disposessed - then technology can be seen as inherently political. If and when a technology appears, that reshapes society in ways that significantly change the benefits distribution of society’s labour, the distinction between the inert technology itself and its effects on society becomes an academic discussion. Even if this technology can only reshape society when that society exists and is combined with the technology. So rather than focusing on the academic distinction, I think people would care more about focusing on the social effects, which are political, and whether there are opportunities to make these effects benefit them (us).

Was about to say now you should look into self-hosting AI, but you’re already on it. 😄

I’ve only tested up to 1Gb. It does 1Gb no probs, with SQM (QoS) which burns a lot of CPU.

OpenWrt on Raspberry Pi 4 with UE300 dongle for the WAN side. 7 years of trouble-free operation so far.

“It’s .lol for free or it’s Cloudflare 💰💰”

But yeah, I wouldn’t go fighting at all. I’d give 'em the options and let them pay if they want to.

If you do it at 3AM anyway… may as well eliminate the need to even think about mismatches. 😁 I think mine also used to do it at 3AM before I switched to ZFS snapshots + send/recv.

Immich uses user/YYYY/MM folders on my setup, and I exclude any thumbnail directories from the backup too. So not many dirs/files to check for the backup software and it’s very quick.

That makes sense. I copy the whole set of data dirs so I can trivially start it after restore or start it elsewhere without extra steps. Also because this strategy works with all services so I don’t have to consider how to backup/restore each one. Makes adding new services less work.

pgdump with live file copy while the service is in active use can result in files the db doesn’t know about, or files it thinks are there that were actuall deleted. Probably can be fixed after the fact.

More generally, as a someone who’s done software for a very long time, I’ve learned that the further away I go from the happy path of a software program, the less tested it is, the more bugs there are and the poorer the edge case handling is. It’s inherent to software development with limited labour. So for backups I lean on the process kill/recovery edge case that they all must handle. Snapshot + backup from that snapshot looks like a process death to the service upon restore.

Immich has so many dirs and files that it will take hour/hours for any file-based program to walk that tree (on an HDD) in order to do a backup. I used to use rsync, syncthing, duplicity and had gotten it to about under an hour for 1TB library. The service has to be shutdown to preserve consistency of the backup. So that downtime was okay once per day. Still a heavy operation. Not great, not terrible.

Because of the above you might want to do one of the following:

• Use snapshotting filesystem like ZFS or Btrfs. That allows to avoid the downtime as you can backup a frozen-in-time snapshot while Immich is running.
• The above but with ZFS om both the Immich end and the backup end. That allows transferring just the delta between the new Immich snapshot and the last snapshot the backup has. This happens entirely within the filesystem so there are no file operations needed. At every point in time ZFS knows what blocks have changed between now and the previously backed up snapshot. When you ask it for that, it starts spitting data without spensing an hour figuring out what changed. That allows online backups every hour or even more frequently. The backup of my 1TB Immich instance (HDD) takes 5-10 seconds to initiate the network transfer, then it takes whatever time it takes to get to the backup machine, which is usually equivalent to transferring whatever new was stored in Immich.

So depending on how painful migrations are for you, I’d highly recommend the latter. Otherwise the former. The ZFS snapshot send strategy works for any service you may run.

As is tradition.

No issues upgrading from 12.1.

Good move and well substantiated.

That’s not what lock-in typically means.

Kinda what prompted me to think about this. I started seeing some too good phishing emails recently.