> Yes, small-N is more difficult living than big-N, but we are more similar than different.
Absolutely, this is something I always try to explain regarding this topic.
Of course it is a lot more comfortable if you can live for two years without a paycheck vs. if you can only make it to the end of the week.
But at a structural level, both those people are still working stiff who will need that future paycheck. So they (we) are much more similar in life experience than different.
The people who are truly different category are those who will never have to work.
You can make those rackmounted servers as loud or as quiet as you like. For home, optimize quiet (and low power consumption).
Even though my server rack is in the garage I try to keep it quiet. A couple of them are fanless Atom-based and others have fans but they are built to be quiet. If you need hardware that generates a lot of heat, go with 4U for large fans that spin slow, thus low noise.
The "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet" happens when you stuff a lot of heat generation into a 1U chassis that then requires lots of tiny fans running at full speed. Those you don't want at home! But it is easy to avoid. Data centers do this to maximize density, but that's unlikely to matter at home.
And do you need a full-on enterprise-grade server? Given the choice between a 1U server whose fans even at minimal utilisation can still be heard three doors away and something with a low-power/laptop-grade CPU that does the same job silently and with little power use, I'll take the latter.
Not quite, this thread was about encouraging people with interest in open hardware to have a home server rack.
That said, it's not clear here what people in the thread even mean by "enterprise grade". Some of the commenters seem to assume "enterprise grade" is defined solely by how loud it is. That's not the definition.
Enterprise grade simply means top quality hardware such as Supermicro boards, ECC RAM and quality components built for 24x7 use for many years. Some of it is enterprise-y features like remote management which is fun, but hardly necessary at home. I do admit it is fun to access the remote management console of my rack servers from my home office, although clearly I don't need it since I can walk 30 seconds down to the garage and access the console directly. But of course a home rack is something to be done for fun, so fun counts as a feature.
> Some of the commenters seem to assume "enterprise grade" is defined solely by how loud it is. That's not the definition.
It's not?
Isn't it like enterprise grade software which is anything that costs over $50,000, sprays its files all over the filesystem, takes half a dozen full-time IT admins round the clock to keep it running, and has more bugs and 0day than an undergraduate student assignment?
Supermicro sells Atom-based SKUs with enterprise features like a BMC+IPMI, 10Gb SFP+ ports, ECC memory, SFF-8087 ports, chassis intrusion detection, etc.
I remember how cool it felt that I pulled out my smartcard from my SunRay on my desk in California, flew to Tokyo, plugged in my smartcard to a SunRay there and just like that, there was my desktop ready to keep working!
> But because they have already sold, and are not buying, they drop out of the market entirely. Prices get set by the people who are price insensitive, because they're the only ones willing to participate.
The buy & hold value investor is also not participating in price discovery since they are just passively holding.
Encourage yourself and all your similar-minded people to keep the fun going!
Yes, 99.99(however many 9s)% of the internet is walled-garden advertising garbage.
But, you can exist in the remaining space and bring your friends along!
I run my website and my blog like I've always done (since 1994), I run mailing lists for a few topics (some date back to 1991) and subscribe to many others. Zero corporate involvement, no ads, no monopolist in control. Just peer to peer real people. I run my email server so I can communicate without depending on the monopolists. There are still hobby forums for specialty topics, or start your own! I even still read Usenet weekly. And so on...
The fun parts of the Internet used to be all of it, now it is a niche, but it's still there for you. Keep it alive!
> As always, this story has have nothing to do with the cameras or AI
Obviously not true, but with nuance.
This shows the problem with bad practices at infinite scale.
Maybe they always conflated 0 with O. Not great, but if it was done manually it came up as a problem almost never. Still not great if someone got caught up in it, but it was not a widespread problem.
Add a layer of ever-present spying on literally everyone and suddenly what was a footnote of a problem is a major issue.
Actually almost any fuel injected vehicle can accept flash updates through the port to at least the ECU and PCM, frequently the BCU is also write enabled.
If there is a BCM. My previous 1995 GMC C1500 had a PCM and the automatic transmission was controlled by mechanical linkage to a hydraulic computer in the transmission along with shift solenoids from the PCM. It also had "throttle-body injection" with two injectors replacing the carburetor. The OBD 1 system would switch to "open loop control" with preprogrammed injection in the event of a malfunction which would make the thing challenging to drive until you fixed the problem. So very simple compared to the multitude of computers and control systems in use today.
A nice feature on that system was that you could put a paperclip between two pins on the diagnostic port and it would blink out the trouble codes on the SES light.
You can adjust the ECU for these 80s and 90s cars and “flash” them like anything else. There’s just a lot less settings! Not sure about the 70s but I’m sure some resto-mods also allow for this.
> You'd be amazed at the number of people that live pay check to pay check. Even on here, I'd guess the number is higher than you'd expect.
Well you don't have to live anywhere near paycheck to paycheck to be intimidated. If you're stonewalled from employment, you're in trouble unless you are so fabulously wealthy that you can afford to never work again.
> If you haven’t use LLMs at all, a weekend would be enough to be on par with everyone else in the industry
Disagree. It takes a lot of experimenting to find the right balance between sufficient guardrails and insane halluciations. And it'll be different depending on work domains.
I'm still refactoring AI workflows every week after more than a year or so and still working on it. Will probably be a perpetually ongoing effort as models change.
But does this translate as "one year of cumulative work" or rather "one year of rearranging your workflow and discarding obsolete ideas"?
If you spend a year walking in circles, someone can easily close the gap with one step. Especially if models and harnesses are supposedly getting more powerful all the time.
Absolutely, this is something I always try to explain regarding this topic.
Of course it is a lot more comfortable if you can live for two years without a paycheck vs. if you can only make it to the end of the week.
But at a structural level, both those people are still working stiff who will need that future paycheck. So they (we) are much more similar in life experience than different.
The people who are truly different category are those who will never have to work.
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