Weirdly I’m polite to all LLMs, but Gemini sets me off and I end up yelling at it.

Open webui lets you install a ton of different search providers out of the box, but you do need sn API key for most and I haven’t vetted them

I’m trying to get Kagi to work with Phi4 and not having success.

Honestly for me it was when we moved in that things started getting more calm.

I did not like all the uncertainty of the transaction hanging above my head.

Now it’s been a few years and we’ve added gardens and done a few upgrades and we have our furniture and spaces, and it’s my happy place.

I keep seeing this on serious sites and it makes me happy

I’m new/planning to get more into self hosting

I have a crappy NAS in the basement I archive to and copy my borg repos to.

Then I pay for a Dropbox style cloud service and I copy my borg archives there. It’s kind of janky but it’s cheap and works.

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

If you set up something like Garage with borg with a bunch of other people you could create a network where you essentially swap hard drive space to ensure you’re all backed up.

But I think Garage assumes very high trust with your fellow hosts, so this doesn’t scale beyond direct social connections.

We grew up with various windows and DOS computers, then my first computer that was mine was a used computer with Windows ME and a massive 20gb hard drive.

After that I bought an iMac with Mac OS X tiger and have been using Macs ever since.

I’ve also frankensteined a few Linux machines together from yard sale parts over the years.

The object storage (S3-compatible) platform MinIO created a bit of a stir this week with a PR that removes a ton of functionality from the interface of its community edition. When questioned, users were directed to the enterprise version of the platform. In unsurprising open-source fashion, a fork has already been created by the community while others have started migrating to existing alternatives like Garage.

How are people finding Garage? Does anyone have a good comparison vs seaweedFS?

How about our prophet, The Sisko?

I put the cardboard from egg cartons underneath potting soil for elevation and drainage

I don’t hate AI, I hate how it was created, how it’s foisted on us, the promises it can do things it really can’t, and the corporate governance of it.

But I acknowledge these tools exist, and I do use them because they genuinely help and I can’t undo all the stuff I hate about them.

If I had millions of dollars to spend, sure I would try and improve things, but I don’t.

At least with C I have a bunch of hand tools, camping gear, rope, life straws, water filters, medical kits, and alcohol. So I could feasibly live life as a hermit in a self built cabin.

A & B I’m totally fucked. I’ve watched all of Alone, I think I starve to death in weeks.

In all those situations I don’t speak any of their languages to defend or explain myself, so I’m fairly sure the locals will murder me.

I don’t know how I just overlooked it as a cool tower

Was the tower in the Civ 3 ad plus intro the Tower of Babel? Never made that connection before

Yep, 1 day blinding stew.

It’s as close to humble pie as it gets.

There are various levels of AI here

Storing embeddings/vectors in a search index can make your searches smarter and more relevant. The embeddings squeeze related concepts closer together than pure keyword approaches, which if done well increases retrieval quality.

RAG tools and AI searches are just a layer on top of your index. When done well these can be really useful in annotating your results and speeding up finding things.

That’s useful when you’re searching say an error message and the AI is able to iterate on keywords and skim a Guthub issue about it and skip to the resolution.

Similarly it’s good when you’re researching something but don’t have the exact words, AI search can iterate and capture your intent, then run several queries based on that.

I don’t find the hallucination problem significant in practice with a lot of AI search tools, but I have found AI is vulnerable to certain types of SEO spam that a human would never fall for.

As an example most companies have a “comparison to” or “alternatives to” blogpost. The AI does not critically look at the fact that a service is hosting a blogpost shilling their own product. So asking search AI for options is actually poor quality because it will return the shilled results that appear in search first.

AI also search adds an additional silent layer of filtering, which you need to be conscious of.

Potentially that would be a good application of federation and distributed computing

An Internet archive like distributed tool, that then feeds into local tokenization and indexing.

Alternatively a centralized service that generates indices and then locally they are queried would save a lot of energy.

I have, and I’ve been able to smell the same thing.

Definitely agree it’s undervalued, I don’t even think you need to have an especially good nose, you just need to stop and do some sniffing.

Prediction: this gets used to surveil dissidents and minorities disproportionately.