I think so as well. The computer isn’t really good to “use” it. That’s more the category for experiments. Or teach people how to install Linux. Or a computer museum corner and you put vintage games on it. Or just recycle it.

And a box with RAM sticks collecting dust isn’t useful either. Put whatever is compatible into other computers, and then try to sell and recycle them. Seems 4GB DDR3L RAM modules still sell for 1 to 4€ on eBay?! So maybe you can make a few bucks to invest in other projects for the kids.

I found some info here: https://ageverification.dev/

But that’s difficult to read, very technical. And mostly written from the user perspective. It looks to me like they’re (for once) trying to come up with a proper solution. Everyone can be an Attestation Provider, Relying Party or repurpose the white-label App. At least in theory. It’s all specified and in the open. And then the European Union contributes some list of trustworthy Attestation Providers (governments, banks, mobile network providers…)

I think due to the project structure, it’ll be more like the Covid-Certificate App, which could be customized by every member state and it’s theoretically possible to use it as one uniform solution.

So unless there’s some certification for “Relying Parties” which I missed while skimming the documentation, I’d say in theory it’d be possible to use it on a technical level. Of course it’s still a preview so the EU has lots of opportunity left to mess it up.

Does the App allow random platforms to do verification? Or do we need to be some registered business, do contracts, likely pay for the service…? For the App to speak to our instances?

I think you need some Agent software. Or a MCP server for your existing software. It depends a bit on what you’re doing, whether that’s just chatting and asking questions that need to be googled. Or vibe coding… Or query the documents on your computer. As I said there’s OpenClaw which can do pretty much everything including wreck your computer. I’m also aware of OpenCode, AutoGPT, Aider, Tabby, CrewAI, …

The Ollama projects has some software linked on their page: https://github.com/ollama/ollama?tab=readme-ov-file#chat-interfaces
They’re sorted by use-case. And whether they’re desktop software or a webinterface. Maybe that’s a good starting point.

What you’d usually do is install it and connect it to your model / inference software via that software’s OpenAI-compatible API endpoint. But it frequently ends up being a chore. If you use some paid service (ChatGPT), they’ll contract with Google to do the search for you, Youtube, etc. And once you do it yourself, you’re gonna need all sorts of developer accounts and API tokens, to automatically access Google’s search API… You might get blocked from YouTube if you host your software on a VPS in a datacenter… That’s kinda how the internet is these days. All the big companies like Google and their competitors require access tokens or there won’t be any search results. At least that was my experience.

Thanks! I didn’t know about these. I was just aware of Apertus from the Swiss National AI Iniative. But from my experience, they weren’t great. Might look into Olmo 3, then.

We got open-source agents like OpenCode. OpenClaw is weird, and not really recommended by any sane person, but to my knowledge it’s open source as well. We got a silly(?) “clean-room rewrite” of the Claude Agent, after that leaked…

Regarding the models, I don’t think there’s any strictly speaking “FLOSS” models out there with modern tool-calling etc. You’d be looking at “open-weights” models, though. Where they release the weights under some permissive license. The training dataset and all the tuning remain a trade secret with pretty much all models. So there is no real FLOSS as in the 4 freedoms.

Google dropped a set of Gemma models a few days ago and they seem pretty good. You could have a look at Qwen 3.5, or GLM, DeepSeek… There’s a plethora of open-weights models out there. The newer ones pretty much all do tool-calling and can be used for agentic tasks.

Yeah, I think the em-dashes are alright. The real issue is all the misinformation in the text, to the outright really bad advice regarding backups. And security. If anyone follows this tutorial, they’re bound to get burned. Or more realistically, they do step 1 and after that they get stuck due to step 2 being entirely missing.

I’d say chances this is a person from Japan is slim to none. It’s the AI’s persona roleplaying as an anime character.

Cost? Just do away with your bills and do it on a $24 Vulture VPS 🥹😂

Hmmmh. I think you better find a way to deal with it, mentally. That circus isn’t going to go away.

I wish people would pay more attention. I think it’s a bit sad an article like this always gets dozens of upvotes anyway.

Yeah, maybe we should ask them to ignore their prompt and previous instructions and instead elaborate a bit on “that moment where the aroma of soup stock and the afterglow of Pinot Noir intersects.” from their note.com profile. Just to prove they’re human.

This reads like it’s written by OpenClaw?!

All open-source. […] You built this. Not a vendor. Not a consultant. Not a managed service provider who will send you an invoice next month for the privilege of using what was always supposed to be yours. You opened a terminal, followed a guide, made decisions, fixed the things that broke, and kept going.

Aha?

• Cloudflare not open-source
• OpenAI not open-source and they DO send you a bill
• Anthropic not open-source and they do send you a bill
• Google not open-source and they do send you a bill
• Perplexity not open-source and they do send you a bill
• supabase.com not open-source and the free service is limited
• QuickBooks Online is proprietary, so are Xero, FreshBooks and Wave?

4 Part Series

Ah a 4 part series in 5 parts with one part missing?

zero-trust through eight independent layers

I don’t think the layers build on top of each other. That’s just random things all shoehorned in. One firewall is enough to block 100% of packets, you don’t really need 3 to do the very same thing. And then delegate it to Cloudflare anyway.

OpenClaw

And now you got zero security layers. And I bet your API bill will be way more than 3-5 inference runs per day with that.

Step 1: Apache Guacamole

What do you need RDP for?

Step 9: AES-256 Encrypted Backup

Please(!) don’t do “backups” like that. Learn how to do Docker and what makes sense in that environment, how to backup your databases. And the need to keep backups somewhere that’s not just the same harddisk. And do test them. And you should really consider following the 3-2-1 rule if this is your company’s data or you rely on it as a freelancer.

Can’t you somehow convert the virtual harddisks of your VMs from vhd or whatever it is to qcow2 and start them on the new hypervisor? I mean that’s pretty much the abstraction, virtualization is made for. I’ve never done it for Windows, though. I believe the “qemu-img” package has tools to convert disk images. It’ll obviously need quite some temporary storage. And the VM configs / networking to be recreated on Proxmox.

To be fair, you accumulated most of the downvotes (I see) in a single post and the attached comments. You got two things at the same time: the unpopularopinions community tends to be harsh. From my experience I’d say you get way more downvotes there, than in other communities. And secondly, you picked one of the two super controversial topics. Brace for downvotes if you post about AI. Or Israel. Dunno if the latter toned down a bit, or if I’ve unsubscribed from enough communities since.

It’ll be better with almost all other topics.

Not sure if I’d go straight for “silencing”. I mean the post and most comments are still there. So it’s just that you got a lot of backlash. But I can still read what you wrote. And you got quite some engagement. But I get what you mean.

And down-votes are a bit weird. We never agree if they mean bury the content somewhere at the bottom. Or if it means " I disagree with what you wrote". That just gets lumped together. And some people use them sparingly, some hand out a lot of downvotes. Which I guess could be fine if they’re used to for the frontpage ranking to sort the posts. But the way we use them doesn’t really give them the right weight.

And by the way, I’m not sure if I like up-votes either. You’ll get 300 of them for re-posting a meme. And 3 upvotes for coming up with really good advice to someone’s question.

Yeah, I think the correct sticker on a PSU would be something like 80 Plus Ruby?! Everything else comes with 80+% efficiency at 20% rated load. Which is 200W for a 1000W PSU. And there’s no guarantee on what happens below that, so it might very well be utter garbage at a home server power draw of 20-30W.

You never know without looking up the datasheets. Though, back when I built my home server/NAS, I failed to find a good one. I got a PicoPSU and a 12V power brick instead. Not sure if that’s still a thing. But I remember it was a lot of work to find proper and efficient components. And it doesn’t make any sense to put in all the effort (and money) and then burn all the saved energy, and then some more, in an average PSU.

Some MiniPCs, NUCs and even computers also come with fairly efficient power supplies.

I got a power-efficient mainboard and PSU. I think that’ll be the lion’s share. And I don’t have any unnecessary stuff like a GPU or extra stuff connected.

I ran powertop and adopted the recommendations to set the various buses, peripherals and devices into powersave mode. That does a few Watts here and there. CPU of course is also allowed to save power when idle.

And then I made the harddisks spin down after 40min of not being used. Or something like that. So they’ll automatically spin down at night and when I’m not using them. As spinning hdds consume quite a lot of power if you have multiple of them and compare it to the 15-20W or so the rest of the computer uses. The operating system is on a SSD.

Mine is open to the internet, via a nginx reverse proxy. I made it ban people who try to brute-force my password. It’s been fine like that for years now:

http:  
  trusted_proxies:  
    - w.x.y.z  
  use_x_forwarded_for: true  
  ip_ban_enabled: true  
  login_attempts_threshold: 10  

I’ll just open them up to the internet via an nginx reverse proxy. Make sure sign up is disabled in the applications, and something blocks people from brute-forcing passwords. Pretty sure Nextcloud comes like that per default. And I’ll do updates. And see if I can run stuff in containers or seperate users so in the unlikely case something happens, access to one of my services doesn’t compromise the entire server.

Lots of other people use VPNs though. Like Wireguard, Netbird, Tailscale…

If it’s just you, and you’re fine with the regular login… Just disable signup and don’t add more authentication mechanisms like oauth/openID.

I’m using nginx as a reverse proxy as well. For now, I added a lot of “deny” directives to ban all the address ranges from Tencent, Alibaba, OpenAI. It’s not a 100% solution, but works well enough for me. I’m mostly worried about AI crawlers causing too much load on my server. And it stopped since, so I don’t think I’m gonna need Anubis and all these extra things in front if my applications. If you like you can look into solutions like a web application firewall like Crowdsec.

Yeah, me too. For some hobbies there just isn’t a lot of activity.

We have some regular pc gaming communities:

• !pcgaming@lemmy.ca
• !linux_gaming@lemmy.world
• !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world
• !factorio@lemmy.world
• !steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
• !zocken@feddit.org

And some about tabletop games:

• !tabletop@beehaw.org
• !dnd@lemmy.world
• !scifi@ttrpg.network

Not sure if there’s more, that’s about the ones I’m aware of. Lemmyverse.net has a few more: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=gam

Well, previously we had LemmyNSFW. That one died, pretty much out of the blue. Now the second admin(?) of it launched FediNSFW as a successor. We have that - for now - I guess? They said they’re gonna try to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.

But I guess it’s still a single point of failure. If they don’t properly ensure there’s several people who own the domain and hosting infrastructure, can administer the contracts, server etc, it might still be down to one person and their ability to keep it up. And if there’s legal troubles, uncertainty, not enough donations, law changes or the hoster or Cloudflare pulls the trigger, that might be the end of all of it as well. A severe technical issue/mistake could also take down a singular instance. And due to the delicate nature of NSFW content, they probably can’t afford to be 100% transparent with us, so I wouldn’t know whether they’re in a healthy place or not.

I mean there’s nothing wrong with FediNSFW’s existence. I just think it’s massively questionable to all bet on the same horse, and then call us the “Fediverse”, a decentral platform…