irmadlad

You bet bro. I’m chuffed I could help. I’m glad it’s working out for you. Rock on with yo’ bad self.

Well, I’ve had a computer in front of me since the 70s. Don’t conflate longevity with knowledge tho. I’ve had no formal training, even tho I ‘ran’ the IT dept for a small construction company in another life. One of my jobs was to train old head construction workers on how to use a lap top, a digital camera, how to interface with our servers to upload data from the field. That was wild.

But, no formal training here. Most of what I know I learned by: Reading, screwing it up, doing it again, ad nauseam. And then when something worked, write that shit down.

I’m not trying to throw shade on your project nor am I trying to discourage you in any way. I think it’s a noble ambition. I hope you make a mint doing it. If I live long enough, I’ll be able to tell people ‘Yeah, I met the dude on Lemmy before he was so successful.’ But if 71 years of experience has taught me anything, it’s that it has to be so easy a cave man could do it - as if it just fell in your lap, and it has to be work and trouble free. Otherwise, the average Joe Schmoe citizen isn’t going to spend the time. Having a secure network takes work. Keeping up with updates and making sure they aren’t going to make the wheels fall off, takes work. Work is where the vast amount of people fall off the wagon.

I bookmarked your project and I’ll give it a serious look see. I will tell you that the demo site: oasis.circuitforge.tech, returns a bad gateway Error code 502 from Cloudflare.

Rock on with yo’ bad self.

Saying it’ll never happen and giving up won’t make that 2% get any bigger

Again, you get a standing ovation from me for your drive. Emphatically, I hope you and others with your drive succeed. I’m just giving my perspective of being involved with people and their computers since the mid 70s. I’m no IT guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I like helping others with their digital devices, because it is my desire for everyone to use said digital devices in the most safe, private, and anonymous manner possible. If any morsel of my experience can help someone, then I’m all about it.

However, and for instance: It’s been back at the beginning of the year, I had almost a 2 hour ‘training session’ with a friend on how to effectively use UBlock Origin. Something so very simple but quite effective. But you have to ‘train’ it to get the most out of UBlock Origin. Three weeks later I’m over at his house and he’s disabled UBlock Origin because it was annoying. Work, yes it takes a little work to learn how to drive the bus, and that’s where most people fall by the wayside for just about anything, not just digital devices.

If you want to help beta test, I’m working on an appliance-level automated installer for provisioning home cloud servers.

I’d be willing to take a look at it. I’ve got a couple empty boxes around here. Back when Microsoft released their Home Server edition, I thought ‘Finally! I hope this catches on’. But they killed it. I’ve always thought some bright, young, entrepreneur could take a couple of small ThinkCenters, construct a server environment, put it in a box, with almost a fool proof, one touch button that went out on your network, connected all devices to that one small central server, deploy apps etc, and everything would be jippity jippity. The problem, however, with making things fool proof is that fools are quite ingenious little buggers.

Decouple people from big tech

I’m not making fun of what you’ve said, and I’m not talking down to you. That said, I like where you’re going, but that will never happen. You can mark it on the calendar: ‘That irmadlad asshole said - never happen’. On the one hand I applaud you loud and clear. On the other hand, we live in a global consumerist society. Corporate is just giving them their fix. That’s their plug.

My entire stack runs off a 14kw solar array

I have solar too. Hell I have solar on two barns. I like it. I often think about how far along we might be here in America if a lowly peanut farmer had not been ridiculed beyond belief for putting solar on the white house. Now, they were not what you’d call efficient, but it was a start. I think the next presidency took them down.

but your techiest uncle could host the entire family in a privacy cooperative, for instance

Oh no doubt. I’ve long since been a promoter of the notion of a server in every home. We live in a digital society. We have digital assets. These need to be centrally housed on a very secure server and backed up.

However, self hosters and homelabbers make up <2% of the world’s population. It gets even less if you differentiate between consistent homelab/self hosters and those who were just experimenting. Yeah, we do it, but not on a massive scale to even make a ding. Again, I like where your head’s at, but it’s not us we need to convince, it’s them. And they like their crack. Corporate likes their money.

I mean, I’m not saying give up. Keep pushing. But realistically, we’re in a script.

This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels

But it doesn’t.

… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.

But it is.

So, now what are we going to do? Give me real world solutions that will actually fix the issue, which would be implemented by real world corporations and real world data centers. I’m not problem hampered, I’m solution based. So let’s fix it.

Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines

Didn’t downvote you however, are you saying if I ran an AI model local, that scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown is ok with you, just because it’s local?. Because that’s exactly what we’re are doing when we access the internet. Throw AI out of the scope, and we’re still pumping massive amounts of carbon in to the air, still turning the water brown. There are 8.4 billion people on this planet. Approximately 6.3 billion of them are online. That’s just individual humans. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of data centers that aren’t even connected with AI and all the energy production to make them run.

So, who will be the first to actually practice what you preach and shut down your servers and internet devices? C’mon…make the first step towards a cleaner planet.

Well, it all started way back when, with a misunderstanding in my mind about what a homelab is. Back then, in my mind a server was this big, honkin’, brutal piece of equipment. Over the years I came to realize that all that rack stuff, while cheap upfront on the used market, was costing me some serious bucks in energy consumption + the added load on the AC, even when electricity in my locale is relatively cheap. Since I already was invested, I didn’t want to redo everything and start from scratch. Then the ‘mini-racks’ started to be a thing with Lenovo’s and such. I saw that others were doing what I wanted to do with much less. So, now days, it doesn’t take much of a computer to run docker containers, Proxmox, etc. Far more energy efficient, doesn’t generate so much heat load, and significantly more quiet.

In the near future, my goal is to miniaturize my lab, and then build me a $4k AI machine. Out of the frying pan into the fire yes, but I haven’t had new equipment in well over 15+ years. I’ve always had used or refurb’s. I think it’s about time to treat myself.

Recently I decommissioned a Dell T320 and replaced it with a Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 and 32 GB RAM all for right at the $200 mark. I’m running a total of 52 containers on it right now with load averages looking like 0.31, 0.51, 0.72. The Dell T320 running the same 52 containers cost me $40 USD per month to run. The Dell 7020 costs me $5-8 USD per month to run 24/7. If you wanted a wider tower, I set up a Dell 9020 for a friend of mine’s son who wanted to get into selfhosting at the age of 10. Similar running costs. I’ve got an Optiplex 3020 mini with 16 GB RAM and a 4 TB external drive running Proxmox quite well and costs probably $3 USD per month. I’m pretty well chuffed with the performance so far of the 7020, and in fact am eyeballing another one to replace a second Dell T320.