I hit all the wrong notes, still eat gods.

Haha fair enough. Fixing it after the fact basically requires a second server of equal or greater storage. I fear a rebuild on my 16tb disks.

Yes, I have a desktop with a radeon 9700 ai pro with 32GB of VRAM. Its more than doubled since I bought it but its basically a down clocked 9070xt with double the VRAM. I also have a little arc b50 in my server.

Mostly yeah use it for privacy reasons. I run llama.CPP directly and access via open webui. I host a searx instance for it to use as web search. Mostly run qwen3.6/3.8 or gemma4 on the radeon and almost exclusively gptoss 20b on the B50 along with a second small model for tags and titles in open webui. Yeah I just use it mostly as a basic chatbot or as an agent in obsidian using the engram plugin. Helps search and summarize years of notes and works pretty well.

I’ve tried to use it as a coding assistant in zed without much luck so usually just post my code into open webui for feedback and it works alot better for me.

Yeah I can access it with other machines on my network including phone with conduit app. I can get to it on the go by connecting to home network with wireguard and sending a magic packet to wakeup desktop.

I havent done any image gen nor have much use for it outside of maybe using it to make app icons in the style of papirus icons for programs they don’t and won’t support.

It definitely feels more comprable to first ai wave than current frontier models but the privacy and price trade off is worth it to me. I’d say using it in obsidian has been the best use of it so far and one I certainly wouldn’t trust to an external AI.

Raid z1 with 10 14tb disks? That’s a bold move cotton, let’s see how it plays out.

Mine seemed horribly out of date. Had constantly buys liquid death, but I havent in years since they switched to stevia. Also got constantly upgrading PC storage, not in 2026. Everything else was has work shop, likes precision tools, has a fujifilm camera, has fender guitar, works on guitar, upgraded server rack, invested in raspberry pi ecosystem. Most of what would give them that data was from accessory purchases, as the big purchase was probably local (guitar, camera). None of those aside from guitar strings would have been bought in 2026.

My partner at work. He’s been there like 30 years and the joke is whenever we are struggling to fix something and I look for a part or tool, he’ll somehow have it working by the time I get back. Just gets bored waiting and starts poking stuff and its done. I would be frustrated but our old coworker said that’s been the status quo for a decade +

Not just piracy. Woke piracy.

My own personal morals are with where are the profits going? To the corporation ceos and stars? Then 100% stealing is justified. The writers, crew editors, session muscisians, programmera, designers etc got paid a salary once and yet others profit off it for decades, nah. I hold off on current shows if I want them to keep making more seasons.

I do try and be more thoughtful with bands and authors. I go to shows and signings and buy merch directly from them. Lord knows they don’t earn anything off Spotify so may as well have my own library. I get most ebooks through Libby and dedrm them or at least borrow for a day before acquiring elsewhere since dedrm seems more difficult these days.

Retro games they already made their money, liberate them or at least make it easy and cheap to own. Steam solved this for modern PC games by having so far a decent service.

So in your case shows over, no one sells it, and if they did only a corporation would profit. Take the show Ed, there was never a DVD release and there’s nowhere to stream it. So what other option is there if you want to rewatch it?

In your deus ex scenario who makes the augments? A mega corporation. So yes they will absolutely be vilified because they won’t be for the good of humanity they’ll be to charge a subscription for… vision, and spy on everyone you know.

Only way they should be accepted is as legit medical devices with open sources and no ability to stream or record video only pipe directly into the optic nerve. They should not be for tech bro fantasies.

I was staying in a cabin and went to get something from the car and a black bear was just cruising past. He looked at me and I looked him. We both kinda panicked and scurried off.

I will die on the hill the Velvet Underground was profoundly more influential on rock music than the Beatles. I’ll give the Beatles they were a cultural phenomenon but only like 10 of their songs are still listanable in 2026. Where I can listen to all 4 VU albums back to back and like most of what I hear.

Not struggling perse but yeah shit has gone up way more than my pay check. Paying double for groceries what I did a few years ago, paying 50% more for gas than I did a year ago electricity doubled. Pay went up a few percent…

I code at a kindergarten level so its been useful for me when I’m trying to get an idea to just work. I tell it what I was trying to do and give it my code and then I ask it to fix then explain what went wrong. Works pretty well in qwen 3.8 27b on my GPU in zed. But I’m not making huge apps or public code just dumb scripts for me. So ive found ive actually gotten better this past year. Its all in how you use it.

I got a little fanless atom PC from work that was being tossed because it “didn’t work.” It did work you would just have to apply pressure to it before boot because the CPU must have been coming unsoldered. I just stuck it on the bottom of like 30 pounds of gear and never had a problem.

Pixel 5 was the last good one.

I’ve got 100tb getting filled. I’m ready. Ok in reality its closer to 60 tb after raid and I’m duplicating the important stuff across 2 devices. But that’s only about 5 tb. But I’m including lots of PDFs epubs and zims as important stuff. The rest is just media.

I’ve dabbled with the ai I get from a kagi subscription its genuinely helpful with some stuff. If I put in a very fuzzy description of something I can write a paragraph about it and it will find it when no amount of searching has been able to turn it up. Its sometimes helpful with troubleshooting, sometimes not. I wouldn’t trust it for any subject I didn’t have some familiarity with and I do go double check some shit it tells me. Over all its fine but I wouldnt pay extra for it outside of my search subscription. I am still opposed to data center rollouts and power use that comes along with it and the lack of data sovereignty but a little box like a strix halo I could see being pretty useful.

Are we not doing phrasing anymore?

I’m not knocking it but I don’t consider audiobooks reading. You are using two different input systems, going through different parts of the brain. They both require different skills to process and retain the information.

I mean not 100% obviously but went from going out drinking weekly to going so long without drinking I might not remember the last time I had a beer. Point was pretty much everyone I know.has cut back significantly.