This is way too complex of a topic to leave to “consumer choice”. There are layers upon layers of complex systems at play, not to mention miles of legalize and precisely crafted PR statements to say one thing and mean another.
The only way this gets better is with government regulation, pretending consumers can make a difference here is blaming the victim.
I recently started donating to my instance to, hopefully, help them keep going. I can host my own instance, but I really don’t want to have to do that. The PHP vulnerabilities are a good example, I spent most of my life having vulnerabilities like that be my problem, but boy was I glad PHP2SHELL was something I watched from the outside.
Little eMudhra was asked to write down his a secret and hand it in to the teacher. He accidently gave the teacher the wrong paper.
And books just contain a series of words. You are playing semantics games. An ebook is just a bunch of electrons shoved into a rock. Yet, somehow, it also contains knowledge.
In a less abstract way, LLMs giant relational databases that are expressed by using the relationship between previous words to select a word that might follow. It’s in the relational graph that the knowledge is stored. The information is there, and the way we’ve figured out best to get it out is by generating tokens.
Specifically for Piefed/Lemmy, I have all the experience and knowledge necessary to self host my own instance. I’ve been managing servers since before half of Lemmy’s population was born. And what it has taught me, is it is always better when its is someone else’s problem. My home lemmy instance closed down, which could have been a chance for me to self host, but I, instead, spent a little time finding another instance I liked, because I didn’t want to be responsible for it.
I actually own a domain with the idea of starting a Piefed and Mastodon instance, but I’ve never been willing to set it up and deal with the overhead. Maybe one day I’ll decide to, especially if feddit.online ever goes offline, but for now, I enjoy it being someone else’s problem.
Also, I’m pretty sure the fediverse wouldn’t work if everyone had an instance of 1. Maybe some day someone will crack a fully distributed P2P ActivityPub like solution, but until then, the health of the swarm requires we stay somewhere between “1 company runs everything” and “there are 7 billion fediverse instances”.
I recently gave Strata a shot for my local AI. I’m very impressed with the performance they have eeked out of my hardware. I’ve got a rather beefy gaming desktop I built as an AI server back when the current craze started, before prices started going up, but models up until this point really failed to take full advantage of that hardware. Strata (which uses a Qwen model) both simplified the setup process, and it maxes out the hardware when running.
Strata acts like an OpenAI compatible API server, I then have Hermes as a “harness” to make an “agent”, which I interact with on “buzz”, which is like discord, but made for bots. Although Hermes also supports discord and several other chat platforms.
If you have the hardware to run Strata, I recommend setting it up, it comes with a basic chat interface, which you can then grill to assist you with setting up Hermes and whatever else.
One thing I didn’t mention, is security. I highly recommend you treat AI as unpredictable, unreliable, and capable of being taken over by bad actors. This isn’t a problem for a pure chat interface, but Hermes gives the AI tools to do things, and those tools could be used to take over your computer, scan your network, and create all kinds of havoc. For my part, Hermes is running in a virtual machine which is on an isolated network. I keep tight control on what it does and doesn’t have access to in my network main network. That may not be something you have the hardware or knowledge to do, at the very least I recommend running Hermes in a docker container, and not giving it access to your personal desktop nor credentials to things like your email account.
Books contain knowledge, I doubt you will find many English scholars that disagree with that. In the same way, LLMs contain knowledge as well, they just also have the ability to output that knowledge in a more dynamic way than a book. You can argue some words that are more anthropomorphic, but knowledge has been attributed to inanimate objects for millennia.
I think most of the comments misunderstood you, or I did.
Keeping a dedicated admin separate from your daily use user is best practice. In a business setting it is a critical security line, and also seriously helps with auditing and logging. It makes sure that if my computer gets compromised, the active cookies and session tokens are all a standard user. It’s not fool proof, but it really reduces risk.
That said, in my home lab, I don’t bother with that separation. It’s far more work than the effort justifies, when the worst result of your systems being compromised is your media library not being available. What you will want, in any case, is a “break glass” account into every system you setup to use SSO. A local administrator that isn’t tied to SSO available in case your IDP is down, certificates expire, or you accidentally paint yourself into a corner (and you will).
I recommend, if you don’t already, using a password manager like BitWarden and having every single local admin be a long, randomly generated password.
Snow Crash is a Sci-Fi book from the early 90s. It coined the term metaverse. It takes place in a post American collapse setting, where corporations have taken over. There’s a lot of interesting points in the book, probably as interesting today as the day it was wrote.
But what stuck with me, and helped form my understanding of society and helped me build my career in tech was his observations on franchises. He posits that franchise are basically a living organism, who’s DNA is written in binders. These binders cover every eventuality. They explain process, procedure, and expected results so that the humans in each franchise can keep the organism alive.
It was kinda a throw away set dressing just setting up the world at the beginning of the book, but it is the part that had real meaning to me.
Not the person you responded to, but I’ll give my unsolicited advice: I switched to Unifi NAS. QNAP has had a lot of security nightmares, and a bad habit of EOLing devices.
The best option might actually be using an old workstation and going with something like TrueNAS, but I enjoy the convenience of a purpose built box.
One big difference between Unifi NAS and something like QNAP or Synology, is that the Unifi NAS only does NAS work, it doesn’t run containers or “apps”. You need separate compute if you want to run containers.