MudMan

That’s not true at all. Synology will sell you 24 bay rack mounted devices and 12 bay towers, as well as expansion modules for both with more bays you can daisy chain to them.

Granted, I believe those are technically marketed as enterprise solutions, but you can buy a 12 bay unit off of Amazon for like two grand diskless, so… I mean, it’s a thing.

Not saying you should, and it’s definitely less cost effective (and less powerful, depending on what you have laying around) than reusing old hardware, but it does exist.

I’m currently running some stuff out of an old laptop which I also have tucked away somewhere and just… remote desktop in for most of the same functionality. And even if you can’t be bothered to flip it open in the rare occassion you can’t get to the points where the OS will let you remote in, there are workarounds for that these days. And of course the solution to the “can’t hook it up to a keyboard and mouse” in that case is the thing comes with both (and its own built-in UPS) out of the box.

Nobody is saying that server grade solutions aren’t functional or convenient. They exist for a reason. The argument is that a home/family server you don’t need to use at scale can run perfectly fine without them only losing minor quality of life features and is a perfectly valid solution to upcycle old or discarded consumer hardware.

I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.

You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.

That calculation changes a bit if you’re trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you’re running a hosting business, at which point it’s not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.

I mean… my old PC burns through 50-100W, even at idle and even without a bunch of spinning hard drives. My actual NAS barely breaks that under load with all bays full.

I could scrounge up enough SATA inputs on it to make for a decent NAS if I didn’t care about that, and I could still run a few other services with the spare cycles, but… maybe not the best use of power.

I am genuinely considering turning it into a backup box I turn on under automation to run a backup and then turn off after completion. That’s feasible and would do quite well, as opposed to paying for a dedicated backup unit.

No.

I had that laptop before I tried to move it to Linux and I’m not buying a new one. It does work under Windows.

This is not my laptop not supporting Linux, this is Linux not supporting my laptop. Because I already own the laptop. If people weren’t trying to cheerlead for their preferred OS for other reasons than… you know, whether it’s good or not, this wouldn’t even be a discussion. In fact, half the “Windows sucks” angles these days are down to “Windows 11 doesn’t support specific pieces of pre-existing hardware”. Which, you know, is the exact problem I’m having here.

Now, would ASUS finally paying attention to the ecosystem make it easier for a whole bunch of people to move over? Sure. Of course. But that doesn’t contradict my previous statements.

Riiiiiiiight.

Man, social media is a trip.

I have an ASUS laptop that maps its multiple speakers incorrectly under Linux, it’s been killing me for months and I’m now considering it. I was not prepared for the realization that the Linux path forward would be to just pay by the bug fix.

What the hell just happened there? That was some weird breakdown.

I mean, I guess you didn’t catch the post of the person explaining why Diablo doesn’t work properly (Fedi threading issues, presumably?) but maaaaaan, that’s some off the rails unprompted weirdness.

The actual answer is below, but I’m constantly surprised about Lutris being proposed to GoG as opposed to Heroic.

I mean, Lutris is more flexible and you can build more stuff into it, but it’s extremely fiddly and not as well supported. As long as you only care about GoG or Epic, Heroic is just hands-off and Steam-like. I actually prefer it to Galaxy on Windows.

Holy, crap, is presenting a quasi-monopoly from a libertarian billionaire’s private company as a “stable and generally positive status quo” a dystopian thing to say.

I mean, in the grand scheme of 2025 it’s at the very bottom of the real billionaire problems of the world, but just as a sentence. Yikes.

You can still buy Dungeon Keeper, C&C and Blade Runner. A bunch of them are on GOG DRM-free, even. I do recommend those. And that C&C remaster was awesome.

The government isn’t a subscription service or a company.

I can’t deal with Americans’ ultracapitalist perspective on the res publica. It’s so annoying.

In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.

So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.

It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?

I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.

Yeah, but… this isn’t that.

You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.

We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.

And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.

They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.

I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.

Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.

So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…

…what’s with people being mad about it?

I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.

Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.

So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?

Honestly, even at the time that entire “benefit of the doubt” garbage read like some combination of active collaboration and outright denial. It’s nuts that Trump rode it to a second term, honestly. As late as the week of the election people were having haughty conversations about the lack of ties between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign and those morons still elected them again because Harris was too weak on Israel or whatever.

I mean, I’d normally not assume an entire culture is incapable of parsing reality, but there are still supposed American leftists going “they’re both the same” on this site right now.

Which reminds me I’m trying to cut off American politics from my media menu as much as possible, so maybe it’s time to mute this stuff and move on with my day, because man, what a group of weirdos.

I mean… yeah, but also I’m very well on the record disagreeing with that and calling Trump a fascist since day one. Not that I expect you dig through my online presence to corroborate it.

I’m not American. The presence of fascists in US politics has been a commonly accepted truth in anybody anywhere left of demochristians for half a century. This isn’t “hindsigh”, it’s “I recommend always reading what people say about your country in foreign newspapers”.

And for the record, we got fascists, too. We’re just less shy about calling them that, maybe? Certainly don’t have any delusions about ourselves in terms of being inoculated from fascism at a fundamental level. The idea that Americans would have survived Bush, let alone the overtly fascist Trump without noticing or acknowledging it seems outright bizarre to me, but there you go.

I mean, Stephen Miller isn’t even shy about it. Even if you are the kind of European that would argue Berlusconi wasn’t a fascist and could maaaaaybe entertain Trump is on that same level of “just horny criminal idiot” you surely would have had zero questions after hearing five minutes of Dracula Hitler back in 2016.

What? Everybody thought fascism would come from the inside in the US. Even if you slept through the first Trump term this has been a thing since the 1930s. Surely during the Cold War, and definitely for everybody outside the US itself, but… I mean, were you alive during the whole “war on terror” nonsense?

Had the post-Reagan, post 9-11 US fascists successfully brainwashed even left of centre normies into thinking that was not the case? Were Americans that oblivious?

Yeah, see? There is a market for it, just like there is a market for an unnecessarily thin candybar.

Is it a mainstream device that everybody wants? No, but some people do like it.

And hey, I 'm not berating you for it. I like weird tech and I’m willing to overpay for it. At this point the only reason to ever buy a new phone is your old phone broke… or you want something fun and weird and are willing to overpay for it.

Apparently both this one and the Samsung one are selling well, so… Somebody does.

This has come and gone. Feature phones had their thin&light phase, too. And it suits the manufacturers because they’re doing this work to make foldables anyway, so selling the thin candybar is a free side gig. Which is probably needed, because to riff on your point, what consumer wants to spend 2K on a bad tablet with a plastic screen that folds into a mediocre phone?