I don’t think the app in the picture is driven by AI. Seems like a catalogue of questions. Probably to assess some situation by some standard procedure. I’d trust that. Regarding the AI apps mentioned below: I wouldn’t trust them at all. If my private parts start itching and I can’t make sense of it, I’d go to the doctor. At least if it’s serious. Or use Dr. Google if it’s not too bad.

You could use some containerized mail server like Mailcow. They’re pretty alright to set up and should work fine for low volume. At least in my experience. Unless you don’t want to deal with mail yourself, then you should maybe consider a paid service. But I don’t have any experience with those.

Certainly Ubuntu. But fortunately I have more options to choose from.

I don’t get that from the article. And I mean it’s not a “web” if it’s not interconnected, is it?

Things have shifted a bit in the last many years. Now almost no one reads blogs anymore. They want doom-scrolling and interaction. And even the old school nerds moved away from RSS, Mail and IRC. I also liked some Linux forums, but I feel it got more quiet there during the last years. Mostly to the benefit of proprietary platforms like Discord and such. But I don’t thing they’re very social, as in open and giving freedom to the people…

What’s a better protocol for a social web?

Sounds like standard practice. First embrace as long as something helps you grow and then wait for the right moment and extinguish.

I don’t think this will be received well in the western market. But that might not be their main criterion.

The processors and peripherals aren’t as uniform as they are on computers. Each SoC has a different set of components, which need drivers and custom set-up mechanics and they’re often only shared between the chip designer and phone manufacturers. A lot of complicated reverse engineering is needed. And that’s often not worth it as there are many different phones on the market and they’re short-lived devices. So we end up in the current situation where we don’t have the operating system foundation / drivers available to the community to build upon.

There is Linux on phones. A modified Linux kernel runs on every Android device. Just the userland is an entirely different one. And Linux isn’t there yet with the desktop and apps. A lot of features are missing, power saving, delivering messages while sleeping and doing background tasks while saving power in the pocket… It’s kind of a chicken and egg dilemma. We’d need some popular Linux phone so people are motivated to tackle the remaining software issues for a mobile ecosystem. And we won’t get one unless there is some good software so it can be marketed.

I still don’t get what you’re trying to do. So your users contribute some text, pictures or measurements they did on their own? You can make them license that stuff to you and everyone, yes. But they can’t upload some Harry potter books, pictures they downloaded from the internet, or whatever we call “copyrighted content”. Adding that to the database will make the whole thing non-shareable. And you can’t attach a license then. You’d have to write some terms of service and everyone needs to agree not to insert material into the database they didn’t create themselves or got a license to redistribute. And they’d need to grant you a license automatically in that terms if service.

You can’t license other people’s work. And you’re doing everyone a disservice if you attach some wrong license to copyrighted material. Someone might believe you, use it under those conditions and get sued. Please don’t do that. It’s not only copyright infringement, but also being disingenuous to the people downloading that content. The correct way to re-distribute copyrighted material is either ask for a license and attach what they gave you, verbatim. Or plainly say it’s not shared legally, or don’t attach any license. Don’t say it’s copyrighted and illegal to share, but also don’t say anything that isn’t correct, just put the files somewhere. (The latter 2 options aren’t legal to do. But at least you don’t claim anything that isn’t true.)

Ah okay. I wouldn’t know. I played Minetest instead of Minecraft. And the community there seems to be nice albeit a bit small. I learned a bit of Lua and contributed some smaller fixes to some mods. But I guess the gaming and modding community for propriety games is a bit different than the open source community.

Most open sorce licenses do, not just the GPL. I’m not sure what Minecraft modpackers do. But in the free and open source world, you’ll always find that attribution. Sometimes they have a list who wrote the software and who maintained it for what timespan.

Sure. You need to be qualified to do that. A doctor can do that for the short term. And then a judge and a court has to make such decisions. I think in the real world they’re the only ones allowed to do that, to adults at least. And it involves lots of paperwork, hearing experts and so on. But also in real life, captains get some extra rights and duties, if they’re far out there, on their own. They can definitely lock up unruly people or make difficult decisions that need to be made on the spot. For everyone else, not so much. However, I think there are some exceptions. I’m not a native english speaker so I don’t know the exact legal term… But next to self-defense, there are other laws concerning emergencies, justifiable emergency, necessity as justification, good samaritan law…? I don’t know how we call that. But I’m pretty sure I could stop someone harming themselves, against their will. In dire circumstances. It wouldn’t be fun though, and the last resort to avert serious damage. It’s certainly problematic. And I think it has to meet objective standards. It can’t be construed, or it won’t apply. It’s complicated. And on the other side we also have failure to provide assistance where I live, which I’m not sure if it’s a law in the States.

Usually that’s done by the network routing. Add a default(?) route(?) or make the software bind to the vpn interface. I’m not sure. I think firewall rules can do the same thing. If you’re using docker, I’d advise you to use “gluetun” that seems to do everything for you.

Usually people do copyright violation with bittorrent. That means they tend to make sure the routing or dns doesn’t leak anything. I think that’s usually done by running the software inside of some containers or virtualization. If you do that your setup becomes simpler than inventing a dozen or so firewall rules. Either use gluetun or make the container bind to the vpn in its entirety. So practically the same setup everyone uses for pirating, just that you don’t pay for a VPN service, but do that (server) part yourself on your virtual server. Everything else is a good bit more elaborate and complicated…

I think what you’re trying to do is called a VPN. Set up a VPN that tunnels all the torrent traffic to and from the virtual server.

There are conditions like being certifiable insane. That certainly applies if someones brain isn’t working alright or got messed with. And makes it morally right to make decisions on their behalf. At least decisions in their interest. Because they themselves are unable to act in their own interest.

We need uncensored models. Eric Hartford wrote a good blog article in May 2023 about the whole topic: https://erichartford.com/uncensored-models

I think that also applies to biology reasearch and a variety of topics. And also in the adult industry AI can contribute new “art” or take away and flood everything with low quality content. We also have fights about copyright everywhere. I don’t see the adult industry in a different position than other industries… We’re going to see how AI changes things. Having a say certainly helps. I don’t like things being forced on people.

Good point. I think it’s super important to make this decision early on. Whether you want to invest time and do self hosting, or not and you’ll want to use managed services or regular non-free platforms. Doing things by yourself certainly teaches a lot. I do it. And I gain knowledge, independence and I think it’s important to understand the tools I use on a regular basis and not let Apple/Google take care of my life. And since I do a lot of things with computers, I can make good use of the gained knowledge. However I can also feel how someone wouldn’t want to do that. They might have other hobbies, a stressful job or a family and it’s quite some time that I spend digging through configuration files, reading documentation and maintaining stuff. It has to be worth it in some way, or it becomes a liability. And I think that’s not super obvious when starting the journey. I’m glad we have managed services which give independence without spending too much time. But I also prefer going all the way and learning lots of stuff.

Sure. I usually do the same thing. The laptop on which I’m typing right now is a refurbished Dell one and I really prefer a bit older enterprise hardware to new consumer hardware. Nice build quality, no nonsense and Linux runs great on that device. And it cost me a fraction of a new machine. However… with the intended use-case of a media center I’m not sure. Intel always adds hardware acceleration in their iGPUs and the modern codecs are quite demanding. I wouldn’t buy an older generation that doesn’t really support AV1. I’m not sure if hardware from 2 years ago can do that. And if someone buys a new TV set which supports HDR or something and then the recently bought, refurbished media center is out of date again… that also doesn’t help. Maybe I’d buy a new one in this case and just use it for the next 10 years. That’s also sustainable. But yeah, you have to pay attention to the details if you’re buying off-brand. But that also applies to most computer hardware, regardless. It’s a bit more of a lottery with cheap and off-brand devices.

Add some googly eyes if it “lives” in the living room. They fit right above the switch which would then become the nose.

Yeah back when I needed storage (quite some years ago) the mini pcs were less capable and more pricey, so I ended up building a NAS myself. It’s a regular, yet very power efficient PC. But due to size, it doesn’t fit next to the TV. If I’d do the same thing today, I’d certainly consider a machine like this. And $200 doesn’t sound much for a 2-bay NAS.

Uuhh, that’s a cute little trash can. Now fit that with the maximum of RAM it supports and two 12TB harddrives… And it’ll do more media center and NAS than the average person needs.