It was started by a Mexican guy (Miguel de Icaza) who eventually went to work for Microsoft, oops.

Epub is html with some crap wrapping it. Converting it to text follows the html formatting, like using the lynx browser.

Mostly pandoc (for epub to text) and a few stupid python scripts. I’m a luddite and prefer reading text files. I don’t use any particular collection management beyond filenames and grep.

IDK really. I’m repeating what I saw someplace years ago. I would say do a real RAID if you manage it. Maybe RAID 5 on 3 drives.

While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID, I ended up choosing nas drives for the 24/7 intended usage,

The purpose of a NAS drive is to be LESS reliable than a regular drive, not more reliable. Explanation: if a regular drive gets a read error on a block, it will retry for quite a while before giving up. The host, meanwhile, has to wait for the data to be retrieved if the retries work. That’s all it can really do, wait and hope. Meanwhile, the waiting slows the application down.

A NAS drive instead will fail once or twice, then give up immediately, since it knows that it’s in a RAID system and that the data is also present on other disks. The RAID then puts the data together from the other drives and gets it to the host, logging the error. It will also hopefully mark the bad block on the drive with the read failure, and rewrite the recovered data to a spare sector. So this is faster than all the retries even though the drive that had the bad block gives up on it rather than attempting recovery by repeated reads.

So if you buy NAS drives, put them in a RAID.

Drives are currently around 2x as expensive as a year or so ago but they are available if you can afford them. I guess that’s better than shortages where they’re hard to find even if you can pay. We’ve had that before too.

I like to think the current situation will settle out. Who knows though. Drive space is still way less expensive than in 2010 or anything like that.

Won’t stop anyone, but luckily I lost my 3D printer in a boating accident.

Fear and surprise, no prob. Ruthless efficiency = pushback. Fanatical devotion to the Pope – WATCH OUT BRO.

Good luck with that, how about a star trek replicator while you’re at it.

Well thanks for at least explaining what it is, but isn’t Matrix already self hostable? Anyway what’s wrong with IRC?

Is this some kind of spam? There are other companies in the same space and they’ll make their own sales pitches. Web search does find some stuff about Gloria shutting down.

I meant the pre-computer, monochrome type of 2D printer, the one referenced in “freedom of the press”, heh. Quick web search finds a prototype:

https://chytomo.com/en/accounting-for-typewriters/

Typewriters were relied on to create unauthorized self-published books, brochures, leaflets, and magazines. As a result, Soviet authorities began imposing strict controls on typewriter distribution. Every typewriter had its own registration number, which allowed the KGB and other repressive organizations to determine the source of unauthorized documents. Each typewriter’s unique imprint made it possible to find out who wrote the paper and where it could be printed. In “Diaries: Uncensored,” Les Taniuk mentioned that there were typewriters for checks on which nothing “like that” could be typed, and two more – carefully hidden. Ukrainian writer and translator Halyna Kyrpa had to destroy her typewriter after a reprint of “Internationalism or Russification” by Ukrainian literary critic, social activist, and dissident Ivan Dziuba was typed on it. (In her interview with Chytomo, she said that she smashed the machine with hammers and threw it into a lake.)

2D printers are next.

Scrounge an old laptop, maybe super cheap if the screen isn’t completely working. Plug in a monitor to deal with screen problems.

Unless you’re going to really run a lot, this is an area where vast.ai is probably more affordable than mucking with hardware.

Oh I didn’t know about Seastanding. I remember Amsterdam had pirate radio boats. I didn’t know about the UK ones. I don’t remember whether Sealand was before or after Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, which was about a similar “data haven” project. In retrospect, the concept was ludicrous.

Sealand was a tiny platform which could support maybe a few dozen humans living on it at most. It wasn’t a survival thing. Its intention was to host stuff like online gambling which would have gotten hassled by government authorities in most national jurisdictions. Its principals were ex-UK military so the UK government agreed to mostly leave it alone, conditional on it promising to not host CSAM. Same kind of thing with space data centers except I guess it would be something like Grok in orbit, complete with copyright travesties and celebrity deepfakes. Anyway that’s the best theory I’ve heard so far. Actually I guess there are also military uses that should be obvious.

This post looks like AI slop in its own right, but part of the space data center scam was to do nasty AI stuff outside of terrestial jurisdictions. There were some previous efforts like Sealand that were less effective than the proponents hoped they would be. I can’t imagine the space based ones being invulnerable either though.

I never thought those leopards would eat MY face.

LLM as a glorified search engine seems kind of ok. It’s the generative side that is awful. And the search engine aspect might do harm than good, since it’s also used for mass surveillance.

Machine translation is now working fairly well, maybe just in time. Within a decade or so, most technical and scientific publications will probably be in Chinese. So the translation tools will help us backwards English speakers read them.

The hotel check-in system, called Tabiq, is maintained by the Japan-based tech startup Reqrea. According to its website, Tabiq is used in several hotels across Japan and relies on facial recognition and document scanning to check guests in.

They left an S3 bucket open.