You can cycle the smaller drives to cold backup, that’s not a waste. You do have backups, which RAID is not, right?

Sure, works fine for inference with tensor parallelism, USB4 / thunderbolt 4/5 is a better (40Gbit+ and already there) bet than ethernet (see distributed-llama). Trash for training / fine tuning, that needs higher inter GPU speed, or better a bigger GPU VRAM.

Yeah, I have a broader view of the phrase, which includes complacency (not actively working at alternatives) as well as just voting, seems most agree with you.

Valid point.

many people believe that “funding” something equals to “controlling” it.

Pretty much the definition of soft power, which an awful lot of politicians believe in.

US funding having been a toxic source of dependency, and it being better in the long run to get money elsewhere.

Yup, pretty much my intent, that and the insecurity it engenders, rather surprised by the reaction.

How could you read it that way ? I’m saying eventually they were going to conflict with the interests of the US (oligarchs and techbros) and lose funding. Shocker, it happened under cheeto.

Not a good thing, just an inevitable one, as they conflict with the interests of the US (oligarchs and techbros).

Oh No ! Leopards Ate My Face.

Better off in the long run.

Seems like data integrity is your highest priority, and you’re doing pretty well, the next step is keeping a copy offsite. It’s the 3-2-1 backup strategy, 3 copies, 2 media (used to mean CDs etc but now think offline drives) 1 offsite (in case of fire, meteor strike etc), so look to that, stash a copy at a friends or something.

In your case I’d look at getting some online storage to fill the offsite role while you’re overseas (paid probably, but a year of 1 or 2 Tb is quite reasonable) leaving you with no pressure on the selfhosting side, just tailscale in, muck around and have fun, and if something breaks, no harm done, data safe.

I’ve done it for what seems like forever and I’d still be worried about leaving a system out of physical control for any extended period of time, at the very least having someone to reboot it if connectivity or power fails will be invaluable, but talking them through a broken update is another thing entirely, and you shouldn’t make that a critical necessity, too much stress.