Self hosting is just an extension of open source software. It’s only goal is being able to run your own backends of apps to not be exploited by major companies. It’s goal is not to be a niche technical hobby, if that’s your goal in its own right, then get a model train or a Warhammer set.

Mainstream consumers don’t know words “Plex” and “Home Assistant” either.

Yes, they do lol. It’s flat out weird to think that the only people who have ever heard of pirating are software developers and server admins who use the command line.

You’re viewing this through an incredibly skewed lense. The average person will never even consider self hosting nor will care, if anything the average person prefers cloud services.

The only lens I’m viewing this through is one that dares to imagine that the Venn diagram of “computer users savvy enough to care about privacy” isn’t 100% contained within the circle of “computer users savvy with the terminal”.

Quite frankly your stance that the ‘average person’ doesn’t care, when this post is LITERALLY from an ‘average person’ who does, is the one that seems off base on its face.

Notice that it hasn’t amongst mainstream consumers.

You know what self hosted projects have been successes? Plex and Home Assistant. You know what projects don’t require the terminal? Plex and Home Assistant.

Self hosting is doomed until this isn’t the answer.

If you can’t imagine why this is bad, maybe read some Kafka or watch some Black Mirror.

Lmfao. Yeah, ok, let’s get my predictions from the depressing show dedicated to being relentlessly pessimistic at every single decision point.

And yeah, like I said, you sound like my hysterical middle school teacher claiming that Wikipedia will be society’s downfall.

Guess what? It wasn’t. People learn that tools are error prone and came up with strategies to use them while correcting for potential errors.

Like at a fundamental, technical level, components of a system can be error prone, but still be useful overall. Quantum calculations have inherent probabilities and errors in them, but they can still solve some types of calculations so much faster than normal computers that you can run the same calculation 100x on a Quantum Computer, average out the results to remove the outlying errors, and get to the right answer far faster than a classical computer.

Computer chips in satellites and the space station are constantly having random bits of memory flipped by cosmic rays, but they still work fine because their RAM is error-correcting ram, that can use similar methods to verify and check for errors.

And at a super high level, some of my friends and coworkers are more reliable than others, that doesn’t mean the ones that are less reliable aren’t helpful, it just means I have to take what they say with a grain of salt.

Designing for error correction is a thing, and people are perfectly capable of doing so in their personal lives.

Yes, they literally are. Or maybe you haven’t heard of human caused climate change?

But a) they don’t refuse, most will tell you if you prompt them well them and b) you cannot rely on them as the sole source of truth but an information machine can still be useful if it’s right most of the time.

My friends would probably say something like “I’ve never heard that one, but I guess it means something like …”

Ok, but the point is that lots of people would just say something and then figure out if it’s right later.

The problem is, these LLMs don’t give any indication when they’re making stuff up versus when repeating an incontrovertible truth. Lots of people don’t understand the limitations of things like Google’s AI summary* so they will trust these false answers. Harmless here, but often not.

Quite frankly, you sound like middle school teachers being hysterical about Wikipedia being wrong sometimes.

Lol

• God 31:5

“Regurgitation without critical thought is fundamentally counter to the principles of science and engineering”

• Jesus 4:12

Their office is downtown, go down and ask to talk to someone. Don’t leave until they ask you to.

You have no obligation not to inconvenience them.

Search for the company on LinkedIn, click through its employees. Have them get a bunch of ‘Appeared in Searches’ notifications from LinkedIn. Make sure they feel seen by a bunch of their fellow citizens.

Try this on your friends, make up an idiom, then walk up to them, say it without context, and then say “meaning?” and see how they respond.

Pretty sure most of mine will just make up a bullshit response nd go along with what I’m saying unless I give them more context.

There are genuinely interesting limitations to LLMs and the newer reasoning models, and I find it interesting to see what we can learn from them, this is just ham fisted robo gotcha journalism.

PC Gamer regurgitating the abstract of a random research paper makes baby jesus cry.

Social media said Mark Zuckerberg was over and sadly I think neither are right.

VD: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=VD

VE: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=VE

I mean, say “CVE” out loud and see if anything comes to mind, then say “EUVD” out loud and see if anything comes to mind.

I’m very pro EU, but this is just a badly chosen acronym.

Lmao come on. Some people in the EU speak English and knew that naming your standard “European Union Venereal Disease” was a bad idea.

Those who can’t express simply, don’t understand it.

Figure out how to make your point in less than 45 minutes or don’t bother making it.

Fundamentally it should be an attribution and reward system, whereas currently it’s a false scarcity system.

Everyone should be able to use everything, but you should be required to attribute your source material. If you do, the song / work etc should get an extra licensing fee per play. That way you’re always encouraged to provide attribution since you don’t lose money from it, and wholly original works will be cheaper and thus more desirable.

Not dissimilar to how song sampling works today but without all the manual negotiation for every license.

And if you fail to provide attribution you get hit with appropriate penalties.

This is frustrating because what i did in the example with my roms and a python script is essentially the same as what a windows user would do the main difference being that a windows user probably wouldnt have to go to github because a fancy gui alternative software exists.

Agreed.

The user still has to worry about viruses all the same, just because the exe has a website and a download page doesnt make it safer than a terminal based alternative.

Agreed.

I just think if you subtract peoples preconcieved notions about the terminal the actual usual experience and results are the same.

Disagree.

When I run a GUI program and it just has a single button that says “do x”, I trust that this software will do x when I run it and nothing else. Why? Because the developer has designed an interface for me, where there is only a single thing, so if I trust the developer, I can assume it will do that thing.

When I download a bash script, I’m downloading a series of commands that I do not understand, and I hope that when I hit run it will do what I want. Maybe the developer has made a CLI interface that gives me some trust, most likely not.

The reality is that a polished GUi isn’t just shiny graphics, it’s an inherent signal of intent, attention to detail, and minimizes cognitive overload. When I’m presented with just a button all I can evaluate is whether I trust the developer, and whether or noti trust this one button. When I download a list machine instructions I can now evaluate the safety of every single one of them. Thats empowering for coders who can read code, it’s overwhelming and leads to decision paralysis for everyone else.

Even from a legality standpoint, if a company publishes a button that says “click me and I will do x”, they are opening themselves up to legal liability if that button does anything other than x. If a company publishes a list of instructions I don’t understand, they’re only liable if those instructions do something other than they say, and I cant evaluate that.

You’re one step more advanced than the user I’m describing.

The user I’m describing roughly understands what the terminal is, and understands you can script with it maybe, but certainly doesn’t trust a random bash script they found since they have no way of parsing it and it looks like a hacker tool that might be able to access stuff on their PC it shouldn’t.