they forgot what actual competition is

That’s an accurate diagnosis. U.S. big tech companies all follow the same playbook: use VC to buy off or price-dump to death all of your competitors. Become a monopoly. Then enshittify and extract the maximum amount of wealth from b2b and retail customers by increasing the cost of your services.

Any sane country would have drowned these companies in anti-trust cases and carved them up. But political leadership at the time was too high on neoliberal free market ideology and the fairytales these self-styled “tech geniuses” wove around themselves. Now big tech has effectively bought off the U.S. government.

They’re in for a nasty surprise when they find out that the U.S. is not the world, and the rest of the world can do pretty well without the U.S…

Good luck expanding that to the rest of the world which is just discovering that, while not perfect, China’s open weights models are

a) good enough for 95% or all companies out there
b) a lot cheaper, also because they’re
c) self-hostable, meaning: they’ll always be available, unlike U.S. cloud AI which you’ll be cut off from whenever Diaper Donnie feels it’s time for yet another bribe.

I second this. Firmware on these controllers is really hit and miss. My first controller (gen 5, iirc) worked flawlessly out of the gate. My second (gen 6 (?)) would co connect and then disconnect again. A firmware update (on Windows, grml) did the trick back then (and now I’m not touching that shit again).

It’s a mixed bag really. Disabling JavaScript thwarts a lot of tracking efforts. But at the same time it puts you into a very small niche of users that, combined with other data points (user agent, IP location) makes you pretty fingerprintable.

Coming from a fellow JS Disabler, mind you.

I feel you. Handoff was dodgy af. I’ve switched to BasicSync for this very reason. It’s a minimal Frontend, handling only execution conditions on Android. All config is done through the webUI. It works great and avoids some, if not all of the trust issues.

It feels like nitpicking, but there’s a relevant difference here. If you can only access the weights (and not the training data and the learning algorithms used), it’s hard to get (say) a Chinese model to freely talk about Tiananmen Square Massacre. (Just tried it locally on Deepseek R1; it’s doable, but takes some prompt hacking.) The models may be freely available, but there’s bias and censorship baked into them.

It’s nice that these things are open source

Open weights != open source

Well, they do have that fruit basket, so…

Immich is dead-easy to set up on its own. I’m a great fan and have been running it for >2 years now.

That said, I don’t think it’ll work for you because:

• I gather you have little experience in self-hosting services. Sure, one can learn all that, but if you’re becoming a parent soon, your priorities will be elsewhere (as they should).
• self-hosting stuff isn’t a one-shot - it does come with maintenance costs. You need to keep your boxes up to date, swap out dead hardware, manage backups… You may not have time for that.
• Running immich itself is relatively easy. But running it securely is a different can of worms. Immich is a young project, written by enthusiasts, but not vetted for security like professionally-deployed software is. Thus, it’s not advisable to expose it to the open internet. Since you want to share access to others, you’d have to setup Wireguard VPN tunnels for your relatives, which complicates matters.

Obviously, I’m making a lot of assumptions about you. Whether these are true is up for you to decide.

Great, I’ll probably do just that this summer. Thanks for the info!

I’ve got a second deployment of immich that also got stuck somewhere on v1.x. May I ask how you upgraded to the most recent version? Did you just go for 3.0, or did you do “baby steps” in between? (e.g. 1.138 > 2.0 > 3.0)

Obnoxious Windows 10 “upgrade” nag screens on Win 7. If you think you can push me, I’ll push back harder. That, and Snowden showing the world that American tech is backdoored all the way to hell and back.

I do still read the changelogs and compare compose files thoroughly on every major update. With that in place, Immich has not once broken down on me, and I’ve been here from almost the very start.

Like showing up to the bank heist in a neon pink monster truck.

Nextcloud + Calendar w/ tasks support or Joplin (Server) can both do this.

Man, your basement has the weirdest carpet I’ve ever seen. Also, much too bright for my taste. If you can see the keycaps without backlight, you’re doing the lighting wrong.

unless you rip the movie out into a single file first

I don’t see the problem with that. It’s what I’ve done with every single disk I own. Why would I bother with badly-written menus, pointless extra content and tons of ads and copyright warnings I need to sit through before I can watch what I paid for?

You patched the annoying “crash-on-start” bug! 😍 I was collecting diagnostics to help nail it down, but you guys were faster. Keep up the great work! 👍👍👍

Leave the poor Russian bot alone. Shilling fossile tech and vilifying Europe for responding to Russia’s aggression is hard enough as it is.

Qwant is nice, but it keeps blocking my VPN and locks me out if I happen to use a non-European exit node (“We’re not offering Qwant in your region”). And I’m not pulling down my mask for a fucking search engine.

If you’re willing to put up with Duckduckgo but hate AI search, there’s https://noai.duckduckgo.com/