JustEnoughDucks

Just send the energy directly back to the power executives houses with a high power laser. They want the energy for free so badly to pad their profits and buy a 5th yacht, give it to them 😉

Only partially true. The solar panels almost all inject power back into the grid. Power companies started complaining about their profits when they had to actually pay the users for their power that they generated so now home power generating houses get paid pennies on the dollar for delivering power and reducing the power capacity needed by the power companies and of course the power companies didn't lower prices at all, so they are just sucking up the difference in pure profit.

Depends on what your usecase is for what is "essential."

I think keeping household documents, taxes, medical bills, etc... In a local only paperless-ngx instance is quite essential to the organization of a household where everything is searchable and able to be organized on multiple levels compared to a simple document folder on 1 computer.

Having a document or self-hosted wiki with an in - case - of - death document that gets backed up in an encrypted, but accessible by family place is probably the most "essential" thing.

Actually, the AI assistant fad isn't all bad.

HomeAssistant has an open souce assistant pipeline that integrates into the most flexible smart home software around. It is completely local and doesn't rely on the cloud at all. Essentially it could make Alexa's and google homes (that literally spy on you and send key phrases back to your built data collection profile) obsolete. That is a way not to have to rely on corporate bullshit privacy invasion to have a good smart home.

Indeed transcribing and translating (and preserving dying languages and being able to re-teach them) are 2 of the best consumer uses for AI. Then there is accelerating disease and climate research.

If these were the use cases that were pushed instead of fucking conversational assistants, replacements for customer support that only direct to existing incomplete docs, taking away artists' jobs, and creating 1984 "you can't trust your own eyes and ears" in real time, then AI would actually be very worthwhile.

What?

He is saying that AI uses countries worth of energy by itself. Even a normal search query using AI uses orders of magnitude more energy than a traditional search query.

Literally tech companies have been buying or reserving entire power plants exclusively for training AI datasets. At least Microsoft reactivated an old nuclear plant instead of buying out coal plant energy shares.

And 90% of uses for AI are absolute dogshit corporate fluff or a shiny activity for 10 year olds to play with for 30 minutes.

There are legitimate uses like auto note taking, voice assistants, etc... But it is destroying the environment because corporations are shoving it into every possible thing they can, quadrupling the energy growth rate and straining our electrical grids and burning tons and tons more coal to do it.

Here in Belgium there used to be big government subsidies for solar panels 5-10 ago.

Now the same wattage battery + solar setup without any government subsidies is a good chunk cheaper than that time with the large subsidies.

Pretty cool and shows the power of government renewables subsidies. A huge percentage of houses in Belgium have solar panels now.(and electricity still costs 0.30€/kWh average because of fossil fuel energy lobbies)

Now that there is a local industry around it, most renovations and almost all new builds include them.

Steam is pretty much the only thing that stopped the Microsoft Store.

If that had happened, you probably couldn't even run games anymore on windows unless they were installed through the Microsoft store. Mods would be dead, and we would be in the same, but worse situation.

Hell, maybe you couldn't even buy games, but had to buy "game subscriptions" like game pass on xbox

won't work, this is their own hosted gitlab instance lol

This is a good way to do it.

I went one smaller with the Node 304 which only can do 4 HDDs with a GPU inserted. Going used for consumer desktop CPU is the most powerful play for the money I think.

This is a good path forward OP for a pretty powerful server

• Node 804
• Used AM4 motherboard ( microatx B550) (can be around 150€)
• used 5700X or similar (seen as low as 100€)
• new 500W power supply
• 32GB DDR4 3200 ram in 16GB sticks
• WD red plus 10TB helium filled for balance of noise and performance and price. My 10TB drives are as quiet as my 4TB. My scheme is ZFS mirror of 4TB (2 drives) for important docs, and 10TB drives for non critical data. Drives are by far the most expensive unless you get good second hand drives
• if you want to do Jellyfin media server, pick up an arc A310

In the professional space:

Add Altium, KNX, pspice, LTSpice (luckily works in wine), and for us electronics/electric guys lol.

Linux is a 3rd class citizen in ANSYS simulation tools. Slow updates, old UI, etc... On Linux. Pretty much only used as a simulation node for kicking on sims from windows.

Pretty much all architecture software

Many ERP systems desktop apps

Not to mention a lot of companies use active directory for access control + sharepoint

Web apps suck, but have been very helpful in Linux compatibility in the enterprise space since the devs only have to care about 1 set of production builds.

At my work, software guys and mechatronics PLC focused guys get away with Ubuntu (saleae is great), but for electronics and mechanicals it is not even worth it to dual boot.

Also, I am confused at why nextcloud is at the intersection of networking, music, and multimedia.

Yes it technically has a video viewer and music player, but I would be very surprised if any person in the world right now is genuinely using it to post that content to the fediverse social-network style.

New year 2026? 😉