There’s two products of Jack Daniels that I do appreciate:
Except every single MacBook you can buy right now (directly, from Apple, not second hand) directly beats pretty much every other device in its price range - unless you go super crazy with the specs and want to do 128GB RAM with an M5 Max and 8TB storage.
So it’s hardly overpriced.
Due to the fact I am running UnRaid on the node in question, I kinda do need Docker. I want to avoid messing with the core OS as much as possible, plus a Dockerised app is always easier to restore.
No, there’s just a very serious reason to push AI - to help out their rich buddies by discrediting any possible Epstein connections (and also any other evidence down the line)
I’ve actually been eyeing lemonade, but the lack of Dockerisation is still an issue… guess I’ll just DIY it at one point.
Piper does chunking for TTS, and could utilise the NPU with the right drivers.
And the idea of running them on the NPU is not about memory usage but hardware capacity/parallelism. Although I guess it would have some benefits when I don’t have to constantly load/unload GPU models.
Aye, I was actually hoping to use the NPU for TTS/STT while keeping the LLM systems GPU bound.
The thing is, if AMD actually added proper support for it, given it has a somewhat powerful NPU as well… For the total TDP of the package it’s still one of the best perf per watt APU, just the damn software support isn’t there.
Feckin AMD.
And I am on ROCm - specifically on an 8945HS, which is advertised as a Ryzen AI APU yet is completely unsupported as a target with major issues around queuing and more complex models (although the new 7.0 betas have been promising but TheRock’s flip-flopping with their Docker images has been making me go crazy…).
Well yeah, the availability of these more advanced hardware bits is pretty new - for example, all the older GH Minis and Echo devices were running a quite pared down Linux distro with software processing for e.g. wake words.
Transplanting all that to MCUs takes time, but now we have a solid base, a handful of devices/boards that utilise the various XMOS chips, and soon we will be seeing more and more consumer level devices - but again that takes time when there’s no big megacorp behind the project pushing it to completion with bottomless finances and hundreds of engineers.
But you’re not exactly correct on there being no other options. There’s the Satellite1 smart speaker which might be a DIY kit but it does exist. Then there’s the Seeed Studio Respeaker Lite w/ ESP32-S3 to which you can slap a speaker (either directly or a powered speaker through the audio jack). In fact the Respeaker lineup has a handful more options for smart speakers all utilising the various XMOS chips.
Just keep in mind that these speakers are DIY mainly for two reasons:
There WILL be consumer products (hopefully soon) on the market, but again, this is being done by volunteers and small startups with just a handful of people, it takes more time to get them on the market than it does for companies the size of Amazon or Google.
To be fair, in the early days HA wasn’t too usable. Even around 2018-19, the integrations were limited and the core logic was quite wonky. I’d say around 2020 it became mature enough for daily use for non-tinkerers.
I do wish there was a smaller LongCat model available. My current AI node has a hard 16GB VRAM limit (yay AMD UMA limitations), so 27B can’t really fit. An 8B dynamically loaded model would fit, and run much better.
The HA Voice Preview is a pretty solid device, but you’re right, there isn’t really any ready made Echo/Google Home Mini replacement device - primarily because all those devices are generally sold at a loss, or at cost at best, and subsidised by your data being sold.
You won’t be able to make a Google Home Mini contender for below $50, and at that price most people will opt for the former. Good quality speakers, microphones, local processing (like the XMOS chip in the Voice Preview) all cost money, and there’s no subsidy to be made. Some older Echo devices are rootable, but the hardware tends to be somewhat exotic (meaning no open source support for specialised components), and there’s little ongoing third party support (focus has been on the display-equipped models, and to run Android on them).
All in all, “cheap” and “fully local open source voice assistant” don’t really coexist.
There were like, about two years between OpenHAB and HA being released. Former debuted in 2011, HA saw first release in 2013.
I’m sorry, what?
Googling “home assistant Spotify” results in the very link you’ve provided.
And you can hardly expect a project like Home Assistant, with THOUSANDS of first party integrations, to cater to your specific needs, or to provide preferential treatment to companies like Spotify, who provide absolutely no support to the project.
It also doesn’t require a “techie setup”, but following a quite straightforward guide, that culminates in clicking about maybe a dozen buttons (most of them being “I accept” to various terms and policies), then copying a handful of readily provided strings into the right fields. It’s simple enough that even my tech illiterate father can do it.
Home Assistant at the end of the day is NOT an Alexa (or other voice assistant) replacement, but a smarthome control hub OS. That it provides a voice assistant interface is quite secondary to its main mission.
This is beginner level IT-TV mishap.
Wanna see something truly ridiculous? How about two girls hackers one keyboard?
Portability is not really an aspect one needs to consider when it comes to a NAS. Performance hits? Z1 will have performance issues when running in a simple mirror (especially for writes), but with 4+ disks that reduces significantly.
Sure scrubs will take longer on a multi-disk array, but again for a home NAS, the goal is maximising data storage capacity without a major hit on performance, ideally being able to saturate the most common gigabit LAN connection and have some more bandwidth available for local processing.
You’re incredibly wrong on your assumptions here.
First of all, ZFS (the file system TrueNAS specialises for) is best used with at least 3-4 disks. The more the better. A dual disk setup for ZFS (or any other kind of RAID) is super wasteful.
Second, no, 4TB won’t be enough. You think it is today, but soon you’ll be downloading media Linux ISOs and quickly realise that even 16TB is a stretch within a year.
My recommendation would be going for at least 4x 4TB, but 3-4x 6TB or even 8TB would be probably preferred. And similarly, I’d rather overshoot the initial purchase rather than realise 6-8 months in that oops, the 2-4 disk system you got isn’t enough… Even if you don’t fill the bays, I’d recommend you go for at least a 4 bay system, but rather, for 6. Sadly, SOHO NASes aren’t designed with easy expandability down the line.
Shit do be like that at times
I found most Japanese whiskey to be too sweet for my taste. GJ has that balance of smoothness while keeping the sweetness at bay.
Plus I’m not that big of a fan of non-scotch whisky anyway.
By the way if you want something truly smooth, and not too sweet, the cheaper Mackinlay’s Shackleton remake, usually around £20 a bottle (should be around $25-30 in the US), is an amazing choice.