USB c has active negotiation for power and communication via a cc pin

The usb a to c cable has a pull up resistor that mimics this and says “give 5v”

Some usb c chargers have a fallback 5v mode for this scenario but not all do

Oh right duh. Disregard what I said, obviously. Been ages since I’ve used a setup that’s not one big pool

Do you have sonarr set to copy or hard link on import

Copy will fuck over your ability to seed, hard link will result in the files staying on your torrenting drive

Yes and I also remember when there were stupid things like early universal remotes that had big timers on them to circumvent the internal programming needs (but then you had to program the remote and sync it)

While I agree with you 100% and every tv in my home is under this mantra I get where the parent comment is coming from. Family members and friends visiting have asked about access to my Jellyfin library and they aren’t necessarily keen on buying additional hardware, aren’t willing to educate themselves on setting up options that would be objectively better for connectivity, privacy, control, etc.

They just want an app in their TVs app store. It’s convenient and easy. I disagree with them but I don’t blame them. It’s human nature to go for the option that results in expending the least amount of effort. But then they don’t get my sweet Jellyfin library. If you cant run the client or kodi then I can’t help you, sorry.

Pick something you want to self host first. Do you want a media library? Then look into Jellyfin guides, or komga, or whatever. Do you want a centralized blocking dns server for all your devices? Look into adguard/pihole/etc. do you want to fuck around with llms? That’s a whole thing but you totally can and look into guides on doing it

Just as advice you’ll find people that become borderline evangelical on what you use. It doesn’t really matter. Debian vs unraid vs truenas, ecc ram or not, etc. I mean it does, somewhat, and you should read about it, but don’t get hung up on small details. For home use basically anything is fine. Get an old ewaste pc from 2012 and run whatever os you want (just not windows though)

There is a large degree of this, at least with some manufacturers. the iphone se referenced being a great example. If you’re a tech dork that wants fancy features you will overlook the se 100% of the time because even if you value a small phone many (basically all) of the bells and whistles on flagship models are gone as the se was based on the low end models from 1-3 generations back. No face id, no 5g, no magsafe, etc

Even for casual users: if you valued photography the se had the absolute worst camera of all the iphones. It was slow, it had less storage (64 gb minimum vs 128gb in the iphone 13 and newer), noticeably worse battery life, etc.

the obvious answer is that people weren’t buying them enough and that capitalistic markets will not support niche products that serve smaller demographics unless they can either financially justify themselves or earn some kind of government subsidy to sustain the effort (eg for a medical device and even then it’s shaky)

There are thousands of cool things that have died because they weren’t financially viable. That is what it is, but what’s more frustrating is that the technology behind these items and ideas is then almost always kept under lock and key forever, lost to the ages, because of the sliver of hope that some portion of it may somehow become a part of some new project. Instead of sharing the information to allow for collaboration and building on what was already established, any future projects need to now start from scratch. Otherwise they may infringe on the creators ability to secure earning potential you see, and that justifies drastically slowing the development of human progress in all fields by obfuscating research everywhere

Finamp is also on ios, making it a great solution for when you have several users across ecosystems. There are other Jellyfin music clients as well but I don’t know them

You can also point Navidrome at your music folder for web access which I prefer when using my laptop

The discovery problem is definitely the biggest challenge though. Lidarr is something but if you enable it with newsgroups you’ll generally only find more “notable” music. Anything on the more esoteric side is generally gonna be tougher.

You can integrate torrents and private trackers but if you’re anything like me you want to run all downloaded music through a mass tagging program like beets.io or picard to get stuff tagged according to musicbrainz so your library is consistent, which wrecks seeding, and private music trackers are generally pretty draconian about seeding. So then it’s either keep two copies of music, one to seed and one tagged, or hit and run everything and get banned, or just have a library with messy tags (which if you’re like me is just simply not an option). I currently do the two copies thing because it’s generally not that much space and once I hit a 2:1 ratio I get rid of it. In the instance the tags match 100% I point it at my library and permaseed. This is labor intensive though and everything else on my server is mostly automated

I have never figured out a way to integrate soulseek. This would probably be the optimal way as the library is almost as extensive as private trackers (sometimes more so), I can filter by quality (though sometimes flacs are transcodes with this way), there’s etiquette to not clog peoples queue but no real seeding rules, etc. but on my server soulseek runs in a vnc based docker and scripting that goes beyond my talent level

My bad!! I’m dumb

No, you need the cables that only have the sata connector. You supply power directly from your psu to the drives. Make sure your psu is big enough for all your drives

Edit sff 8087 to sata like this https://www.microsatacables.com/sff-8087-90-degree-mini-sas-36-pin-to-sata-7-pin-cable-75-meter-sff-797-75m

Fuck amazon

Interesting. I also wonder how it would fare across different models (eg user a uses chatgpt, user b uses gemini, user c uses deepseek, etc) as that may mimic real world use (such as what’s depicted in the comic) more closely

I remember when compression was popularized, like mp3 and jpg, people would run experiments where they would convert lossy to lossy to lossy to lossy over and over and then share the final image, which was this overcooked nightmare

I wonder if a similar dynamic applies to the scenario presented in the comic with AI summarization and expansion of topics. Start with a few bullet points have it expand that to a paragraph or so, have it summarize it back down to bullet points, repeat 4-5 times, then see how far off you get from the original point.

Short links are bullshit anyway. Don’t obfuscate where you’re sending me, that’s sketch. That’s phishing email behavior. Just because you don’t want me to erase all the tracking bullshit from url. Soon I won’t be able to anyway because most sites are starting to embed it into the url anyway. Fuck you and fuck the internet

That’s silly. A motherboard with a free pci slot (I think x8? Been awhile), a cheap hba with the associated sas cables, and literally any case that will hold the drives. You could strap them all to a board if you wanted

Obviously you’ll need cpu and ram. Make sure the power supply is beefy enough to cover the amount of drives you plan to use and preferably get a good quality one if you plan to run it 24/7. I do think it’s worthwhile to get server grade hardware as it holds up better to long term 24/7 use but it’s not necessary. It’s also absolutely fine to go entirely used; my whole build was all ewaste and was maybe $300 minus the drives (which added much more). And my build was frankly overkill for a nas but I also run VMs and do some local llm stuff. If you just want to serve files for like Jellyfin/plex you really don’t need much, an ewaste pc from like 2015 will probably do the job spec wise (though increasing ram a lot can help significantly especially if you do zfs)

I have a 15 drive nas. My drives are sata but my hba is compatible with sas drives. I use an lsi 9300-16i and I have read of people using it with sas arrays just fine. If you shop around you can get it with cables for like $40-50 used (maybe more now since inflation fucked everything and you need the less common cables). Be careful because there are lots of counterfeits.

Also be mindful of cooling, the card runs HOT. I added active cooling to mine with a 3d printed bracket. If you’re only running 3-4 drives you could also get the 9300-8i which is cheaper and runs cooler, but has half the drive lanes so you’re limited in terms of future expansion.

Is it exposed to the internet?

Mine is local only so I’m not as diligent with updates. I push them like once every 2-3 weeks. Some containers automatically update but some don’t because in the past that has broken associated scripts

It happened long before chatgpt. Subredditsimulator was touted as a “fun game” at first but it was really a testing ground for bot devs. That goes back to like 2016, 6 years before chatgpt.

Openai was established 2015 though, some of their team was probably already shitting up the internet by then

Works from db0, congrats

Oh I didn’t mean larger like that, I meant width wise. Standard rack width is 19 inches so if it’s one of those specialty racks that’s narrower that thing I said about repurposing an old 1u/2u is pointless because it won’t fit. Doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t use this rack, just that that idea is no good.

4u is fine unless you want to expand down the line. Networking gear and stuff. However if it’s a narrow rack I don’t think there will be much to put in it for those purposes? Depends on your goals. I have a larger rack but I also have my whole networking stack in it, switch, poe switch, ups, router, nas, etc.

I would consider posting on the unraid forums. There may be someone who has used similar hardware and can give guidance on how they approached the setup. The benefit of unraid is ultimately that the support community is very solid

How do you connect the drives? Looking at specs there’s only one sata port (which I don’t actually see anywhere, but it says it is there, although using it slows the second nvme lane)

USB connected drives in a raid array are not ideal. USB connectivity is not as solid as a direct sata connection and a drive suddenly disappearing from your area, especially parity, is quite a headache

No pci slot so you can’t add an hba for more sata lanes either. You could do one of those nvme to sata things but I’ve heard bad things about the reliability of those.

If it’s free though I def think it’s worth finding a way to make it work. The specs are more than enough for unraid and usually those tiny pcs are pretty power efficient, which is nice. But that’s the issue to work around, connecting the hard drives reliably.

WRT what to put them in it could be anything really. You could get a cheap broken 1 or 2u server case where someone’s pulled the motherboard and powersupply, rig something in there to hold them all. Should be more than enough space for 5 drives and will probably have cages for at least 2-3, maybe all 5 if you get lucky. Might even have hot swap ones. Dunno if this would fit though, that rack looks small and I couldn’t get the specs to load, is it full sized or a tiny one?

Could also see if there’s some kind of 3d print thing. There’s probably a 3d print thing to rack mount that mini pc.