Comment by realityfactchex
12 hours ago
> Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS
That under-states the matter. It is a terrible time, price-wise, to build a NAS.
I'd almost rather have no AI whatsoever and have storage 1/10 the price of pre-AI times.
(If there were a magical choice between having AI and significantly more expensive storage, and having no AI and some program to dump that investment money into getting and somehow leveraging significantly more available storage, that is.)
You're telling me.
I had a drive go bad in my 4 year old home-built NAS a few weeks ago, and it cost 2x what it originally did to buy the same capacity drive, and that was going to a grey-market importer on eBay, it was more on "reputable" sites.
> I'd almost rather have no AI whatsoever and have storage 1/10 the price of pre-AI times.
Almost? ALMOST!?!?!
If you handed me a button that would make it like LLMs had never existed I'd be slamming that button so hard Sam Altman's clothes would spin around.
Return memory and storage prices to normal, undo the sloppification of ~everything, remove all these annoying "features" that are so useful they have to force them upon people, and make scammers actually have to put in a slight bit of effort, all at the "cost" of real human developers, artists, writers, etc. getting paid for their work....
If this is a hard decision for you, you are the problem.
Same. Every time I think about this, I come back to the fact that I was excellent at my job before AI, and even enjoyed aspects of it, so I would be fine if tomorrow it all blew up.
Same, I'd smash it like it was offering me a million dollars. I cannot think of a single positive thing that has come out of the AI boom. It has been a net negative for all of society.
Oh come on! I'll take a few years of expensive RAM in order for humanity to get wide access to something near as makes no difference to the Star Trek Ship computer.
Which is 100% what this has felt like to work with, all spring and summer.
So we're in a slop phase, it'll pass. The first few years of youtube gave no hints that we'd get stuff like Veritasium.
Ignore the slop and use the tools to create something you never thought you could do. That's what it's for!
Same here, the usefulness of the slop machines is quite limited compared to the downsides.
Hey everyone, stop progress! Wolrah has decided that November 29, 2022 is as far as things should go. Because everyone knows before that day, there were no scams, every artist lived lavishly from commissions, and software was flawless and without any extraneous features.
That's quite uncharitable. What are you trying to achieve here?
They (probably) don't want to stop progress (especially unqualified like this) in general. They'd like a world where LLMs didn't come to exist.
And whether LLMs are progress at all remains to be proven.
There's a difference between standing in the rain and being hit by a tsunami, even if it's both just water.
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I'm doing it anyway and I've found some secondhand deals. Maybe COVID homelabbers are offloading gear?
I built a 24 TB HDD NAS in a 36 bay chassis for around $1000 all-in: mb, ram, rails, chassis, rack, disks, hba, nic
Awful Watts/TB but the plan is to run it and the GPU rig on solar.
I obtained a used Dell PowerEdge and just stuffed a bunch of drives in there. It's old enough that the RAM is not overly expensive (DDR3), so it has 192GB of RAM to effectively cache the data, and then 32TB of raw storage. (Of course I regret not spending the extra money to take it to 384GB now.)
The nice thing about the array being big is that I can just RAID 1 it instead of worrying about tinkering with RAID 5, and leave a drive as a hot spare.
PCIe 2.5G NIC for the uplink, and then it can serve over SMB or iSCSI. The main use case for this thing, incidentally, is it just is a caching proxy that holds Docker images, models off of Huggingface, and so on.
36 bays and only 24T of storage?
Can't you get that in a single disk that costs less than a kilodollar?
36 bay? Why so many?
The 36 bay was all I could find on fb marketplace.
I fell in love with the silly idea of squeezing 10G NIC + 10G writes (to a 2x12 RAID 10 HDD array) on the thunderbolt bus of my 12 year old macbook pro.
Then I got distracted with the server mb and truenas and ZFS.
I would kill (figuratively, anyway) to have no AI whatsoever. No slop machine threatening to replace my job, or turn my job into babysitting its stupidity, and hardware would be reasonably priced? That would be awesome. AI has brought me nothing but downside.
AI has freed most people I know from the tedious job of writing actual emails and birthday greetings - leaving then more time to e.g. wash dishes or clean the floor.
Seriously, if arts and creativity is what sets humans apart from other animals, then AI has almost completely displaced our capacity to even consider doing these activities ourselves. People reach for AI when they should be composing a birthday greeting themselves.
someone at work unironically said they use ai to compose "thoughtful responses" to people, and my immediate thought was that what they are doing is the literal opposite of thoughtful
People were Googling these things. Those who were good with words, didn’t do that before AI and won’t do it today. They don’t have to.
Is it a genuine birthday greeting if you just let AI do the job?
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Are you being sarcastic? There's no way you believe people couldn't wash dishes or clean floors because of all the emails and birthday greetings they had to write, or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art.
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But we now have trillionaires, aren't you happy about that? It means you might be the one some day too /s
I immigrated wanting to become a millionaire. Never found time working my ass off. Now that I get pension and tokens from Musk and Zuck, I can finally try!
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