I will definitely put AudiobookShelf at the top of my most impactful self hosted app list. I listen to audio books all the time and I used to use Voice, a foss app, but switching to AudiobookShelf has improved the experience significantly. I spend a little time importing books and then they just look so neat and tidy, I love it.

I have tried Umbrella and CasaOS and they are really very similar. That said, learning to use portainer allows you to understand the underlying technology of docker much better and also allowd you to do cool things like making a stack of containers that work together and saving that stack in a single config file. The GUI of Umbrel and CasaOS are basically the same and they only differ a little in their internals, so I would say switching shouldn’t be too hard, but if you have found yourself struggling to get something working on CasaOS you will probably have the same issue on Umbrel.

The web interface with all the links to your services can be achieved with things like Homarr and you can manage storage on the back end with Open Media Vault or something similar to make things more accessible. If you can have your data files accessible on a single BTRFS or similar partition with folder level sharing then you can have files hard linked between your downloading application and your media serving application, say Deluge and Jellyfin. The files download in /share/Downloads and then on completion get linked into /share/Imports and Jellyfin can manage moving them into /share/Movies or /share/TV as needed, and the same would go for something like Subsonic or AudiobookShelf.

Personally I have a wonderful set up with AudiobookShelf which syncs to my phone ereader. I can have books for my ereader with all the metadata and it is accessible via WiFi so I can just pick a book and get the epub delivered directly, no Calibre or USB cable required. It also works nicely for the audiobook side by letting me tell a whole series to download to my phone so I can listen back to back without worrying and I can always make space if I need to by clearing things out. Oh, and I can set my default listen speed to 2.0x and that carries over on other devices, so I don’t have to constantly fuss with it.

Overall, super fun, I would recommend learning about Portainer if that appeals to you, maybe consider setting it up on an old laptop and playing with it there, and if it works out nicely then you can redo your server and get it all working nicely there.

Early on I wrote a script for my user account to run df and save the output to a file, then a second script to read that file and if the drive was full send me an email.

First, it failed because it couldn’t send the email because the email service failed under full disk conditions.

Second, it failed because it couldn’t write the file to disk because the disk was full.

Third, it failed because outbound SMTP was blocked by my ISP.

I learned a lot about how well you can fail if you really put your mind to it. Now I have Home Assistant grabbing the disk stats for my machines and flagging anything over 90%.

I agree, you would have a hard time pushing for the intent part of a crime, however manslaughter does not require intent, nor do many other crimes, and discovery would being many documents to light which may show the level of intent or reckless disregard. Also, what is the difference between intent and callous disregard? If you know your actions will cause deaths and you do not act to prevent those deaths then are you not choosing those deaths? If there is a discussion documented where the possibility is raised and then disregarded it would show at least knowing disregard for the safety and wellbeing of others.

If I, and Australian citizen, had gained access in the same way I would be facing charges. Those charges would likely be under the Cybercrime Act of 2001.

s.478.1(1) Criminal Code—unauthorised access to, or modification of, restricted data;

That carries a maximum 2 year sentence and it clearly a significant threat to an individual.

Will Sam Altman face this charge? No. The purpose of the AI in this situation is not to do the actual hacking. The purpose it to abrogate the blame, to shield the owners of it from legal repercussions. Altman and co can do whatever they want and shift the blame to the AI.

“We didn’t fire missiles at those children, the AI made a mistake and identified them as hostile actors”

“We didn’t deny your dead partner’s healthcare, the algorithm incorrectly labeled the procedure as unnecessary and due to the delay your partner died, but that wasn’t our fault, it was the algorithm.”

ausclusive

Ftfy

I think this should be a thing. At the same time, I would also want something similar for funding or platforming fascists, but that is unlikely to end up being done. I think a simple tag, the [AI] one would work, is the best current solution. I think extra detail in the post is a good thing to do, for example AI assisted documentation, AI assisted bug finding, AI assisted vibe coding. They are all different and have different effects on the product and community. If someone uses AI to find bugs in their own code I am all for it, that is a great use if it. If they use AI to write their login system I am not keen at all given the likelihood of intense security issues and the low likelihood that they will ever fix it.

A quick question, what accent do you have? As an Aussie I have real trouble speaking naturally with most speech to text software, open or closed source. I feel like the guys in that Scottish sketch show in the voice activated elevator. I sometimes use voice dictation for my notes for work and I spend almost as much time correcting as I do speaking.

That said, I have found a perfect solution. I can get well over the 95% correct mark by simply using an English or American accent. I can do both fairly well and the speech to text has no complaints. I imagine someone from Boston would have a tonne of trouble being understood, as would a Welsh person, but pretending to be a Californian or similar can help immensely.

I would love to find something that can be trained by my speech like Dragon Naturally Speaking used to be. I used that in the early 2000s and at first it was awful, but training it for a few hours really did offer a noticeable improvement, and ongoing use continued to improve further. My computer died and I lost all the trained data, so I never went back, but if I could I would definitely do that again.

My personal recommendation is to get started asap with what you have. That would mean using any old thing you have laying around. Do you have an old laptop? They are ideal for beginner self hosting as you can physically access the machine and it includes a battery backup right in the machine. Usually they are also fairly lower efficient, so that is nice too.

Buying dedicated hardware acts as a barrier to actually doing things, so getting past that is key. If you find you don’t actually want to do self hosting you can just stop using your old laptop, but if you bought a full server machine it will be a bit of a trap and make you feel like you failed in some way. Also, the cost right now is fairly prohibitive, but using existing hardware can make that much more manageable.

As for what to run, I would recommend trying a fresh install of a distro based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Yes, four. They are different and have a different feel to them, but also have different communities. By going through the process of installing each one you will get a feel for the system and the community around it and have a better idea what works for you. I spent a few years having around the Debian end of things but eventually moved over to Arch stuff and am currently using EndeavourOS. Your experience will likely be different to mine but trying a few different options will help you figure it out.

Then moving on to services. Try to see what you actually use your machine to do now and then find services for that. For example, if you use something like Google Drive to synchronise data from your phone to your desktop then try using Syncthing to replace that. If you use Netflix to watch stuff try using Jellyfin. If you do play things like Minecraft get a local server running.

These will all be for learning, so their performance doesn’t need to be better than what a professional can provide, they just need to work and be yours to learn with. If you find you love doing this and enjoy the process but the hardware is holding you back this is a good time to upgrade to a dedicated machine.

For this I would recommend getting an office computer like an Optiplex or similar, just a basic office computer with an i5 or similar. You will want a fairly good amount of RAM in it, probably 16GB minimum and really 32GB is where things start getting good. A dedicated graphics card is not likely to be useful this early as the iGPU in most modern processors is actually fairly robust and should handle transcoding video for most use cases at a small scale. Storage could be one SSD for the OS and multiple spinning disk drives in a RAID or similar configuration for storage. The SSD will make the actual OS faster, decrease boot times, and make it faster to install and update things making updates less disruptive. The spinning media is way cheaper and you can backup all of your OS drive onto the spinning disks as a cron job in low usage times.

That’s my two cents on it, start with what you have, expand as you need but not aggressively before you need it, and try things now before you are too afraid to mess something up because you rely on it. Remember to have fun and experiment, nothing teaches better than experience. Enjoy yourself, don’t take it too seriously, and don’t lock yourself in to one specific thing, be flexible and willing to experiment.