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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Was going to make it a sort of central computer that could centralize all the computing for several members of the family. Was hoping to get a basic laptop that could hook into the unit and play games/program on a virtual machine with graphics far above what the laptop could have handled, plus the aforementioned spin up of more machines for friends. Craft Computing had a lot of fun computing setups I wanted to learn and emulate. I would have also had the standard suite of video services and general tomfoolery. Maybe dip into crypto mining with idle time later on. Lots of ideas that somewhat fizzled out.


  • Yeah, I was trying to go all the way when I should have compartmentalized it a bit and just had two computers instead of one superbeast. The server PSUs aren’t super expensive relatively speaking, 1U hotswap 1200W PSUs with 94% efficiency are like $100. Problem was that the power distribution board I had didn’t have GPU power connectors, only CPU power connectors, and tired me wasn’t going to accept no for an answer and thus let out the magic smoke in it. I got lucky and the distribution board seems to be the intended failure point in these things, so the expensive motherboard and components got by unscathed (I think, I never used the GPU, and it was just some cheap Ebay thing). Still a fairly costly mistake that I should have avoided, but I was tired that night and wanted something to just work out.



  • Only way that would help is if you’re completely disconnected from the system and thus have nothing to take. They’re taking photos of you online and then deepfaking them into scenarios, so your adversarial system would need to be active from the beginning to the end of your existence on parts of you (your face) that you want to protect, since having it only nearby opens up the opportunity for the attacker to simply cut out the adversarial system before feeding it to the machine.


  • I wonder how much interference/potential damage these could cause. Last I checked microwaves can wreak havoc on electronics, even if it wouldn’t harm people. Not very helpful to transmit power if every wireless communication system had to turn off to avoid frying.

    In any case it seems like a novel concept, but only really useful for situations that cannot be reliably hooked up to a terrestrial grid. Figure for the cost to get one system in the atmosphere, you could get a comparable unit on the ground several times over for the same price. Not a fan of even more potential space junk in orbit either.


  • I was trying to do some fancy stuff like GPU passthrough to make the ultimate all in one unit that I could have 2 or 3 GPUS in and have several VMs running games independently, or at least the option to spin it up for a friend if they came over. I’m probably not quite sophisticated enough to pull that off anyways, and the use case was too uncommon to bother with after unga bungaing a power distribution board after a hard day of work.



  • I built a massive overkill NAS with the intention of turning it into a full blown home server. That fizzled out after a while (partially because the setup I went with didn’t have GPU power options on the server PSUs, and fenangling an ATX PSU in there was too sketchy for me), so now it’s a power hog that just holds files. I just turn it on to use the files, then flip it back off to save on its ridiculous idle power costs.

    In hindsight I’d have gone with a lighter motherboard/CPU combo and kept the server grade stuff for a separate unit. The NAS doesn’t need more than a beefy NIC and a SAS drive controller, and those are only x8 PCIE slots at most.

    Also I use TrueNAS scale, more work to set up than UNRAID but the ZFS architecture seemed too good to ignore.