I’m one. There are actually a lot of us, and there have been for a long time.

The fight might appear lost right now but it is far from it. The pendulum swings fast.

The creator didn’t have a good answer, so there may not be a good one for this project. But the value proposition is actually there.

These self-hosted solutions are riddled with configuration options, often obscure requirements, and countless maintenance pitfalls.

For a disciplined tech person, it is no problem to install and maintain.

For people less disciplined or non-tech, self hosting is ill-advised and can be dangerous.

But even for a tech person, when you have enough docker-compose services laying around, it can start to get a bit overwhelming to keep it all up to date, online, and functional. If you change your router etc you have to recall how things were set up, what port-forwards you need, what reverse lookups, etc etc.

There actually is a gap in usability and configuration management. I could see a product that has sensible defaults that unifies config across these self-hosted services without needing to access the command line.

From my perspective it is 100% true as I have seen the other side. Having the conclusion known gives a small advantage in forming the logic to get there.

The logic is not faulty, it is predicated upon conditional statements. It is actually a synthesis of Bostrom’s trilemma, Zuse/Fredkin digital ontology, Dyson/Fermi cosmological reasoning, and extrapolation from current computational capabilities.

The “holes” are epistemic, not logical.

I am skipping steps because this topic demands thought, research, and exploration, but ultimately the conclusion is, in my view, inevitable.

We are already building advanced simulators. Video games grow in realism and complexity. With realtime generative AI, these games will become increasingly indistinguishable to a mind. There are already countless humans simultaneously building the thing.

And actually, the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial life is support of the idea. Once a civilization grows large enough, they may simply build Dyson sphere scale computation devices, Matrioshka brains. Made efficient, they would emit little to no EM radiation and appear as dark gravitational anomalies. With that device, what reason would beings have to endanger themselves in the universe?

But I agree, the hard evidence isn’t there. So I propose human society band together and build interstellar ships to search for the evidence.

Simulation theory is actually an inevitability. Look up ancestor simulators for a brief on why.

Eventually when civilization reaches a certain computationally threshold it will be possible to simulate an entire planet. The inputs and outputs within the computational space will be known with some minor infinite unknowns that are trivial to compensate for given a higher infinite.

Either we are already in one or we will inevitably create one in the future.

In a simulation, you could take a thousand years to render a single frame, and the occupants of the simulation wouldn’t know any better.

The max tick rate for our simulation seems to be tied to the speed of light, that’s our upper bound.

Of course, the lower bound is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or Planck length.

In other words, it is a confined system. That means it is computationally finite in principle if you exist outside the bounds of it.

This paper is shit.

https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488_8e072972f66d1fb748b47244c4813c86.pdf

They proved absolutely nothing.

For instance, they treat physics as a formal axiomatic system, which is fine for a human model of the physical world, but not for the physical world itself.

You can’t say something is “unprovable” and make a logical leap to saying it is “physically undecidable.” Gödel-incompleteness produces unprovable sentences inside a formal system, it doesn’t imply that physical observables correspond to those sentences.

I could go on but the paper is 12 short pages of non-sequiturs and logical leaps, with references to invoke formality, it’s a joke that an article like this is being passed around and taken as reality.

Software like wgpu makes it much easier to close the gap between various GPUs. New compute languages that are backend-agnostic are appearing, in the same vein as taichi-lang, that make it significantly easier to make high-performance gpu kernels deployable anywhere.

The compute groundwork for crossplatform tensor calculations is already here. Inference is already doable on any device. Training is not far behind. As a side-effect of this, processing on the GPU in every capacity, like physics, novel rendering techniques, or whatever else the imagination can muster, is now within grasp of “average” programmers.

If you have always been intimidated by GPU programming, I urge you to take another look now. The landscape is radically different. The software moat everyone talks about with NVIDIA is smoke-and-mirrors. Cuda is old news, though I am speaking to the actual code landscape here, not the common mental consensus.

What we lack now is cheap video cards that have high memory. I believe the current cards are overpriced by about 10 - 100x what they should be, because this profit situation is extremely temporary. Just as pens were once thousands of dollars, these compute devices will be collapsing in price.

I welcome China building cheaper video cards. Hopefully we will all benefit from it before any robot wars break out.

Aren’t eggs produced at industrial scales from chickens, who super-abundantly exist?

How is that working out?

In no universe does the economics of a $1 egg make sense, yet here certain countries are. Did you know you can have chickens in your backyard, and they’ll turn bugs and cheap feed into eggs?

The less you can offload production to central untrusted parties, the better. When you manufacture something yourself, you get to know all the properties instead of trusting that some people elsewhere (whose primary motivation is money) still considered your interests by making a quality product.

So when you say “we,” what does “we” mean exactly? It is rhetorical.

Additionally, you get consistent reproducibility without reliance on large scale logistical networks. There are many other reasons I can think of off the top of my head beyond this.

If we lived in a more cooperative world, with ironclad democratically owned logistics networks and manufacturing, centralized manufacturing would make sense in the way you say. But the reality is, we do not live in that world, and more and more, we are all increasingly feeling what that means.

As someone that also 3d prints screws, I can share my reasoning.

I am a westerner living in a non-western country. Communication with local people can sometimes be difficult, especially on the acquisition of technical components, including with screws. Often I need a specific kind of screw for a specific task, and often the screw does not need to be particularly strong. I would rather communicate exact specifications to a computer and get exact results than be at the mercy of polite miscommunication, and have to adapt all my printing to what is available locally.

I would also rather keep production as local as possible instead of outsourcing it to people I don’t know, or having it flown overseas.

In general, if I can 3d print something I need, I will. Having a database of parts, components, and tools is very helpful, even if it takes less time to just order it. There is a reproducibility, security, and satisfaction to doing it all yourself.

As an aside, I have learned something. 3d printing has enabled me to live better than I did before leaving the western world, because I can make things now I never dreamed of before. This makes me realize that we can distribute and localize significantly more production than previously possible.

I now believe every household should have a 3d printer and a laser cutter for this reason, and houses should be built with techniques and components that utilize both automatically as largely as possible. By democratizing production, power becomes much more distributed and equitable, without any claw backs of the old mechanisms of doing things.

This also allows easy repairs or expansion of a house. Something breaks? Print or cut the part and replace it from a library of parts. Everyone can understand raw materials no matter where you go, so the standard of living becomes planetary.

That is a part of the real change.

That does sound nice.

These assholes are all pedophiles and they use it to control the planet. To get to high levels of government, you must enter the shadow contract of pedophilia. It is easy to control people and trust people with that kind of shadow on them, so it is required.

Then they turn around and use pedophilia to control everyone else. Any tech that threatens their power, they can immediately shutdown by pedo-bombing it. The counter to pedobombing is authoritarian moderation. Once you have that, it is over. The government they control now can control the mods, and that means they control the narrative. THAT is one of the core enemies to fight. An alternative to Reddit or any other system is not enough.

Because pedophilia is such a taboo / social death sentence, it is among the most powerful shadow contracts.