IMHO the OSI is right, the designation “open source” should be reserved for those models that are actually open source (including training data). And apparently there are a few models that actually meet this criterion: “Though none are confirmed, the handful of models that Bdeir told MIT Technology Review are expected to land on the list are relatively small names, including Pythia by Eleuther, OLMo by Ai2, and models by the open-source collective LLM360.” (https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/22/1097224/we-finally-have-a-definition-for-open-source-ai/)

Perhaps it would also be useful to have a name for models that release their weights under an OSI license, maybe “open weight”? However, this model would not even meet that… (same for Llama).

i.e. it’s most definitely not open source.

It seems that 18.04 was the last release for 32-bit x86 (i386): https://askubuntu.com/questions/1376090/latest-version-of-ubuntu-for-i386-architecture-32-bit

But you could just go for Debian which still supports it.

It’s an Apple Silicon Mac Mini. Do you have a particular reason to think the new one is less efficient?

I do think it can achieve that while waiting for network packets (see e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested).

But in terms of money savings it would rarely make sense, as you need to make it back during the time you run the system. If we assume 6 years lifetime then it would only make sense to pay $120 more. But yes, I’d also go for a system that runs regular Linux :)

I don’t have one (and I don’t want one), but Anandtech measured the M1 version at 4.2W in idle. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested I think you can also get that from other Mini PCs (e.g. NUCs).

I would disagree with idle power not being important for a home server. Most of the time, your system will be doing very little and wait for something to happen. I also don’t think a typical server has a display attached. Wolfang explains this quite well: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=94&si=zyjEKNX8yA51uNSf

I don’t have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.

• Gaming PCs can consume up to 100W (876 kWh / year).
• My AMD B650 NAS consumes about 17W in idle (150 kWh / year).
• A NUC / Mac Mini can idle as low as 5W (44 kWh / year).

If you pay 0.30$/kWh, running your old 100W gaming PC all the time would cost you 263$ per year. My NAS is 45$ per year…

It also depends on what you need/want from the machine. The Mac Mini doesn’t have any HDDs and can’t run a regular Linux distro, for example.

This seems very one-sided. Sure, the disclosure was not handled perfectly. However, this post completely ignores the terrible response by the CUPS team.

The point on NAT is certainly fair and prevented this from being a much bigger issue. Still, many affected systems were reachable from the internet.

Lastly, the author tries to downplay the impact of an arbitrary execution vulnerabilty because app armour might prevent it from fully compromising the system. Sure, so I guess we don’t need to fix any of those vulnerabilities /s.

This article is conflating terms that I need help distinguishing between. The other commenter mentioned that Ubuntu is a type of Debian but this article lists Debian and Ubuntu as distributions.

I’d say that the article is correct in calling them separate distributions.They are certainly related (both part of the Debian family), but I think most people would consider them to be separate distributions. Software built for Ubuntu 24.04 may work on Debian 12, but it might also not. For a beginner, I think it’s most useful to consider them to be separate things.

It sounds like a weird idea at first, but maybe it could actually work. Kind-of like running two trains on top of each other instead of after each other. I guess the downside would be the need for bespoke rolling stock and larger platforms. I think, it would generally be preferable to double the frequency or run longer trains. But it could be interesting if you’ve already exhausted those.

The main downside of double-decker train cars is the time it takes passengers to to board them. And, since this is one of the main factors limiting metro frequencies and thus capacity, they’re not that suitable for subways. To maximize metro capacity, you want long trains with many doors and very high frequency.

Double-decker cars are much more suitable for lower-frequency service (S-Bahn, regional, long-distance,…) where they’re also commonly used.

Of course, you could still use double-decker cars in a metro (and maybe some places do), it’s just suboptimal.

I think when I messed it up, it worked when I tried switching to the proprietary drivers for the second time. I think you can try that without much risk.

In my case I ended up disabling Secure Boot anyway because it just got too annoying (a BIOS update breaking it was the final straw for me). The security benefit after you’ve enrolled a MOK seems dubious anyway. It would be nice if distros could ship signed kernels with the open-source Nvidia driver but I guess that’s not happening.

No, they’re almost entirely unrelated. Almost all CPUs will idle close to 0 W (with correctly working drivers). The main idle power contribution comes from the mainboard and other devices (e.g. disks). The Mini PCs you mentioned should have a very low total idle power, probably below 10W.

Check out Wolfgang on YouTube, he has some great videos on the topic: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM

I’ve also recently built my own NAS and I’ve gone through similar considerations. One of my mayor decisions was not to use btrfs because it’s not recommended for Raid Z1/Raid 5. With that, I landed on ZFS and TrueNAS Scale. Note that RAID expansion should be landing in both very soon.

Things with TrueNAS were pretty easy, very quick, and everything worked nicely. However, I noticed that it was constantly accessing the disks and preventing them from spinning down. I really wanted to keep the power consumption low (<20 W idle), so I eventually decided to just go with Vanilla Debian + ZFS. I can recommend that if you want to tinker with things yourself. Otherwise, I’d recommend TrueNAS Scale.

As for migration, you might be able to create a degraded pool initially, copy over the data, and add the parity disk last. Raid expansion would ofc also help there…

What kind of junk energy is there to harvest from a car (in meaningful amounts)? I guess breaking is the obvious answer, but that’s already covered by regenerative breaking. Most car-based energy harvesting systems seem to employ speedbumps that clearly take useful (kinetic) energy away from the car (probably at a very poor efficiency).

How would a turbine that takes energy from the air current generated by a passing car decrease the energy of the car?

Not sure where you got that idea from, but how would that generate a meaningful amount of energy? It seems very unlikely that such a system would ever recover the energy spent on its construction.

Sure, but those are completely different approaches. Dams have the advantage that they have a much larger capture area for water and that they can accelerate the water beyond the 10 m/s terminal velocity of raindrops.

Raindrop energy harvesting is a rubbish idea. The raindrops simply don’t have a meaningful amount of energy to begin with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907674

Good luck :)