There is /kbin which seems down all the time and its fork MBin which seems to have a good community but is written in PHP which I try to avoid.
Can you expand on the reasoning for avoiding PHP? I get avoiding Java; JRE it's s disaster, and a resource hog.
You'll waste more time trying to figure out how to do this than it would take to move a monitor and keyboard to the server, do the install, and plug the monitor and keyboard back into your main computer. Once the server is up, you can administer it over the network via ssh.
This "fair use" argument is excellent if used specifically in the context of "education, not commercialization". Best one I've seen yet, actually.
The only problem is that perplexity.ai isn't marketing itself as educational, or as a commentary on the work, or as parody. They tout themselves as a search engine. They also have paid "pro" and "enterprise" plans. Do you think they're specifically contextualizing their training data based on which user is asking the question? I absolutely do not.
In fairness, a lot of the more exceptional engineers I've worked with couldn't write their way out of a wet paper bag.
On top of that, even great technical writers are often bad at picking - or sticking with - an appropriate target audience.
"The world seeing [their] work" is not equal to "Some random company selling access to their regurgitated content, used without permission after explicitly attempting to block it".
LLMs and image generators - that weren't trained on content that is wholly owned by the group creating the model - is theft.
Not saying LLMs and image generators are innately thievery. It's like the whole "illegal mp3" argument. mp3s are just files with compressed audio. If they contain copyrighted work, and obtained illegitimately, THEN their thievery. Same with content generators.
I agree that their replies are a little... over the top. That's all kind of a distraction from the main topic though, isn't it? Do we really need to be rendering armchair diagnoses about someone we know very little about?
I mean, if I posted a legitimate concern - with evidence - and I was dog-piled with a bunch of responses that I was a nutter, I'd probably go on the defensive too. Some people don't know how to handle criticism or stressful interactions, it doesn't mean we should necessarily write them (or their verified concerns) off.
I was hired at a small company a number of years ago. Contract-to-hire. One of those "we want to see you prove yourself before we actually hire you" deals. My role was to take over all of technical operations (cloud architecture, sysadmin, desktop support, the whole deal), so that the CTO didn't have to do it all himself.
One time - about a week in - I spent the entire day playing with kinetic sand in the main lobby (which was in full view of every developer and the CTO). Mostly, I was building little bricks (something like 0.5x1x2cm), and stacking them in a 2 sided 90 degree wall.
When asked what I was doing by several people throughout the day, I said "I'm rebuilding your network". I'm certain I looked like a crazy person. Honestly, it's not a totally invalid assessment in general, even now.
What I was actually doing was planning out the subnets, ACLs, and general routing for a series of servers (web front-ends, api servers, DB servers, etc), and weighing the pros and cons of AWS LBs vs HAProxy for various applications.
Over the next few days, I built out the new network and started migrating legacy servers into it. I demo'd the process and accompanied documentation (which I mostly kept in case I had to build another network, or rebuild this one after some catastrophic total loss), and they seemed impressed.
My 3 month contract was converted to direct-hire within 3 weeks, after a number of other enhancements (like centralized ssh auth via OpenLDAP - rather than everyone sharing the same default user RSA key - and total systems monitoring via Nagios). Each one came with about a day's worth of playing with some fidget or fixing some non-technical thing (like hanging a bunch of framed items in the lobby, which they'd been meaning to do, but wasn't a high priority, especially for the technical staff).
They'd have had all the reason in the world to assume the new guy was full of shit and was about to wash out, but after that they assumed that when I looked like I was majorly slacking off (usually well away from my desk, tinkering with something mindless) that I was about to build some new thing into the network, or up-end a process, or some other crazy (but ultimately useful) thing.
They definitely didn't mind when I would pace and talk to myself like a nut-bar (which I did/do frequently).
Never mind the hazards of producing it; It's fucking annoying to look at while the sun it out.
I live in Arizona, so double fuck me.
I was wondering what that ominous music was when I woke up this morning
Why bother? Paid, non-transferable cloud backups, low-spec hardware that wears out in a few months, over-hyped/half-finished games (assuming they're ever released), back catalogs that aren't available if you don't subscribe or repurchase every generation... Just skip em.
If you want AAA games, there's plenty you can play mobile or on PC (or both), or if you specifically want indie, there's plenty of them too on Itch.io , individual websites, and steam (among many others; GoG, HumbleBundle, etc). You frequently don't even need to pay for these games, since a lot of them are free or via user-decided donations (mostly re: indies).
Hardware that can run them range everywhere from GPD handhelds to Steam Deck to any number of either's competitors, and they also function as more than just game machines since they run either Linux or Windows.
Nintendo who?
My first distribution was Slackware 7.1 when I was in high school. It took a week to download the .iso on dialup, and I had to use a download manager (GetRight) so that I could resume the partial download any time the connection dropped (usually because someone had to use the phone).
I'm old o_o
I still vividly remember not being able to figure out how to install new packages, or knowing how to compile from source.
I'll grant that PHP is set up to allow some super shitty code, but on fairness to the language; WordPress is a dumpster fire (compounded by endless awful plugins). That's compounded by it's ubiquity, so it's a massive target.
I just set up mbin as a single-user instance, and other than a bug I found (that they fixed live with me, in chat, including PRs), it's been awesome.
I hope your instance continues to work well for you 👍