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Joined 29 days ago
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Cake day: February 19th, 2026

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  • Can confirm what another user said, that Intel iGPU would be better in your case.

    I’ll let you know now – if it runs Windows kill it. My server was originally Windows running Docker Desktop. It hosted three services: Minecraft server which lagged like a bitch; Samba folder share; and Emby. Whenever Emby playback froze I knew Windows, whose antivirus kept running the HDD under constant load, had fucked the i6 6100 to 100%, which happened at least twice a day.

    Moving on, now I run Proxmox. I host 25 services with the CPU at ~35% idle and 24GB RAM at 75%. Nothing lags.

    Before I plugged in the GPU my server drew 25W consistently, going to 35W under load. With the GPU, an RTX 3060 11GB (used), it uses 85W idle, so make sure it’s worth it. For my case it not only transcodes for Emby and resumes streaming in a second, but also handles voice inference for Home Assistant in under a second, and mid-sized Ollama LLM responses. Would recommend a high VRAM Nvidia card (for CUDA) in that scenario, as my model Gemma3 7B uses 6GB VRAM and 2GB RAM. But a top model, say Dolphin-Mixtral 22B, needs 80GB storage, 17GB RAM and… Well I don’t have the RAM but you get it. LLMs are intensive.








  • As someone who’s tried both, it depends on what you want. Your choice of Matrix server depend on any political and ethical values – some say Synapse is too corporate, being maintained by Element who are for-profit and obtain funding from corps and governments, so some prefer others such as Conduit ( – until maintaining slowed to near abandonment and it was superseded by Conduwuit – until the owner got cyberbullied so hard she quit the project and it was superseded by Continuwuity) because it was built on Rust and much more efficient than Synapse, or Dendrite. I recommend Continuwuity.

    Then there’s clients – the only mature matrix client for mobiles is Element, and there are two apps, Classic and X, who offer different pros and cons, and imo are not good enough on their own, both are in a kind of beta stasis. But it’s the best they have. If you really don’t need calling, then Element X, FluffyChat or Schildichat is your app and Element Web for desktop access (available on Github). However, when exchanging encryption keys to trust another of your devices, or a contact’s device, only Element offers simple QR scanning.

    In short, Matrix is very good as a privacy-focused server with partially working, modern looking clients.

    Then there is XMPP. Again there are different backends to choose from and I am inclined to recommend Prosody. XMPP just works out of the box for me, calling included, and is relatively stable. However, there are large caveats – several pieces of user data are stored unencrypted on the server, which is fine for you as the owner, but it’s a lot harder for someone else using your service to trust that. And, while XMPP uses OMEMO encryption keys, handshaking with devices is far more manual than Matrix’s Olm/Megolm and involves a multi-step process, and migrating to a new device is a pain because messages are not backwards decrypted, so they must be transferred from the first device. Finally, clients are very rough. The best desktop clients such as Gajim and Pidgin still look like they were built in 2001, and while mobiles have Monocles, Cheogram and Conversations, they all look very similar, as the former are very slight modifications of Conversations.

    In short, XMPP may lack some comforts of modern messengers, but it is simpler to set up than Matrix, and offers many of the same features. However, the manual key sharing process might scare off all but the most avid privacy enthusiasts, especially that if you migrate to a new device without sharing message history from a previous verified device, messages are lost.

    Choose Matrix for polished software, inviting many contacts, and, with Element X featuring (eventually) Element Call, complete E2EE.

    Choose ol’ faithful XMPP for an easier initial setup, if video calls are important, you appreciate that historical messages cannot, by design, be hacked into, or if you don’t like Element the company.

    I too have heard good things about SimpleX and Signal, and recommend trying them if they are valid contenders for your use case. Signal really is the best (most private, least data-farming) non-selfhosted option.



  • I know it’s a joke but the fact is Al Qaeda was founded by people whose friends and family were bombed by the US military. There’s very little that people, who lost everything to live for in a country kept destitute by attacks from America, can do except keel over or find a way to attack back. The US government creates their nemeses through cruelty, and are ultimately the cause.

    Then they somehow convince their people that some gang member in Bahrain poses an actual threat to the lifestyle of their children in fucking rural Wisconsin, and gets them to train up so they can go and murder four gang members and 48 civilians, whose family members become radicalised against America the violent untamed oppressor, and the cycle continues.


  • Well yes, the more CSAM detection and predator hunting, the better. Task forces and, dare I say it, detection programs with algorithms that may or may not include AI learning, are invaluable to eliminating the actually terrible stuff, anything that can’t even be educational.

    I believe the Online Safety Act and Chat Control’s sections that tie every user’s real identity to their online actions is not a solution, because when that data gets leaked and/or abused many innocent lives are in danger. I trust the state very little. I trust unidentified malicious hackers even less.


  • As much as I hate Reddit this is just continuation of the UK government steamrolling and destroying the free Internet, ruining the adult experience.

    One of the wonders of the Internet was that it was wildly unregulated - if you wanted it and you could disable safesearch you could get it, with the caveat of ISP-enforced content locks on all mobile data subscriptions under the name of a legal child (under 18), workplace and school security and filters, unremovable Safesearch on most search engines etc. Broadband required an adult, who in turn could activate parental controls. I couldnt wait until I turned 18 so I could finally access many sites for porn, news, gaming, forums and anything containing keywords without being blocked. I had a list of proxies for bypassing school filters.

    In short there is significant existing protection in place and we know that this is simply more evidence of Orwellian enforcement.





  • I don’t think there’s a straightforward way like a HACS integration yet, but you can access Ollama from the web with open-webui and save the page to your homepage:

    Just be warned, you’ll need a lot of resources depending on which model you choose and its parameter count (4B, 7B etc) – Gemma3 4B uses around 3GB storage, 0.5GB RAM and 4GB of VRAM to respond. It’s a compromise as I can’t get replacement RAM, and tends to be wildly inaccurate with large responses. The one I’d rather use, Dolphin-Mixtral 22B, takes 80GB storage and 17GB min RAM, the latter of which I can’t afford to take from my other services.