pezhore

I filed mine mostly because I knew I was going to be getting a refund. I wanted to make sure that I got that money before the IRS was completely fucked. This may be the last year that I purposely overestimate my tax burden (e.g. paying more in taxes than I ideally should).

In the past, people would say that you're giving the government an interest-free loan - I didn't really care about that because I knew I would get that money back later. Now? I'm not so sure.

They look a little like that sauce packet kitty from reddit years ago.

Even if it's backed up, will those backups be retained for 4 years? 8 years? By the time someone is in power will they even be able to restore this content? Probably not.

We're left with things like Wikipedia and archive.org snapshots - second hand resources that can easily go away.

The brain drain is real and fucking terrifying.

We are all domestic terrorists now?

Not really, but I can give you my reasons for doing so. Know that you'll need some shared storage (NFS, CIFS, etc) to take full advantage of the cluster.

1. Zero downtime for patching. Taking systems offline to update Proxmox sucks, especially if the upgrade fails for some reason. A cluster means I can evacuate one host, upgrade it, and move on to the next with no downtime for the hosted VMs.
2. Critical service resiliency. I have a couple of critical systems in my home lab that, if they unexpectedly go down, will make for a very bad day. For instance, my entire home network (and lab) is configured to use a PowerDNS cluster for DNS. I can put the master PowerDNS server on one host and the slave on a second host - if I have a hardware failure, I won't lose DNS. I have a similar setup for my Kubernetes cluster's worker nodes.
3. Experimentation. A cluster gives me a larger shared pool of CPU/Memory than my single host could offer. This means I can spin up new VMs, LXC containers, etc and just play with new software and services. Heck that's how I got started with my Kubernetes cluster - I had some spare capacity so I found a blog post that talked about Kubes on LXC containers and I spun it up.

I hope that helps give some reasons for doing a cluster, and apologies for not replying immediately. I'm happy to share more about my homelab/answer other questions about my setup.

I dunno, Trump showed the world you can completely give up decades of hard won soft power in only two months, maybe China will think it's cool?

/S

Bench seats were in cars too! In the early 2000s I had a 1987 Chevy Caprice Classic. That thing was a boat with a couch for a front seat.

I had some luck cobbling together a HiFiBerry with some speakers. It's not the same thing, but it does show up like a streamable audio device.

It's not super cheap though.

Those are beasts! My homelab has three of them in a Proxmox cluster. I love that for not a ton of extra money you can throw in a PCIe expansion slot and the power consumption for all three is less than my second hand Dell Tower server.

At this rate, Google will pull so many features the Home Assistant, Whisper/Piper combo will have parity.

The only thing I'm missing from my OSS voice assistant is, "where is my phone"... And I'm fairly certain I could figure out how to get that working if I tried hard enough.

Well, obviously this is the result of [outside group of people I personally hate/am racist against].

/s

Actually, with the drastic cuts to NOAA and science, how long before we'll hear that the death toll is as large as it is because of DEI or illegal immigration?