Essays

Why on Earth Would You Need a Home Server? Whether you’re just dipping your toes into the world of home servers or you’re an IT professional, there are plenty of reasons to consider setting one up. Whether it’s for fun, to break free from the grip of big tech, or simply to explore new possibilities, here are five compelling reasons to get started. And no, you don’t need a massive rack-mounted server—your setup could be as simple as a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, a budget mini PC, or even an old computer lying around. ...

Featured Image by @TheCrazedEB Regardless of how you feel about AI, it’s clear that something is going wrong. This is how the ArtStation main page looks at the time of writing: Image by @joysilvart The same “No AI” images could be found on DeviantArt and have been tweeted by many artist accounts, even by KDE’s Krita app. Two lawsuits (1, 2) have been filed against AI Art tools. And it’s not just art: ChatGPT has been using AO3 fanfiction as training data, prompting many writers to only make their stories accessible to registered users; and the introduction of Copilot by Github, an AI to suggest code, resulted in another lawsuit being filed. ...

This is a problem because one company, Google, controls every web standard used in our browsers. So, Firefox is our last hope for a non-Chromium-based browser. If you look at the current desktop browser market share, Chrome accounts for almost 70%. That is 70% of the web is controlled by just one company, a company that makes money by selling your user data and pushing ads. They also have a huge incentive to get as much control of web standards as possible to increase their profits. ...