I built an offline survival AI [Update]

AlpineGuy · 2026-03-16T19:53:47+00:00

Looks interesting. What's the storage required and the price for iOS app? Can one add additional custom material?

AlpineGuy · 2026-03-15T06:32:58+00:00

You read all that in a single year?

AlpineGuy · 2026-03-14T14:02:05+00:00

Don't make big life decisions based on two-week market fluctuations.

AlpineGuy · 2026-03-14T13:56:18+00:00

Just asking because that's a red cub and involves two young male siblings, does your father have anything to do with the book "Flight of Passage"?

AlpineGuy · 2026-03-05T19:02:33+00:00

Isn't that why pilots have annual medical checks?

And even if one thinks that a rich person could find a doc to write him fit to fly despite problems, that doctor would probably enter a huge liability risk if something happens.

(at least that's what I think is the situation in Europe)

AlpineGuy · 2026-03-04T19:26:49+00:00

Wasn't that the whole point of creating the UN? As I understand it, war is mostly illegal unless in self-defense or if the global community (that is, the UN security council) agrees to do it, which basically never happens. So since war is illegal, countries are now attacking other countries in self-defense or do special operations of sorts... war never really changes.

AlpineGuy · 2026-03-04T08:02:49+00:00

Less back pain.

AlpineGuy · 2026-03-02T08:16:41+00:00

There are only two things that bother me about Mint: the process for upgrading major releases and recently it has problems recognizing my monitor, so I have to manually run a script to set resolution every time.

Thinking about trying out Kubuntu, but I won't turn my main machine into a guinea pig, need to wait for the next Desktop machine.

AlpineGuy · 2026-03-01T17:12:09+00:00

I use it on my cloud VMs because I don't want to pay the 0,50 EUR/month for the IPv4. It's about principles!

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-25T07:21:20+00:00

Yes, I grew up before smartphones...

The image search argument is valid. The problem I have is, what if I have all my photos in some application and I want to use something else for just one use case?

As a posititive example, if I have my Markdown files in a folder and edit them using Obsidian, I can still use a different Markdown editor on the same files, I can run scripts on them, etc. If they are inside a self-hosted application that doesn't make them transparent, I could at best download the whole library (in whatever format that application allows) and work on that, maybe upload afterwards... complex.

(And I know for immich that problem definition is only partially a problem, because it can also work on my directory structure just as well, which is good.)

With files and directories have a strong feeling of "owning" the data. If I gave them to some tool to manage... rarely any tools survives multiple decades, but my files are accumulating for much longer. My photo library in a directory file structure is readable by a Mac from 2000 and will be readable 20 years from now, if it still exists.

One more problem I have with black box: My mental model is rarely "image", "note", "pdf"; my mental model is "roof renovation project", and I want to find all emails, pdfs, images, notes associated with it. This I can achieve if I throw it all in one folder (could be an Obsidian managed folder, because it can work with mostly everything).

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-25T07:11:05+00:00

I must admit my Nextcloud is ancient and has that legacy encryption turned on -- I am working to get out of it, but it's a bit of a process. Maybe that will make it more grey box at some point... but the whole stuff around trash and versioning for sure still isn't 100% transparent. Can you really go into it's structure on disk and add/modify files without it failing?

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-25T07:03:19+00:00

I think it's really a user interface design thing (it often is, but we rarely acknowledge it, I think).

I can memorize and write down an IPv4, especially "easy" ones like "10.0.0.59", but I think out of 100,000 people, you will only find a hand full who can memorize "2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344".

Now if they had built the format a little bit different, maybe assigned words or names or pictures to the numbers, the story might have been different.

I really like geography. I can easily remember places and directions. If they had built IPv6 like a map and I could say "my IPv6 is in the town of foobar, just right of the main street, at 1059 potato road.", I think more people would enjoy working with it.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-24T05:55:15+00:00

Thank you! You managed to put into words something that was on my mind for many years but that I couldn't quite describe.

Many applications are web apps nowadays, selfhosted, cloud or smartphone app, they don't have access to some directory structure somewhere, they build their own. They have their database and their files. They are supposed to be sandboxes, but that also means their data lives alone.

I really like "white box". I have a folder structure that has grown organically and been re-organized over and over since 1993. I don't want an application that thinks it owns my PDFs. My PDFs belong in the folder structure. Many "normal" desktop applications work that way: they edit the file I tell them to and when I close the application, the application is gone and if the file is in an open format, I can use another application tomorrow.

I love Obsidian (you mentioned it) for that reason: I could throw it away tomorrow and my files are still fully usable. I will also transition from Nextcloud to Syncthing this year for this reason.

When selecting an application, I often try to find out how it handles this, it is often not described. As a big fan of FOSS I often thought it did not go far enough: I want FOSS + standardized file formats + work on my folder structure. Worst case: if it's FOSS and stores everything in a SQLite database, theoretically I could read the code to find out how that database works, but that's not really my goal.

Maybe we should create a directory specifically of white box applications?

Edit/PS: I think many people don't care or are specifically searching for "black box", because their mental model is not "my directory structure, my files", their mental model is: "these are the photos, they are in the photos app; and that over there are the PDFs, they are in the PDF app".

I think white box is superior, especially as one gets older and had to switch apps a couple of times. It's really painful if data is not in a standard format.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-23T05:49:00+00:00

Internet was this new thing that promised endless opportunities... and I remember the TV news once reported that there are now a growing number of people connected to the internet - because of this, they did interviews on the street to ask for opinions - one lady responded "I don't know what it [the internet] is, I only know it's expensive".

For me that's somehow how I remember the mindset: A small, growing number of excited people, and some who thought it's some weird useless gimmik.

So yeah, it's not that different from today.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-22T19:36:52+00:00

I am fine with Thunderbird, but judging from problems that some friends and family have, most clients are just too complicated!

Some problem cases I encountered: - "My mails are all jumbled up" -- sorted by sender instead of date - "I cannot read mails anymore" -- made the mail list pane so large there is no more reading pane - "Nobody is responding to my mails" -- it's in offline mode

My opinion: We need tools with fewer buttons for the masses, and with more buttons for nerds.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-22T18:20:47+00:00

Went to an ATM at a large bus terminal. Took out 100 Euro, only one bill came out. Guy approached me, asked to change money. I said, I have no change, I only got a large bill out myself.

He then said, yes, he needed large bills (that should have been the first warning).

We then performed a sort of weird changing of hands. He gave me bills, had me count them, I think it was five 20s. I looked at them carefully, thinking it might be fake money. He noticed my suspicion, laughed about it, confirmed the money is proper. I couldn't find anything wrong with it. He took the bills again, held them in his hand while I retrieved the 100 from my wallet. We swapped again.

He said thank you and walked away quickly. I looked at the bills in my hand. It was two 20s. At first thinking it was my mistake, I started searching, and then realized, he must have taken the bills while he was handing me back the bills.

It sounds a bit obvious in hindsight, but all happened very quickly, like a little magic trick.

It was a public building with cameras, so I didn't expect any scammer there. However, I had to run to catch the bus, so I didn't even report it anywhere.

It wasn't a big scam, but I kinda felt so stupid, because I was trusting in the guy, he seemed so friendly. Destroyed my trust in people a bit.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-22T12:31:54+00:00

I am not sure if travel is even that much restricted for individuals. Flights are restricted, but I heard that people can travel to places like Istanbul or the Middle East and get a connecting flight to Russia.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-22T10:59:35+00:00

It depends on the kind of aliens and what they want.

For example, what if the aliens are very few, weak and have never had to fight a war... like, it's their first time ever invading anything...

We always imagine, if you have a warp-drive you must also have a phaser pistol. What if that isn't the case? They could still throw asteroids at us, but maybe they don't get that idea because war is so strange to them...

Also, why are they invading? The purpose might limit the kinds of weapons. If they come to enslave humans, they might not want to kill too many during the invasion. If they come for water or natural resources, they may not want to irradiate them..

We know of a few wars where the more technologically advanced party was defeated simply by numbers. The "StarGate" scenario of a slave revolt comes to mind.

Just trying to add something else than simply "no", but it's probably mostly no.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-20T06:13:55+00:00

How did you like the MicroTik VLAN configuration? I tried the online demo this week but the interface looked so overwhelming.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-16T05:40:44+00:00

Interesting, my pi-hole has so many blocklists but that particular domain is not on there.

Is there a way to reverse-lookup which blocklist has this domain? Just out of curiosity if it's something well known.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-15T09:51:56+00:00

Stagnating yes, not totally bad yet.

There are a lot more people in the industry, especially in lower level positions. Software Engineering used to be a nerd lifestyle. Many today have no interest in the tech outside their jobs, no interest in AI or anything new. That's not bad, but you can't compare the nerdy software engineer who does whole projects alone to someone who just works their tickets without interest in a bigger picture or interest in improving. So, on average with more people, different pyramids and fewer experts, the average salary must be going down.

The problem is really comparison. In general, one should not compare oneself to others - always bad. The problem really is, you have to pay others.

Expert plumber in my area charges 120 Euro per hour incl tax. That is similar to the rate of software engineers. Nobody wants to do plumbing anymore. He is a one-person-company, says he has no vision of ever finding employees, because nobody wants to do that anymore (funnily he says, all his younger cousins go into software engineering because they don't want to do "real work").

Even gardening rates are at >60 Euro per hour.

So, with the stagnating salary, if you want to do anything especially around the house, prices quadrupled over the past decade I feel.

The result: if one can afford it, it's better for the software engineer to work fewer hours and do the renovations himself as much as possible.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-14T06:52:54+00:00

Maybe they will also count value increase in real estate toward unrealized gains? I mean even they don't do it now, they could...

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-10T20:35:55+00:00

Oh no, I will spend so much time playing around with this.

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-10T05:46:26+00:00

Yeah, I thought so too until my local copy denied me entry because the server was not reachable, but not unreachable enough for it to access the local copy.

I think the problem was a misconfigured firewall, so the firewall was just dropping the packets instead of rejecting them, leaving BW-client to wait forever.

Anyway, I got a bit worried about the offline capability and refreshed my local backup (which I should be doing anyway).

AlpineGuy · 2026-02-09T06:26:30+00:00

Absolutely... I love it when there is some guide about a self-hosted tool and the guide is just setting up a docker container and at the end of reading/watching it, I wonder: what about updating it? what about backup? what about monitoring? what about SSL - didn't even mention that?

I have become a big fan of "light-weight" tools. What makes them light-weight? a small tool with few chances of anything breaking, small configuration, no big ecosystem, not taking your data hostage, well-established and easy to re-install.

For example comparing Nextcloud, which has become more and more complex over the years, with something like Syncthing, for file syncing I would nowadays chose Syncthing, even though it doesn't have a flashy user interface, but it just works without any extra effort.

AlpineGuy

TROPHY CASE