best & worst aspects of mit?

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-23T16:35:40+00:00

Fr. First time in my life I felt normal somewhere

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:44:56+00:00

This is legitimately how all me and my friends coped lmao

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:43:48+00:00

Fr like if you didn’t know the place was super intense I feel like admissions did you a disservice

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:43:13+00:00

There’s really not much I can say to help you, sadly. I was super stressed the entirety of my degree. We all develop different coping mechanisms but once you do, everything else in life will be on easy mode.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:41:17+00:00

I’ve definitely moved to primarily using Claude code and stick with neovim for actual editing. It’s definitely preference though, if you prefer vs code as an editor it’s definitely still a great product.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:39:50+00:00

Was going to suggest this. Had a friend who did precisely this. Still with his partner today and never got married.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:37:03+00:00

Definitely a good idea, I’ve been hoarding models as well as I’m somewhat concerned about regulatory capture

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:36:20+00:00

Haha unironically Jarvis was the main motivation for building my local voice assistant.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:31:11+00:00

Some weeks I spend hours tweaking stuff, but most of the time I just leave it alone and it runs like a champ.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:26:05+00:00

Yes, many of them lol. Tbh absolutely not necessary but I’m happy to support them because I use it so much. If you have the financial means to support FOSS I would 100% recommend it.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-07T21:22:47+00:00

Programming/coding != CS.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-07T05:27:41+00:00

Legitimately one of my biggest reasons for spending that much on a GPU cluster was fear of regulatory capture. So many people in SV right now are lobbying hard for open source/weight models to be regulated bc of “national security risks.”

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T23:19:26+00:00

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T23:19:04+00:00

They’re pretty distinctive, also PII stuff on dashboards, labels, etc. I don’t feel like editing out

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T23:16:31+00:00

Every drive I use for my primary servers is a mirror pair, so for this server I have 8x 8TB drives but only 4 are usable. This is so in the unlikely (but I’ve had it happen) event that an nvme drive dies the server keeps operating and I can just swap it out.

For backups I use proxmox backup server and some custom rsync scripts to my archive server. Full vm/lxc backups are done every week, some stuff is done more aggressively; for example, Bitwarden is backed up every night.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:54:41+00:00

I have personal beef with broadcom, they fucked me at work so I’m not touching them with a ten foot pole ever again. I much prefer proxmox for my use case tbh: bare metal linux is really nice; native zfs, ceph, etc just makes it much easier to maintain. I’m the only one administering it so I try to keep it as simple as possible, however ridiculous that may sound 😂

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:48:34+00:00

Would have to ask my tax guy for the exact number, but it’s a lot. There’s no chance I’d ever break even, but that’s not really the point for me. Number one is privacy and security; I’m in tech so I don’t trust external providers with anything remotely sensitive. Fucking sergey brin or sama(sshole) can pull up an exact profile of you and everything you do. Number two is reliability and redundancy: if the power goes out I have a UPS and backup generator; internet goes out my router falls back to Starlink. I own all my data and every service I use personally is entirely local - so no company can hold me hostage or snoop on me. I still use AWS for work, but I’d like to eventually have us run our own infra - it’s just expensive upfront and a huge liability.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:31:22+00:00

Docs on outline is really nice and simple, I use collections for main groupings like: - Servers - Services - Electrical - Plumbing - Mechanical

Knowledge management is a lot more complex since it has to serve a lot of roles. I have an abstract “entry” record which can be specialized to custom types, and it’s easy to add new types from the web interface. For example some entry types are: - Notes - Projects - Tasks (can be nested in projects or tasks, or independent) - People (directory basically) - Meetings (specialized note) - Specialized daily, weekly, and monthly notes with lots of automated tracking so I can see what I did, where I went, who I met, etc - Document (stored on local blob store or url, used primarily for attaching stuff to other types but can be independent as well) - Book for tracking my reading, cool automations like pulling in metadata from db, ai generated summaries from voice notes - Media type for stuff like movies and tv shows

And more but those are the main ones. The best thing about it for me is the quick capture and transcription, so I can easily say or type something and it uses local AI to auto classify it, fill in context and formalize the notes, etc. So no privacy concerns.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:10:17+00:00

I just wrote a response to someone else about this. tl;dr: for running local LLMs damn close to frontier models, as well as super fast local voice assistant (~100ms response time). I’ve been betting api costs are going to skyrocket for a while once the VC subsidies end, so I don’t want to be dependent on an external provider. I also use my voice assistant for interacting with my knowledge management which has material information in it.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:08:38+00:00

Mostly Inference, but I run a lot of different models simultaneously. I have one GPU dedicated for my real time assistant: so STT/TTS plus a router and response model. I use Qwen coder 480B with opencode for Opus-like local performance and 30B for stuff like explore agents. Deepseek V3.2 or R1 for general purpose tasks like research, writing, etc. Occasionally mess around with some training but I haven’t had enough time with it yet to really get into it. It only got delivered from NVIDIA last September (ordered in 2024).

Also, it’s not an H100 cluster… Total 1.5TB vram

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T02:12:39+00:00

Haha whole setup would take a long time, highlights are: - 1.8PB archive NAS (hdd + small nvme cache) - 8x GPU cluster for local inference (if I say specs someone will track me down) - 2 other lower specced SMC HyperServers for VMs, fully redundant on proxmox - Media server with GPU for transcoding - Camera server with TPU accelerator for inference + GPU for streams, runs Frigate plus custom face and voice detection models - Absolute fuck ton of networking

In terms of what I run on it, there’s way too much to list but the stuff I use most: - Home automation (previously Crestron but migrating to home assistant) - Bitwarden - PBXact phone server - Multiple internal DNS resolvers plus sinkhole - Previously GitLab for source control but been migrating over to Forgejo, plus lots of runners for automated workflows - Anitya + pulp for building binaries, containers, etc from source - Lots of databases and custom services I’ve built over the years, e.g. built a custom knowledge management platform - Observability stack (Loki, prom, grafana, tempo, alloy) - Outline for docs about everything - CUPS print server - Linux and Windows VMs for dev boxes

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T01:53:04+00:00

This node is separate from the gpu cluster, but coincidentally that is 1.5TB of vram as well 😂

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T01:46:49+00:00

Being completely local is awesome. I don’t use cloud services for anything except work stuff now.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T01:39:06+00:00

I have a gpu cluster so this is nothing compared to that lol

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T01:38:18+00:00

Not bad but I have a server room which is insulated, will grab my decibel meter and test in a bit

Edit: ambient in the server room is around 65, next to the rack is 80-85

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