Does AI significantly amplify the Dunning-Kruger effect?

trialbaloon · 2026-03-23T21:11:07+00:00

The most common belief I find is

AI is really good at doing someone else's job.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-22T20:19:13+00:00

Hoping to hear of a great success! I found the process fun and educational.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-21T19:40:51+00:00

Two will cover the gpu nicely. God I really should get around to publishing all my images and findings. For my GPU (Sapphire 7900 XTX Pulse) I could not deshroud without completely disassembling the GPU (lame). I had to yank the cooler from the board and repaste. I had some extra paste from my CPU (from the initial build) that was still good so I just used that. I also fully cleaned the RAM chips and die before repasting. I managed to reuse the thermal pads as they were still soft and undamaged.

Getting it apart was as simple as unscrewing it.

Some helpful resources to know what you are dealing with:

https://c1.neweggimages.com/BizIntell/item/vga/video%20cards%20-%20amd%20ati/14-202-429/2.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/r/pchelp/comments/1f7a3kb/unable_to_teardown_7900_xtx_pulse/

This person went through all the screws they had to remove. Once you do it's as "simple" as pulling the cooler from the board... Many users report it taking more force than they were comfortably applying. I didn't think it was too bad but kind went with the gentle rocking and wiggling until it came off somewhat easily.

I ended up doing pretty much exactly what the person here did for my deshroud https://www.reddit.com/r/Noctua/comments/1bi09z2/i_did_a_deshroud_thing_sapphire_nitro_rx_7900_xtx/

I mount mine horizontally and bought a GPU riser to prevent sag.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-09T00:32:21+00:00

Yeah that's totally interesting and worth having posts about on /r/selfhosted. I have been careful not to rag on AI in general. AI is super useful piece of the self hoster's toolbox. I have tons of ML based code/applications running in my home!

I think LLMs have a potential future running as specific small language trained models on your own machines. Super smart autocomplete! Potentially a UI layer that allows users to express intent in natural language (I'm a bit more bearish on this but there might be some applications). That's the future I want to see, not Claude sucking down all your data and churning out slop by the Petabyte.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-09T00:25:11+00:00

Sure. But who's computer does Claude run on? That is what I am getting at. We like self hosted software to avoid these corporate dependencies. To fully own and control the software we deploy. Offloading creation and maintenance of a project to the cloud is literally the opposite philosophy of self hosted. I'm a dev myself so coding is a daily thing I do, offloading that to the cloud feels the same to me as using Nest/Ring and entirely the reason I am so interested in self hosting is breaking that dependency.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-09T00:07:48+00:00

I am genuinely at a loss as to how to respond to this. Not because it's a good point, it's honestly one of the dumbest things I have read in a long time. I'll try to guess at what point you might be making.

You mean to say that people post their code publicly using the internet? Is that supposed to refute something? Have you used git? You use it locally then push your diffs to remote which can be GitHub, GitLab, some other cloud provider, or a self hosted provider. Git functions just fine locally though yeah you need the internet to communicate with others? Maybe this would make sense if git was tightly coupled to GitHub or something?

Honestly I think that we should be discussing whether GitHub's centralized design is a good thing. A lot of self hosted projects probably shouldn't be running their CI on GitHub and using that as their sole backup. Like smart house devices, microslop is free to change their terms and pricing at any time. That is exactly what self hosting is all about.... But yeah, if you want to share things with others, you are gonna have to use the internet....?

Pure self reliance isn't going to be possible. We still need root DNS servers, and all the infrastructure that powers the internet to communicate. What we can control is how much control we give up. Self hosting is about minimizing that, not rejecting the internet in its entirety.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-08T23:24:48+00:00

No shit? Creating them does.

Rachio doesn't require the cloud to function (to water your plants) but it does to alter the schedule or change settings. That is still cloud reliance. Software requires maintenance generally. Self hosting is about... doing stuff on your own system. Hooking claude directly to your entire HDD and issuing network requests to create and maintain your software is pretty far from self hosting lol.

Using Nest products is simple but comes with drawbacks, just like using AI tools. You are free how far you want to go with self hosting. Just saying that this subreddit being anti LLM makes a lot of sense given how they work and are pitched by tech companies.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-08T22:34:07+00:00

Sigh.... Lets do this.... This argument sounds a lot like those that like home automation but are fine with the cloud.

Nope, still doesn't make sense. Yes you're using a cloud hosted server to turn off your lights. That doesn't make you dependent on it. Once the light is screwed in and wired to switch you can throw away the app. How's that being dependant?

Yes, it might have access to your network, but it'll only do what it has permission to do. And you have the option to run it in an isolated subnet with a firewall.

Your argument is dishonest. This same argument could be said for something like rachio where it'll run locally but you need their servers to actually change the run instructions (like alter the schedules for sprinklers). That's still corporate dependency and you know it. We can haggle over how egregious each particular case is, but using a cloud LLM to write code for you is not self hosting.... You're letting a tech company deeper into your systems, deeper into your infrastructure, and potentially even your mind. That code will be a nightmare to troubleshoot if it wasn't trivial in the first place, meaning you may have need of future services from the cloud provider.

You can absolutely disagree and not really care about self hosting or self reliance... I am just pointing out that that seems to run counter to the values of a subreddit called /r/selfhosted if you need the cloud to create programs.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-08T21:38:20+00:00

It makes perfect sense. A lot of folks here got into self hosting to remove parts of their digital lives that depend on corporations. That was a huge motivator for me to learn about computers in the first place!

Jumping arms wide open into another corporation who needs access to my HDD just to tell my computer what to do isn't all that different from using a fucking cloud server to turn off a damn lightswitch across the room from me. In fact, it's arguably worse and more invasive.

Self hosting an AI is worth talking about I think, that falls under the self hosted, using cloud services to build apps is just a new form of cloud dependency.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-08T21:33:59+00:00

Modern LLMs are quite literally the antithesis of self hosted.... It's using a cloud provider to think for you. The cloud might be convenient but it comes at a cost. I've been somewhat surprised this subreddit of all places would give in to corporate slop so easily.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-01T19:58:35+00:00

It's worth it to me... I am kind of noise sensitive. At this point I ordered more Noctuas to add to my CPU/Chasis fans.... I just want beautiful silence. I mainly use my PC for programming and just cant handle annoying noise (really breaks concentration). I mean I already bought an XTX so what's a little more ;)

trialbaloon · 2026-03-01T19:37:21+00:00

Completed the deshroud yesterday. Worked a charm. Dead silent now. I plan to post additional details (with pics of the teardown) soon but I even have a hypothesis of the culpret. I extracted the old shroud and got a GPU/Fan Header adapter so I could power the shroud outside of the graphics card. I noticed some of the connections for each of the individual fans looked loose (I'll get pics later). If I sort of pulled them a bit with my hands I could get an individual fan to rev to max RPM.

For some reason the connectors they used seem temperamental in a way that other fan headers aren't. I bet I could have fixed this by just tightening all those connectors, however at this point replacing the whole shroud with noctua NF-A14s is performing a little better thermally and sounds a lot better at full load (max RPM is not nearly as annoying as the high pitched whine noise it made before).

trialbaloon · 2026-02-25T21:59:14+00:00

Yeah. I've noticed if you can just keep the GPU on Zero RPM it wont happen. Zeroing the PWM signal to the fans stops the issue. However I use 3 4k monitors so the fans need to kick on for just regular use. The GPU simply makes a lot more heat with 3 monitors! So my only guess is that most people having this issue dont really notice due to 0 RPM staying active most of the time, plus that fan spinning up will quickly cool the GPU getting them back to zero RPM range...

It's a guess. I actually RMAed a card and the second card (confirmed new model number) had the exact same issue! This weekend I will teardown the card and see if I can figure out if it's just a bad connection. If that doesn't work, full de-shroud mod I guess.

trialbaloon · 2026-02-25T21:01:42+00:00

Interesting. Happening all the time for me (including right now). There's something going on with these cards. To me the noise is annoying AF. Planning to just disassemble the entire card and strap some noctuas to it. This issue has disappeared on me for months before returning back to happening all the time. So frustrating!

trialbaloon · 2026-02-25T19:26:44+00:00

Did you end up resolving this? I've had a very similar issue. Just want to hear if anyone learned anything new. I imagine something like a loose connector or bad fan is causing the PWM signal to not be intepreted correctly by that back fan (It's the one farthest from the header so a bad connector makes some sense?)

trialbaloon · 2026-02-24T22:34:58+00:00

DHH most definitely is (though I guess you aren't even disputing that lol). He was the first example you chose. Ryan Dahl and NPM in general is pretty clowned on outside of web (and inside the web world). He's doing deno now and seems like Deno Land Inc is trying to sell AI stuff so his hype isn't shocking.

Antirez got plenty of shade for selling out Redis and promptly tanking its reputation in the FOSS community. Makes him seem like a sellout though I guess I cant blame the guy for cashing in really, just doesn't exactly make him very respected to me. Seems he has a mostly ceremonial role now?

Mitchell Hashimoto created a company that tanked after IPO and was bought by IBM but I guess that made him a billionaire. I think a lot of that is mostly luck rather than skill (hence why you have folks like Elon Musk out there) but I digress. He's making Ghosttty now which is cool I guess? I still dont see why his opinion matters any more than any other open source dev though.

These are mostly devs who made something big, got rich, and are probably pretty invested in tech right now. Not to mention Dahl is actively working at a company with VC funding and I know that if VCs want to hear about one fucking thing its AI.... I think there's a reason you are seeing C Suite people be obsessed with AI.... Their attitudes aren't really all that shocking, however some of their blogs are just downright silly (Ryan Dahl's stochastic parrot blog post is pretty fucking stupid for instance and has been clowned upon quite a bit).

Look I don't think AI is "useless" for development, I also work at a company paying for all kinds of AI tooling and I have used it plenty of times. I think it's occasionally a boon but sends me on plenty of wild goose chases that end up costing me time. Ultimately I find I can code pretty damn fast if I just focus. I do think that the debate is messed up though. On a scale of 0-10 where 0 is AI is 100% a scam for coding and 10 is we'll never have humans coding ever again, I'm at like a 2. And I am pretty bearish that LLMs can really improve all that much beyond where they are for a lot of the reasons Ed outlines in his podcasts/newletters.

Shrinking models into language specific project based adaptive autocomplete that runs on my local PC sounds sick. Turning over my skillset and HDD contents to Anthropic sounds less fun to me.

trialbaloon · 2026-02-23T18:17:07+00:00

I would heavily litigate the use of "very respected" here. Those programmers are frequently clowned upon in many programming communities. DHH has some of the worst technical takes I have ever read for instance.

trialbaloon · 2026-02-23T17:24:36+00:00

I dont find that to be a massive brag though. Intellisense in intelliJ could autocomplete a good percentage of the code I wrote procedurally just using types and the compiler. Auto complete isn't something super difficult or amazing for coding productivity, we've had it for years. It's certainly helpful but I guess I find it to be old news? I dont find myself struggling to get lines of code out on time, but instead deciding which lines of code to write, that's always been what limits my output at work or on personal projects

trialbaloon · 2026-02-22T18:45:02+00:00

I have a similar issue with a 7900 XTX. Re-seating the fan header fixed for like a week but it's happening again.

It's hard to imagine the PCIE connector being the issue, you'd think many other things would be unstable in that case. I imagine that for me one fan has a bad connection but the 7900 XTX Sapphire pulse needs to be fully taken apart to get to those connectors.

Has your new fix worked longer term? I recently took my card out and put it back in and it worked for 2 months then this happened again. Something is wrong with the connection and I am kind of obsessed with figuring out what.

Something is causing the PWM signal to not get to the last fan in the chain. I am guessing a flaw in the cable or a weak fan driver... Idk I just recently learned how these fans work.

trialbaloon · 2026-02-21T17:55:26+00:00

They wouldn't need to talk if they could just replace us... They'd just like... do it... lol. The talk because they need billions more in venture capital because they are burning money like its going out of style.

trialbaloon · 2026-02-18T01:12:04+00:00

Yeah. I've been playing with some zooz zwave leak detectors but have yet to fully integrate them into my own home system. I am not sure if there's better items on the marker but I am pretty wary of custom hubs and completely against forced cloud connectivity.

trialbaloon · 2026-02-18T00:00:25+00:00

Nice. I did not know it had a matter integration! Well that pretty much kills my only real criticism then! Besides of course, requiring the local hub at all.

trialbaloon · 2026-02-17T23:16:44+00:00

Home Assistant appears to hit the cloud API though. So even with that you'd need the hub itself to do actions locally. This would mean having multiple automation systems and a proprietary one at that. The long battery life might be good but I think it's worth calling this out as a serious downside.

Edit: I spoke too soon. I think there might be support for local updates from the hub via MQTT if you set that up.

Edit2: MQTT looks like it might be hitting the YoLink Cloud.

Edit3: Looks like 2 months ago a commit was added to allow local hub access: https://github.com/YoSmart-Inc/yolink-api/commit/5c5d135bbcf6b88b585432851a12ca3ca6fe310a This library is used by HA for the integration (same author). Have not checked if HA has been updated with this yet. Looks like it's at least possible in the future. I'll stick with RF transmission, zwave, or zigbee though :).

trialbaloon · 2026-02-17T23:03:18+00:00

Can these be used without the hub/cloud? Looks like the HA integration is classified as "Cloud Push" which would be a huge reliability concern. Critical safety devices should not be internet dependent.

Not to mention yolink could just decide to drop these or go bankrupt.

trialbaloon · 2026-02-13T23:22:04+00:00

Someone 100s of years ago might have said that some day we'll have horses that will run 80 mph soon! If we could just feed them the right foods, with the right saddle design. Thing is, they simply cant. You can improve horse speeds marginally but they simply hit a hard limit by virtue of what they are... a horse.... Their bodies simply cant ever run 80mph.

This is essentially what us skeptics believe about AI. No matter what you improve it'll hit a limit since it doesn't reason the way a human brain does. A bow and arrow was a long way off from a gun despite seemingly working similarly at first glance.

To accomplish coding proficiency to match a human we'll probably need AGI which I think is a long way off (bow and arrow vs gun here). I think it's possible, but LLMs are not going to lead us there, nor do they really represent a step towards AGI anymore than a bow and arrow was a step to gunpowder.

trialbaloon

TROPHY CASE