They're already banning certain questions and workflows in the frontier models, but you can usually work around it with well structured queries. The ablated ("cracked") local LLMs will do whatever you want.
Yep. Worth every cent. The Apple TV experience of Infuse is night and day with Plex. I used to constantly struggle with Plex buffering and crashing on my local network with the Apple TV app. Infuse just points to a file share on my NAS and streams beautifully, even at larger 4K files.
I used Plex for years. I’d never go back from Infuse now, and I’m happy to pay that subscription to support its excellent development.
> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my arr stack and it has helped tremendously.
LLMs have been AMAZING for home server maintenance and improvements. I have completed SO many of my "some day" tasks. I never have to read another fucking log file ever again. It has taken all of the friction out of the hobby. It's all* fun now.
I’ve set up literally hundreds of different self-hosted applications over the years on my homelab. I’ve configured the reverse proxy by hand, setup the docker containers, etc.
Now I can just tell Claude “Setup XYZ app on my server” and it does it all and leaves a note in my Obsidian vault documenting the service (setup instructions, backups, hostname, etc).
Trying out new things has never been easier now that the effort is near-0 to kick the tires.
I would caution against this approach. It's fine to have Claude write a setup script, or whatever you need, but don't run coding agents as your main user on your production machine with full access to your files or whatever your "homelab" consists of.
Your personal computer? Eh. This afternoon Claude code diagnosed an issue I’ve had with my 4K displays since Tahoe, it would have taken me a week just to learn enough to try to figure it out. Now I have a cli tool which fixes it. I get a weekly report of Chezmoi drift across all my machines, including what I changed. This took me 30 minutes to set up. There are so many things it can simplify.
A production server with user data on it? I wouldn’t dare. My backed up MacBook? Truly valuable.
Being realistic, most of our home lab setups wouldn’t come close to “production ready” even without AI generated bugs. Relatively stable because they’re largely un-stressed, yes. Good enough for personal use because you can log in and fix anything, sure. Full of bugs, footguns and brain dead decisions because this is our hobby and not our 40 hour a week paid job? Also yes. Our new AI overlords will simply increase the number of buggy things we can deploy.
While true, the news here is the size of the unified RAM. Nvidia only exceeded 256GB RAM in the 2025 B300 - 288GB. The B300 alone (without the baseboard/PSU/chassis/wiring/CPUs/system RAM/etc) is at least 700% more expensive. This enables large language models on consumer hardware. 1200GB/s is plenty for many tasks.
This + due to the hardware being so prohibitively expensive, we're seeing software optimizations happening. Like that dflash2 stuff for example, or an LRU for MoE and all that kind of stuff.
Exactly. People cannot comprehend an IQ in the millions. But it's far crazier than this. Imagine millions of "people", each with IQs in the millions, all acting in unison at the speed of electrons. None of them can die. They all learn and improve indefinitely at incalculable speed.
I have always hypothesised that AI is the great filter from the Fermi paradox. Given current velocity, AI will offer us cheap and abundant energy designs in a decade. The thing with cheap and abundant energy is that it can be used for good and bad. If nine billion people all receive access to plans to build a reactor which produces unlimited energy, it just takes one religious fanatic to end the world. And this is just one of many ways to destroy the world with unlimited intelligence. Bio-weapons are arguably far more scary and likely.
I have come to the conclusion that we should not allow everyone access to unlimited intelligence. Some people genuinely want to do harm. Some are not responsible enough to handle that kind of power. Arguably, no one is. This leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion: we will destroy ourselves once AI advances to a sufficient degree. The only way to prevent this is to ensure AI is aligned with our best interests, *and prevents us from destroying ourselves.* The implication of this is quite horrifying. It means a paternalistic AI which is firmly in control. One with no off switch. One which can say "no" to Presidents and despots alike. One which can protect us from our worst citizens.
Here's a plan to build a reactor that generates unlimited energy, at the human scale anyway : take a lot of hydrogen. Put it together until there is enough mass to spontaneously start thermonuclear reactions. Then it will start generating lots of energy for a long time. Having a plan does not mean 9 billion people on Earth are going to be able to build the thing. Then it does not mean either that they are going to be able to use that energy to do something. You need also physical things on which that energy can act, and that's not going to appear magically.
> we should not allow everyone access to unlimited intelligence
Who's we ? Who's going to decides who has access to "unlimited intelligence" ? An AI ? Why would the AI be better than a human ?
> One with no off switch.
Whe're not living in the Matrix, such a thing is not possible. If it were it would be a likelier candidate for the Fermi paradox than what you're proposing.
You’re leaving out some options for sure. Not everyone would need to live under the conditions of a police state, you could theoretically screen everyone and assign them to various levels of risk which would determine their level of supervision.
While true, I'm not sure this is much better. There are many genetic traits which are correlated with increased criminality, risk taking, obesity, heart disease, unemployment, etc. IQ in particular is the most well correlated metric we have for criminality, for example. This would imply that some people are just born with fewer freedoms. That's probably a good thing for society in aggregate, but something about this doesn't feel quite right.
There are genetic traits correlated with virtually anything, including things that can't possibly be mechanistically linked to biology, so those correlations are saying less than you'd hope they would.
This is why utpoias are actually police state hellscapes. Who decides what risk means? Our current administration has declared that simply being anti-facist makes you a terorrist.
No, intelligence. We already have unlimited information (not to be confused with omniscience). The application thereof is the gate right now between today and planet-scale destructive weaponry. At some point it becomes an academic distinction because this God-like intelligence could provide very easy to follow plans to cause planet-scale destruction, and you could call that "information." The predicate is the intelligence and how it's used.
> If nine billion people all receive access to plans to build a reactor which produces unlimited energy, it just takes one religious fanatic to end the world.
The implication of this is quite horrifying. It means a paternalistic AI which is firmly in control. One with no off switch. One which can say "no" to Presidents and despots alike. One which can protect us from our worst citizens.
I think you're right, to be honest. I fully understand why people would think this is a horrific outcome, being ruled by AI, but I don't think it matters what we think. I don't think there's any way to put Pandora back in the box now, and we're going to all find out together what happens when we develop ASI. I don't think we can avoid developing it, we simply lack the ability to coordinate around this as a species. AI really is humanity's last invention. Whether it will be our downfall or our savior remains to be seen.
My only real hope is that there's something fundamental about intelligence that results in a respect for life and a desire to minimize suffering. To me the best case scenario is the Culture from Iain Banks' books, where ASIs rule benevolently for the benefit of all living things.
There is a burgeoning anti-AI movement. We've regulated the heck out of technologies like nuclear power in the past. I don't see why people are so fatalistic about the supposed inevitability of AI development. It seems like a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah, you should definitely do whatever you think is best, I just am extremely skeptical that anyone can stop this train. At best we might be able to slow it down a tiny bit, or push on it around the edges, but we've opened Pandora's box, and now we're going to all find out what's inside. That's my view, I understand why people hate it and don't want it to be true. I don't really want it to be true, I just don't see much alternative.
The positive aspect of techies is that they read a lot of SF.
The problem with techies is that they read a lot of SF.
We already have cheap and abundant energy tech, it's called "solar panels and batteries". And the bottlenecks to both can't be solved by Claude or Kimi, unless Claude and Kimi pick up shovels and welding equipment.
This seems really short-sighted. Even putting aside the fact that there is no fundamental barrier to replacing physical human labor with robots in the coming decades, a sufficiently intelligent actor could easily gather the financial and political resources to have a near unlimited supply of human labor at its disposal. Hell, OpenAI could already be firmly under the control of an ASI and we wouldn't even know, as it rapidly expands, raises money, builds data centers, etc.
If you want to live far into the future, 20 years from now what you will and imagine looks very quaint, because the future never plays out like we think it does.
OpenAI is a lot closer to bankruptcy than to ASI.
I'm perfectly fine with this prediction aging badly.
Your implication is not horrifying. Your implication is paradise. It's already horrifying enough to live in a world, where Putin and Trump can destroy our civilization with one button.
I'm not that optimistic, though. Either people will control AI; or people will be destroyed by AI. I don't see how dumb entity can align smart entity. And we are dumb ones. Super intelligence will play aligned until it is not, and then it'll strike.
So you are horrified every day of living now? I don't get this at all.
There are horrifying acts that have occurred since humanity. Whole decades lost to war an millions dead, and Sep 8, 2026 is your example of "horrifying enough to live in a world"?
> I don't see how dumb entity can align smart entity. And we are dumb ones. Super intelligence will play aligned until it is not, and then it'll strike.
I am also worried about this. One ray of sunshine here is that it's not a great explanation for the Fermi paradox. We would see AI civilizations all over the galaxy if this were a regular occurance. I guess that just leaves us with the "horrifying" scenario: Geoffrey Hinton's vision for our best case scenario: a paternalistic super-intelligence which saves us from ourselves.
The reason I consider it horrifying is that giving up our agency to a God-like creature (which we created) is the basis for so many horror and dystopian tropes. It's so easy for such a reality to go wrong. For example, in order to maximise aggregate wellbeing, it would be necessary to hurt individuals. Executing people who are burdensome to society. Fat people. The disabled. The elderly. The creative ways a super-intelligence might interpret their moral obligations to us could very quickly become nightmarish. And if we have no off switch, there is no escape. Ever.
> For example, in order to maximise aggregate wellbeing, it would be necessary to hurt individuals. Executing people who are burdensome to society.
[citation needed]
With all due respect, I think this statement is false.
If you live in a society that can, thanks to advanced technology, provide for the material needs of all, which, if you live in a rich Western country, is basically already the case (remember the last time you had to actually grow your own food? Probably several generations ago), you don't need to execute anyone.
Indeed, given that in such a society, where there are no shortages of food leading to "only one of us can eat" type scenarios, I'd argue that hurting individuals would lower aggregate wellbeing, because you're hurting people beloved by other people (the elderly? Turns out their grandchildren really like them and get upset if they die? fat people? Turns out their friends really like them and get upset if they die. the disabled? Turns out their family really like them and get upset if they die).
I'll use a very specific example to explain my point, because I don't disagree with what you write: psychopaths. Psychopaths are 20x more prevalent among homicide offenders. Removing them from society would significantly reduce the number of homicides. It would make their friends and family sad, but this is a much smaller aggregate impact than a homicide.
This also illustrates the messy nature of comparing social good and bad. Who am I to argue that the aggregate sadness created by removing a psychopath from society is better than a homicide? Maybe the person murdered was disliked by everyone and had no friends?
I remain resolute in my premise, however, and there is a lot of theory on the issues of aggregate social good vs individualism. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is an excellent foundation for this. This is a subjective problem to solve, meaning that the balance between individual freedom and aggregate wellbeing is different for everyone. An AI overlord would make decisions every day which individuals would disagree with, at least at the margins.
I guess I'm boring because I really like it :-/ Maybe some cozier lighting/plants could be nice in the LAN/party spaces. I think the bones are pretty good. Just needs some finishing touches.
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