Interest groups. Hobbies. Travel. Volunteers. Book clubs. That sort of thing. Cast your net wide enough and you are sure to get someone.

It took me 6 deploys to finally understand all the mechanisms. What I like about self-hosting and the open source mantra in general is that every failure is a lesson with field experience. So skills development and acquisition is fairly easy if you push for it and once you get it, its wash, rinse, repeat.

Self hosting is not always about hosting at home. A private VPS/VDS, co-located server that you own/lease and operate is essentially that. I take self hosting as not turning to big tech for the very same solutions I can spin up myself on a private server.

That being said, self hosting also involves servers at home that run personal services.

My line of work is mostly in business. Getting people to operate their businesses with open source tools on private servers, local, in the country and abroad, as they wish.

So there is a bit of work you need to do, but if you manage your server well, do DMARC, DKIM, SPF etc and then nip it in the bud when you get warnings, its very easy to manage. Its about responsibility. Bad actors exist, but careful operators prevail.

There are very easy steps you can take here. It seems complicated, but there are tools for this and with a VPS/VDS, you can be up and running in under an hour if you are technically inclined. Moving to my own email, is by far, one of the best things I have done in my life.

I just launched a business to help non technical people identify and selfhost their business tools. I faced such problems when I lived in a fascist country and now that I live in a fascist country again, I figured its a good way to go.

Lol. Yeah. Been through that. I find myself wanting to start new subs, then I am reminded of the horror show, and I move on.

Looks like you found a niche and are about to start a new sub.

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An analytics tool?

Same here. Makes me consider just doing my own thing instead and rolling my own extra backup system. Something to consider.

That aside, I’m surprised at how there is a VPS limitation at both Netcup and OVH. Netcup is selling ARM as the closest alternative. OVH is selling Canada as the closest option. I found it weird.

Had considered Hetzner, not going down that route. If only Scaleway had services in the US. Well, their snapshots are marked as copy on write, so my assumption is that for every write, there is replication somewhere.

Check their website.

https://www.netcup.com/en/server/root-server/rs-1000-g11-iv-12m#rs-1000-g11-iv-12m-nue

I was working on cal.com two days ago. I saw this.

If they lied, they will get what’s coming to them ;)

From Google

A punishment or fate that someone deserves.

I’ve been planning for two years now on how to successfully put this together.

First thing I realised I would have to learn is tools like Blender, Gimp (which I will likely replace with Krita), etc. cause regardless of how well AI produces, you need to tidy things up.

Then there is story boarding. No amount of AI can replace professionalism. So this is an important skill to have.

Then there are the layouts. All that. I learnt how to use Scribus for layouts and Inkscape is always handy.

My main struggle will be maintaining consistency which has improved consistently over the last two years, and I’ve been reading a ton of comics to learn the sort of views and angles they use.

I can’t allow AI to generate text for me, cause that loses the plot. I might as well just prompt a story up and put it on Amazon and move on. I don’t want to do that. Instead I let it suggest better phrasing, words, basically a better editor.

I also created my own theme and it, very nicely, points out when I lose the plot. I then ask it to point out where my story sucks and it will also point that out. If I run my text through an AI text detector, I get like 1-2% written by AI which I believe any AI language tool would do. It points out where it detects the AI written text and I work on it and remove the text. GPT has a habit of adding its own text and does not stick to the boundaries set.

Well, if I am going to push this into the project I envision, privacy is going to be key, so everything will be done locally. I have privacy concerns about running on someone else’s hardware regardless of the provided guardrails and layers of protection I can provide for myself.

I used to use Languagetool and Scribens but found my current working model as the best for me at the moment. I will definitely look at options as I move to the next chapter so Languagetool is still an option. Also, I believe they went AI too? At least online?

I’m an author working on an online story series. Just finished S04. My editing was shit and I could not afford to pay someone to do it for me.

So I write the story, rewrite the story, put it through GPT to point out irregularities, grammatical errors, inconsistencies etc, then run it through Zoho’s Zia for more checks and finally polish it off with a final edit of my own. This whole process takes around a year.

Overall, quality improved, I was able to turn around stuff quicker and it made me a lot more confident about the stuff I am putting out there.

I also use Bing image creator for the artwork and have seen my artwork improve dramatically from what Dream (Wombo) used to generate.

Now I am trying to save up to get a good GPU so that I can run Stable Diffusion so that I can turn it into a graphic novel.

Naturally I would like to work with an artist cause I can’t draw but everyone I meet asks for 20 - 30k dollars deposit to do the thing. Collaborations have been discussed and what I’ve learnt is that as times get tough, people are requesting for greater shares in the project than I, the originator, have. At some point when I was discussing with an artist, he was side lining me and becoming the main character. I’m not saying that all artists are like this, but dang, people can be tough to deal with.

I respect that people have to eat, but I can’t afford that and I have had this dream for years so finally I get a chance to pull it off. My dream can’t die without me giving it my best so this is where I am with AI.