I’m self hosting on an old laptop, and I’m a convert for life. Self-hosting is amazing. Looking for other people’s weirdest examples of what they’re doing as inspiration.
My example, I recently set up a grammar script, where I have a couple 8b LLMs and an html landing page. I upload a doc and it corrects grammar and highlights changes it made, or just proofreads and I make changes manually. I can upload a novel before bed, and have suggestions based on specific writing styles in the morning. All local, perfectly suited for my own work.
I’ve written a Signal bot that listens for messages from my wife and me. It’s for sharing pictures of our daughter with a small list of people that want baby pics. The images we send it get blurred and sent as a preview, with an unblurred version sent as a “view once” image. Each blurred image contains an ID so that recipients can request the images again.
Does the signal bot need its own phone number?
I think I read somewhere, that Signal just recently allowed registration without phone number (“just” a spare device and a one-time payment, it’s in Android Beta, apparently), so that’ll work now.
Yep. I keep an old phone for the bot to be a linked device.
God that sucks.
Why not use SimpleX or Wire or Matrix?
What would be the advantage?
No phone number needed. Can run directly on a non-phone server.
Also more secure and trustworthy because it’s open source.
But Signal is open source…?
Getting a phone number was relatively cheap and easy, so for a one-off implementation, Signal was an easy choice as it’s what many friends and family already use.
The phone number part significantly degrades your privacy and security
Also the signal app depends on non free software blobs, which is a huge risk to security. Claiming that Signal is open source is disingenuous. Parts of it are open source. As a whole, it is not.
I’m not here to fight you. I was replying with a cool thing I wrote to share baby pics to family and friends, not trying to be the most perfect hardcore op sec person on the internet.
People I know use Signal. I have never even heard of two of the three services mentioned higher up the thread.
When I wrote it I was dealing with a newborn, auditing whether Signal passes some No True Scotsman test for open source-ness was really not my priority.
Ugh, this kind of response is so off-putting. You can reply if you like but I’m probably just going to delete the whole damn comment thread because fuck this kind of purity test bullshit.
I wasn’t asking for fucking feedback on my work.
That’s very cool!