I self-host everything I can. Unfortunately email is a bit tough these days but I should start archiving it locally. What tools are you using for that?
I haven't done much experimenting with local AI models yet - probably need some newer hardware for that to be worthwhile.
I wrote some code with an IMAP lib. Wasn't too happy with out of the box things.
The smaller Deepseek models are most interesting for self hosting LLM's at the moment. Impressive! Many other ML Things need a lot less compute, though. Like facial recognition, spam filtering, etc.
Good god. This is why I will continue to repair my older car until it's completely infeasible to do so. Then what? Are there internet communities out there actively working on disabling all this nonsense? Can't imagine buying a car like this without knowing I can physically disable the cell modem.
I've been using an amalgamation of pyenv, pip-tools, black, isort, etc. for projects and just gave uv and ruff a try. Wow, it really is fast! Skeptical of anything VC-backed but I'll be keeping my eye on it.
I find it hard not to see "AI safety" in a similar vein as "the war on drugs". I truly can't imagine it ever succeeding (nor do I want it to, despite the unfortunate outcome in Las Vegas).
And the mention that the New Orleans bomber played the "assassination" game Among Us harkens back to previous eras trying to pin blame for violence on video games. At least the media didn't seem to run with the idea for very long.
and also useless as a collaboration tool, now you need email infrastructure up to be able to work. I don't think I ever need email to do my job. Slack can be down to, all I need is github/gitlab
You can viably run git over sneakernet. Yes if you decide to use a specific communication service, that service needs to be up, but git itself is entirely agnostic.
I find it increasingly hard to justify any sort of SaaS subscription these days. Is the value you get out of Microsoft 365 really that much greater than any of the open source alternatives? So much better that you let a corporation dictate the terms of your computing environment?
It honestly makes me angry. And I say that as someone who works in the industry for a SaaS company. The only SaaS I reluctantly pay for is Fastmail and that's only because it's basically impossible to host your own email these days if you care about your email actually getting delivered to all those Gmail and Outlook inboxes out there.
Are you kidding me? For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / products. Let's list some major ones.
Exchange online with 100GB mailbox.
Onedrive with 1TB storage
Sharepoint with 1TB storage allocation as I am 1 user
Full desktop office applications
Full browser office applications
Forms - so basically functional enough SurveyMonkey
Teams
Planner
Bookings, so Calendly...
Anti-virus
MDM
MAM
Windows 10/11 Enterprise
AAD, a full identity provider with MFA, SCIM, Federation, support for 1000s of integrations
A ton of security and audit features to go with all of this.
There is nothing even close to this... adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO...
MS has a good deal on offer if you're an IT department looking to pay less for a suite of SaaS tools that would be more expensive as one-offs. But very little of this is appealing as an actual user. It's basically Office and an inconvenient to use 2TB of storage.
When someone is saying how they don't want to keep paying for SaaS it's almost certainly as an individual because businesses in a position to buy all this crap are large enough where this isn't even a blip.
I pay $89 for 15 months of Outlook for Families thing, which gives me onedrive, office and ad free outlook, credit monitoring and centrally managed anti-virus for a family of 6... You are not beating that in any other provider. Credit and dark web monitoring alone per person will cost that much per month.
It depends. If you need basic word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and email, you can definitely get by with alternatives. If you want more advanced functionality, you’re more likely to run into limitations or just things that work differently than what you might be used to. Microsoft 365 is not better in every way, but it’s a strong contender.
I suspect the familiarity and compatibility probably cinches it for a lot of people. Honestly, the convenience and familiarity are valuable, even if you and I would prefer open source options were more popular.
Microsoft 365 is good value, and it comes with many services. I wouldn’t have a personal license but it makes a lot of sense at work if you don’t mind sharing your data with USA.
