Opensource

Lately, there is a need of private chatbot service as a complete alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. So, I decide to implement one at home and make it accessible to everyone in my household alongside with my network printer and NAS (OpenMediaVault). In the past, I used to recommend people using Llama series for English tasks and Qwen series for Chinese tasks. There was no open-source model that’s strong enough in multilingual tasks comparing to proprietary ones (GPT/Claude). ...

Eventually, I found myself with enough leisure and motivation to set up a crypto wallet. For my situation, investing time and money into my skills, knowledge, and projects yields more return and safer than in finance. But in this time, I found some good VPN deals which I would like to pay with XMR. Plus it’s convenient to have some spare crypto in wallet for making donations to my favorite creators and projects, so it’s time to set things up. ...

Recently I came down to want a mobile hotspot when going out of home, something like Netgear Nighthawk M series, but able to flash custom firmware (OpenWrt/pfSense equivalents) and cheap. However, there is no such thing on the market even without budget consideration. So it has to be done with DIY, like USB tethering with a router. In the case of tethering or so called Ethernet over USB, we are using a phone as a cellular modem for our router. ...

RustDesk is my favorite remote desktop tool which is the best alternative to any closed-source solutions, such as TeamViewer and Anydesk. It’s kinda like Bitwarden in the post-breach era of the cloud password manager (LastPass/1Password) market. As a light user of RustDesk, I use it only occasionally. So I didn’t setup my own RD server on VPS even though I suppose to. For some reason, one of my RustDesk client got blocked to the official servers. So now I have enough reason to properly making it up. ...

the “Open Source AI Manifesto” Mark Zuckerberg has been hated by Richard Stallman for decades and he is the only person who appears on both cover image of the video essays: How the Internet was Stolen and How AI was Stolen by Then & Now. However, things has changed recently after his adoption of the Fediverse and open-sourcing of Llama continuously. In Zuckerberg’s latest “Open Source AI Manifesto”, he stated 5 needs of open-source: We need to train, fine-tune, and distill our own models. We need to control our own destiny and not get locked into a closed vendor. We need to protect our data. We need a model that is efficient and affordable to run. We want to invest in the ecosystem that’s going to be the standard for the long term. That describes the needs of tech individuals and small businesses accurately. ...