1/ on the Ideal Home Dat...

1/ On the ideal home data center I tweeted out that more people should have home data centers (for freedom, I think) and now people are asking me what I mean and I am going to expand on the thought. This is a work in progress, I am not 100% sure, welcome input (View Tweet)

Note: home media center

2/ The design spec of this thread is "what does perfection look like?" This partially overlaps with my current setup but is not my current setup. This is my "I wave my magic wand and fairy godmother sets it up" setup (View Tweet)

3/ This is also not my recommendation for "area person" - this is overkill for most people at this stage. For most people I will be absolutely thrilled if they spend $100 and get a hardware wallet and stop fumbling their NFTs to dumb hacks. So this is "advanced mode" (View Tweet)

4/ Let's start with crypto: ✅A BTC full node ✅An ETH full node ✅IPFS and Arweave to pin/support not just your NFTs but other content too You make the network stronger and you pick up some incremental self-sovereignty. Lightning? Counterparty? Ordinals? maybe dunno. (View Tweet)

5/ Now let's got to data: I think people should keep local copies of all their important electronic data ✅Your computer files ✅Photos and videos ✅Backups of cloud-based data - your gmail account, your tweets and so on. ✅Medical data Keep more data - AIs will gobble it up (View Tweet)

6/ What about non-electronic data? Well, you should digitize it too! ✅Photos, videos, negatives, etc (including your families) ✅Interesting family documents These two are the must-dos - how far further is up to you - do you digitize mix tapes, a receipt from a date, I dunno. (View Tweet)

7/ Getting data out of centralized services on an ongoing basis (to keep a local copy) is a nuisance. Most of them do offer ways to do it, but it takes work to figure it out, it is more work to remember how to do it and so on. But it is probably worth it (View Tweet)

8/ If you are a home automation person, then that data might be interesting to keep too ✅Security camera footage ✅Weather station data Again, there is no limit to how far this can go. I once put commercial temperature sensors in my fridge to see what was going on in there. (View Tweet)

9/ Unrelated learning: If you put a hot soup or stew in your fridge to "cool it off", it really is a disaster. Your fridge temperature will rise above safe levels for hours. The formal advice on food safety is right here, I have tested it empirically (View Tweet)

10/ How are do you go with your media? Do you rip your DVDs to have a backup? (do you even own DVDs anymore?) Do you scan (destructively) any books to have truely owned digital copies? Do you buy any MP3s? Much harder questions in streaming days (View Tweet)

11/ But assuming you have done, whatever you have done, on data, then as of "more or less 2023", interesting possibilities open up for your own private LLM / GPT model. State of the art in "in the wild" models is increasing, you can find them on huggingface (View Tweet)

12/ I would not give OpenAI access to all my data but I would to a locally hosted model. Does that mean retraining/fine-tuning/waiting for context windows to be bigger to shove all your medical history into a query about why your head hurts? I dunno yet (View Tweet)

13/ Unlike the crypto infrastructure that is now quite settled for the big chains, the model of "how you can run JARVIS in your home" is just now being worked out. You need GPT4 brain+larger context window+your legacy and real-time data pre-integrated+local hosting (View Tweet)

14/ This does not exist yet, either out of the box, or at all to be honest. But you can imagine it existing soon, so you can get on with the part of getting your data organized to prepare for that day (View Tweet)

15/ There might be some crossover areas too - there are some decentralized crypto networks that will theoretically run machine learning models. Could this make it into the "host your own" bucket? Maybe, though for now way too early to know if they will work. (View Tweet)

16/ So where are we? ✅Crypto nodes ✅Full life/family data ✅Media (maybe) ✅Home automation systems ✅Backup of your cloud systems ✅Your own GPT model This is not a trivial setup! (View Tweet)

17/ And dream hardware? ✅server closet w/racks ✅AC/ventilation/security ✅NAS (network attached storage) ✅UPS w/solar + battery backup ✅ISP w/Starlink backup ✅proper network setup with VPN (View Tweet)

18/ And of course this is a single point of failure so you should probably back up [x] of this data to S3. and if you are really fancy and have more than 1 home, ideally in more than 1 country, sync it to another NAS there too (View Tweet)

19/ Now: is this unreasonable? kindof should everyone do it? no have I done this? in part do I aspire to the full thing? yes, I think how much would this cost? $5K to $30K I think depending on how aggressive you get. it is a clear luxury good but not for billionaires only (View Tweet)

20/ The real cost is "your time to get up to speed to do this" This type of setup will take between hundreds and thousands of hours of your life to do. Is it worth it? It depends. Probably more so if you consider your learning to be part of the value. (View Tweet)

21/ In other words, if you find psychological satisfaction in knowing you have your own Ethereum node, you use your own RPC, you know that you know how to do all this, well it makes it more worth it. If this is all just a drag, well. a hardware wallet is good enough. (View Tweet)

22/ I think what I am trying to saying more precisely is that basically 0% of people to this right now, but I think maybe 5% have the capacity (economic, time, education) to do it. And, in time, some of this can be more out of the box and we can go to 15% or 25%. (View Tweet)

23/ Middle/upper middle class/upper class households in America spend $5K+ and lots of time on dumber things than: "ensuring your financial and intellectual sovereignty is under your control" So I think we can move off the 0.0001% adoption rate we have today. (View Tweet)

24/ As mentioned, this is stream of consciousness, so I am sure I am missing lots of things and look forward to learning about them in the replies below (View Tweet)