I’ve had several occasions in my life where I’ve tried to switch to Linux only to run into hardware incompatibilities that would have taken me man-months to solve. Thanks to GPT my primary personal PC, home media and project server is now running Linux and fully functional. I’ve got Jellyfin, NextCloud, Navidrome and Joplin all happy. I’ve also been able to wipe an obsolete MacOS off my 2017-era Macbook Pro and it’s happily running Mint.
There’s a deep irony in Windows being enshittified by AI, while the same AI makes Linux about a billion times more usable. Now I have a leftover Windows micro-PC running a local LLM model, so I can be less dependent on GPT, as long as time isn’t a factor…
I was never really against AI, and used the free things for most of the time. I moved to paying for AI once I started homelabbing, I have saved so much money with being able to move my things to my LAN. If I could afford a computer with a strong enough GPU it would be great.
I was able to setup a firewall running OpenWRT that I had tried searching the internet for help but it was always way over my head.
So, word of caution. Be careful. I tried using Copilot to open a connection for a single port between two LANs on my network in pfsense, as I didn’t know pfsense. It happily recommended opening 0.0.0.0/0 on the first LAN’s gateway address. It worked!.. By opening everything on the whole network up to anything at all. The problem with AI: you can only use it if you already know enough to catch its horrible screw ups.
The problem with AI is that it doesn’t push back. It is fantastic at manipulating your emotions.
I noticed that there are sometimes huge differences between models and providers. ChatGPT, which most people use, is a useless sycophant because it’s made to value user satisfaction higher than factual correctness (so it makes shit up und basically never pushes back if you challenge it). When using Mistral AI I had the AI tell me outright that I’m wrong (though it still generated very friendly text to do so, and it only properly does it when in “thinking” mode). No clue how Anthropic or Google do in this regard, just that ChatGPT is especially awful. In the end all models are risky.
Yeah I do know a little bit of networking and I would have definitely looked up opening 0.0.0.0/0. Not saying you did a bad or anything dergatory but I do double check things I am uncomfortable with.
Yeah, I know enough too, but I worry about the sneaky details I don’t know.