Voroxpete

Absolutely there’s a difference. LLMs, when it comes to this specific task, are better. That’s why they’re being used here. It’s a job they are uniquely well suited to. They do indeed come with high hardware requirements, which is why you’re not forced to use them, and why they provide the option to offload the work to a cloud service.

Personally I would absolutely not want to ever feed my documents into an off-device model, but the point of self-hosted software is that it does what you tell it to and they absolutely should include letting you make bad decisions.

I think you’re under the impression that the difference between those things is far greater than it actually is. Large Language Models work by developing statistical maps of associations. That’s discrimination. They’re a direct evolution of categorization models. The ability to associate a hash of a JPEG with “cat” is the same as the ability to associate “How are you?” with “Great, how about you?” It’s all associative mapping. LLMs are just the current leading edge of that technology. If you want to, for example, generate a list of tags that describe a document, an LLM is the best tool we currently have for doing that.

To put it another way, what you term “discriminative AI” is “generative AI.” It’s generating a category or list of categories in response to an input. That’s not functionally different than generating a sentence in response to a sentence, it’s just an order of magnitude less complex. You can argue terminology but the technology exists on an evolutionary curve, with no real hard boundaries.

Paperless and Papermerge have always done a lot more than just OCR. If that’s all they were, most people can do that already on the software that comes with their scanner. The core selling point of these applications is automatic categorization, sorting and tagging, and those have always relied on machine learning tools. Literally the first thing you do after setting Paperless up is start training the AI.

what’s the best alternative?

You’re asking for suggestions for an automatic document categorization tool that doesn’t use any automatic document categorization?

It reads as especially hysterical in this context, because Paperless is an automatic document categorization system, and I’m really sure what they think the automatic part of that is if it’s not “AI” of some broad description. Paperless, Papermerge et al are basically wrappers for machine learning tools and have been for as long as they’ve existed. LLMs are a natural and obvious fit for the kind of work these applications exist to do.

This just feels like someone reading “Improved AI pathfinding” in the patch notes for a video game and screaming “OH MY GOD IS NOWHERE SAFE?!”

Modern routers have a feature that’s typically known as “hairpin NAT”. This means that if the DNS lookup resolves to the router’s public IP, it routes the packet internally instead of passing it out to the internet. So for your subdomains all of the traffic should stay local.

At work we use Meshcentral. It requires you to host your own server, but it’s very powerful, and very reliable. We’re managing something like 400 remote systems with it currently. We also use Netbird as a secondary access layer (I prefer it to Tailscale for the simplicity of setting up ACLs, and the really easy deployment).

For most home server usage though, I wouldn’t bother with Meshcentral. It’s a lot of overhead if you’re only managing a couple of systems. If you really need remote desktop (why do your servers even have desktops?) use RustDesk instead.

RustDesk really is fantastic. No shade to any of the other solutions suggested in this thread, but 99% of the time when someone needs take desktop access, RustDesk is exactly what they need.

So, they had multiplayer, and it worked very well, but then they went through a whole bunch of major reworks to underlying systems that broke multiplayer, and they basically went “Yeah, that’s gonna stay broken for a while until we get all this shit done, please be patient.”

Project Zomboid is a blast, especially when you really dig into the options for changing game rules. You can basically craft your own custom zombie apocalypse. You can decide how the virus works, whether zombies are slow or fast, whether they have good eyesight, good hearing, how strong they are, where they spawn. You can change loot rarities, how long it’s been since the outbreak started, when the power gets shut off, etc, etc.

America not only doesn’t have the means, because of the tariffs it can no longer get the means. Manufacturing requires a lot of heavy industrial equipment that - surprise, surprise - isn’t made in the US.

But to say that Trump’s goal is to move production back to the US is almost giving him too much credit. He doesn’t really have a clear idea of what his goal is. Depending on the moment it changes, and the various goals he suggests are all contradictory; each one can only happen without the others. He says he’s imposing tariffs to move manufacturing home, but that only works if the tariffs are set to last a long time. But he also says he’s making deals, and that only works if the tariffs will be removed as part of the conclusion of the deal. And he says that the tariffs will replace taxes, but that only works if the tariffs are permanent, and imports remain at their current levels rather than manufacturing moving back to the US. For any one of those claims to be true, the other two can’t be.

There is no plan here. He just likes the idea of tariffs, because he has only ever understood the world through the lens of power; of dominating or being dominated. Tariffs feel big and muscular, like throwing punches but with money. That’s why he wants them. The rest is just excuses. It’s really all about his crippling insecurity, and the entire American right being in his thrall.

Fair enough. If your family are all tech savvy enough that that’s a good solution for them, then congratulations, and I’m jealous.

Counterpoint: I can access my friend’s Jellyfin servers, and they can access mine, without anyone else in the world knowing what the fuck we’re doing. Saying “It’s necessary” always begs the question “Why did you make it necessary?”

No need to abandon all the user-friendly aspects of a self-hosted streaming platform. Just use Jellyfin. I switched to it from Plex years ago and have never looked back.

Nvidia Shield. The regular version is $150 US and from what I understand it gives flawless playback. I have the pro version which is more powerful, but that’s specifically for running games.

It’s Android TV OS, so app selection is great. You can load Smart Tube Next on there to get YouTube without ads, and there’s a very solid Jellyfin app. You can also use Kodi for local direct playback. Remote is perfectly functional, and you can use an app to rebind most of the keys.