Agreed. Reading this, or trying to, I was switching back and forth between “this is missing information” and “why provide this additional explanation?” The target audience isn’t clear. Either go for the technical deep dive or provide a much higher-level explanation of what happened. Not this… mess in between.

Gentoo user: “Of course we build from source! (What are snaps?)”

No joke: I just built a low-end server based on DDR3. Got 32 GB for 40 EUR.

Better to use apt-get though. That way you don’t even need to bother with the dumpster fire that is Windows 11.

Predatory

It’s gonna happen for real this time. Cryptocurrency NFTs AI and cryptocurrency will upend the market with how incredible they have been.

You forgot the Metaverse. (Like you should.)

it won’t happen again.

Not to him, no.

I’d fork this just to name it more appropriately: “Glasshole radar”

They found out the hard way that abuse is only tolerated if you have passed a certain wealth threshold.

Appreciate the call to reason. Yet, though this may have been sharply worded, insulting it was not.

This should have many more upvotes. The security incidents quoted at the start of this article have no relation to its actual topic, i.e. the hypothesis that there may be increased fragility of supply chains as a result of AI adoption. While it’s plausible this may happen, the article makes it sound like this has happened when it clearly hasn’t. In other words: it’s little more than “hurr, durr, AI dangerous”.

Except AI is trash at doing what it’s advertised to do, it makes everybody dumber, and its shills will blame you once it inevitably mucks everything up.

We don’t even have “AI”. We have LLMs, aka chatbots, aka glorified digital parrots that, just because they’re eloquent and sound competent, management with little to no technical expertise feels can replace large parts of the workforce.

If we just called it “cyberparrots” instead of “AI”, maybe more people would their limited utility and the utter folly of having these take over ever larger portions of business procedures.

Vista, more likely. Win 7 wasn’t a chonky one (for the hardware of the time).

If you’ve got that experience under your belt, you’ll be just fine. I haven’t tackled zfs myself yet (I’m lacking the RAM, plus I was put off by the ECC RAM recommendation). But I know it unifies a lot of the things you’re already familiar with under one roof (volume management and journaling) and adds more cool features (snapshotting, RAID, encryption, bitrot protection) without you having to combine and manage several different technologies (mdadm for RAID, LVM, LUKS, …). I did that on my main rig and it turned out to be rather complex. Hence the switch to btrfs to at least squash a bit of complexity.

If you’d rather continue working with the storage technologies you know and avoid zfs, you may want to look into other OSs than TrueNAS (because that is zfs only). Two I’m running and can recommend are

• Open Media Vault: great for beginners (friendly, though dated-looking web UI), but Debian-based underneath and hence reasonably flexible if you know your way around the CLI, which you probably will. Case in point: mine is no longer just used as a NAS, but runs somewhere between 10-20 Docker containers, and I rarely touch the webUI these days.
• Proxmox: You mentioned VMs, so you’re probably familiar with this one. I like its flexibility, allowing me to run each VM tailored to its purpose: a NAS VM for network shares, a hardened, minimal VM for publicly available services and Wireguard access into the network, an LXC as a local DNS server…

Props for the powerful DIY! You’re right about the pre-built models. I’m coming from a QNAP one, and while they’re good for learning the ropes, they’ll become pretty limited after a while. That, and the shit they’re trying to pull with proprietary HDDs.

A self-made rig gives you a lot more flexibility, although it requires you to learn a bit more. But seeing that you’re already getting comfortable with GFS, I guess you’ll manage just fine!

cocks revolver

“Give me liberty or give me death!” Classic!

Same. Scored two 16TB drives and a 4GB in summer of 2025 (by pure chance though). They’re now 150%-200% the original price. Cannot wait to see this bubble pop.

SSDs were first, actually, with HDDs now following suit.

That’s a much more sophisticated setup than mine! It may even be overkill (depending on what it is you want to host, and to how many).

I’ve been running two enterprise-grade Toshiba 16TB drives in a btrfs RAID1 since last summer. No SSD for caching (though the OS and my Docker containers run on one, with regular syncs to the slower spinning drives). No complaints so far.

The worst part is that we don’t something, and by saying something, I mean boycott them.

Boycott is under way. In my bubble, people are ditching American goods and services left and right, including Windows. The combination of “Murica first” (fascist edition) and big tech overreach has prompted people to make good use of their middle fingers.