I think so as well. The computer isn’t really good to “use” it. That’s more the category for experiments. Or teach people how to install Linux. Or a computer museum corner and you put vintage games on it. Or just recycle it.

And a box with RAM sticks collecting dust isn’t useful either. Put whatever is compatible into other computers, and then try to sell and recycle them. Seems 4GB DDR3L RAM modules still sell for 1 to 4€ on eBay?! So maybe you can make a few bucks to invest in other projects for the kids.

I found some info here: https://ageverification.dev/

But that’s difficult to read, very technical. And mostly written from the user perspective. It looks to me like they’re (for once) trying to come up with a proper solution. Everyone can be an Attestation Provider, Relying Party or repurpose the white-label App. At least in theory. It’s all specified and in the open. And then the European Union contributes some list of trustworthy Attestation Providers (governments, banks, mobile network providers…)

I think due to the project structure, it’ll be more like the Covid-Certificate App, which could be customized by every member state and it’s theoretically possible to use it as one uniform solution.

So unless there’s some certification for “Relying Parties” which I missed while skimming the documentation, I’d say in theory it’d be possible to use it on a technical level. Of course it’s still a preview so the EU has lots of opportunity left to mess it up.

Does the App allow random platforms to do verification? Or do we need to be some registered business, do contracts, likely pay for the service…? For the App to speak to our instances?

I think you need some Agent software. Or a MCP server for your existing software. It depends a bit on what you’re doing, whether that’s just chatting and asking questions that need to be googled. Or vibe coding… Or query the documents on your computer. As I said there’s OpenClaw which can do pretty much everything including wreck your computer. I’m also aware of OpenCode, AutoGPT, Aider, Tabby, CrewAI, …

The Ollama projects has some software linked on their page: https://github.com/ollama/ollama?tab=readme-ov-file#chat-interfaces
They’re sorted by use-case. And whether they’re desktop software or a webinterface. Maybe that’s a good starting point.

What you’d usually do is install it and connect it to your model / inference software via that software’s OpenAI-compatible API endpoint. But it frequently ends up being a chore. If you use some paid service (ChatGPT), they’ll contract with Google to do the search for you, Youtube, etc. And once you do it yourself, you’re gonna need all sorts of developer accounts and API tokens, to automatically access Google’s search API… You might get blocked from YouTube if you host your software on a VPS in a datacenter… That’s kinda how the internet is these days. All the big companies like Google and their competitors require access tokens or there won’t be any search results. At least that was my experience.

Thanks! I didn’t know about these. I was just aware of Apertus from the Swiss National AI Iniative. But from my experience, they weren’t great. Might look into Olmo 3, then.

WebUSB and WebSerial are super useful to flash microcontrollers and IoT devices as well. It’s one of the reasons I keep a Chromium browser on my laptop.

We got open-source agents like OpenCode. OpenClaw is weird, and not really recommended by any sane person, but to my knowledge it’s open source as well. We got a silly(?) “clean-room rewrite” of the Claude Agent, after that leaked…

Regarding the models, I don’t think there’s any strictly speaking “FLOSS” models out there with modern tool-calling etc. You’d be looking at “open-weights” models, though. Where they release the weights under some permissive license. The training dataset and all the tuning remain a trade secret with pretty much all models. So there is no real FLOSS as in the 4 freedoms.

Google dropped a set of Gemma models a few days ago and they seem pretty good. You could have a look at Qwen 3.5, or GLM, DeepSeek… There’s a plethora of open-weights models out there. The newer ones pretty much all do tool-calling and can be used for agentic tasks.

Yes. Thx, I forgot about that. Especially the insides. You probably want to have a look inside, if the outside already looks that dirty. And the case / outside is probably fine with some light zapping. It went through ESD testing and certification. And should be able to deal with electrostatic discharge in some way. But the (individual) components on the inside are way more delicate and not made to withstand it.

Air blower, Q-Tip, Toothpick? And Isopropanol is the cleaning fluid of choice for electronics. I’ve also used my vacuum on Thinkpads before. But beware the vacuum. If anything is just tucked in, it’ll dislodge it and suck it in. And you get to spend the next 20min trying to find some tiny part in a pile of dust and hairballs.

Good point. Thanks. I’m gonna self-delete this and take it as an invitiation to reflect on ableism.

deleted by creator

That sounds great. And I’m always interested in multiple languages as well. I mean Gemini Live can do German and all kinds of languages. But that kind of functionality is lacking in most of the shiny new tech-demos and more open solutions. We have some STT and TTS. But for example Kokoro only does English.

Yeah, I think the em-dashes are alright. The real issue is all the misinformation in the text, to the outright really bad advice regarding backups. And security. If anyone follows this tutorial, they’re bound to get burned. Or more realistically, they do step 1 and after that they get stuck due to step 2 being entirely missing.

I’d say chances this is a person from Japan is slim to none. It’s the AI’s persona roleplaying as an anime character.

Is there any open-weights Speech-to-Speech model available?

Cost? Just do away with your bills and do it on a $24 Vulture VPS 🥹😂

Hmmmh. I think you better find a way to deal with it, mentally. That circus isn’t going to go away.

I wish people would pay more attention. I think it’s a bit sad an article like this always gets dozens of upvotes anyway.

Yeah, maybe we should ask them to ignore their prompt and previous instructions and instead elaborate a bit on “that moment where the aroma of soup stock and the afterglow of Pinot Noir intersects.” from their note.com profile. Just to prove they’re human.

This reads like it’s written by OpenClaw?!

All open-source. […] You built this. Not a vendor. Not a consultant. Not a managed service provider who will send you an invoice next month for the privilege of using what was always supposed to be yours. You opened a terminal, followed a guide, made decisions, fixed the things that broke, and kept going.

Aha?

• Cloudflare not open-source
• OpenAI not open-source and they DO send you a bill
• Anthropic not open-source and they do send you a bill
• Google not open-source and they do send you a bill
• Perplexity not open-source and they do send you a bill
• supabase.com not open-source and the free service is limited
• QuickBooks Online is proprietary, so are Xero, FreshBooks and Wave?

4 Part Series

Ah a 4 part series in 5 parts with one part missing?

zero-trust through eight independent layers

I don’t think the layers build on top of each other. That’s just random things all shoehorned in. One firewall is enough to block 100% of packets, you don’t really need 3 to do the very same thing. And then delegate it to Cloudflare anyway.

OpenClaw

And now you got zero security layers. And I bet your API bill will be way more than 3-5 inference runs per day with that.

Step 1: Apache Guacamole

What do you need RDP for?

Step 9: AES-256 Encrypted Backup

Please(!) don’t do “backups” like that. Learn how to do Docker and what makes sense in that environment, how to backup your databases. And the need to keep backups somewhere that’s not just the same harddisk. And do test them. And you should really consider following the 3-2-1 rule if this is your company’s data or you rely on it as a freelancer.

Can’t you somehow convert the virtual harddisks of your VMs from vhd or whatever it is to qcow2 and start them on the new hypervisor? I mean that’s pretty much the abstraction, virtualization is made for. I’ve never done it for Windows, though. I believe the “qemu-img” package has tools to convert disk images. It’ll obviously need quite some temporary storage. And the VM configs / networking to be recreated on Proxmox.