The Discussion:
We talked about AI and fake news, and found the factcheck.org as a great resource, especially around election time.
Next RustDesk was the big topic, which is useful for remote access to Linux, Windows and Android (yes, even smart phones) devices. Carl related how it is easy to install, configure and run the optional server. By doing this all connections can be privately managed. For simple use, perhaps to manage a relative’s computer, a private server is not needed, since there is a very responsive server provided by default. In this case, it would be easy to send someone a download link, have them run the installer, then send you the access code. No password needs to be exchanged, making this setup quite secure, even if someone were to overhear the instructions.
The discussion then turned to wifi connections and specifically to running Open WRT54 on a Linksys router.
We wrapped it up talking about AI and the advantages of running your LLMs on local hardware. Keith talked about alpaca as an option to run llama3.1. The chatbot was quite impressive although not as fast as most online offerings. Keith gave us a short demo which only teased us into wanting more. Perhaps next time we’ll have a discussion dedicated to ollama and self-hosted chatbots.