Its obviously not universal. No movement is a monolith. That's a silly expectation to have.

This is classic whataboutism. You don't have to criticize every single atrocity in the world in order to criticize one. I often find that people who take your stance don't care about any issues. They're simply weaponizing other problems to avoid engaging with the one they actually oppose.

There is also a key difference between the Palestine issue vs the others you listed. The fact that our country is deeply in bed with the country that is committing these crimes against humanity and actively funding it, along with the strange level of undue influence that country has on our government.

I intentionally didn't do a whataboutism, but just asked why it seems that westerners care about what happens in Gaza, as bad as it is, more than they do other equally horrific injustices.

It's undeniable that our society cares more about Gaza and the future of the Palestinian people, so what makes them unique that's different? Or are you suggesting that Americans, for example, care equally about what's going on in other conflicts and humanitarian catastrophes? If so, why don't we see campus protests for example?

I answered your question, if you read my response fully.

Generally though, I find your line of inquiry fascinating. There are people out there actively protesting a particular issue because they genuinely care about it and the people affected. Meanwhile, you—presumably from the comfort of home—are criticizing them for not addressing other issues, all while doing nothing about ANY of these issues yourself. It reeks of apathy and malintent.

Personally, I do care about Gaza more because my government is complicit in it. So it's my duty, especially in democratic country, to oppose that. I don't know how to influence Iranian government, if anything, I think my government could offer them lifting sanctions in exchange for easing domestic policies.

Your country is not democratic, that's the takeaway, if the two political parties - count them two - both behave exactly the same way.

Just to clarify - my country is Czechia not U.S. but still not very democratic, and we indeed have more or less 2 parties behaving the same way.

I find LLMs remove all the fun for me. When I build my homelab, I want the satisfaction of knowing that I did it. And the learning gains that only come from doing it manually. I don't mind using an LLM to shortcut areas that are just pure pain with no reward, but I abstain from using it as much as possible. It gives you the illusion that you've accomplished something.

> It gives you the illusion that you've accomplished something.

What’s the goal? If the act of _building_ a homelab is the fun then i agree 100%. If _having_ a reliable homelab that the family can enjoy is the goal, then this doesn’t matter.

For me personally, my focus is on “shipping” something reliable with little fuss. Most of my homelab skills don’t translate to my day job anyway. My homelab has a few docker compose stacks, whereas at work we have an internal platform team that lets me easily deploy a service on K8s. The only overlap here is docker lol. Manually tinkering with ports and firewall rules, using sqlite, backups with rsync, etc…all irrelevant if you’re working with AWS from 9-5.

I guess I’m just pointing out that some people want to build it and move on.

If your sole goal is to have a homelab that self-hosts services, I completely agree. I'm speaking for those who are interested in developing their skills and knowledge, and believe that building something with AI somehow does that.

I'll agree to disagree on it not being applicable. Having fundamental knowledge on topics like networking thru homelabbing have helped me develop my understanding from the ground up. It helps in ways that are not always obvious. But if your goal is purely to be better at your job at work, it is not the most efficient path.

>I don't mind using an LLM to shortcut areas that are just pure pain with no reward...

Enlightenment here comes when you realize others are doing the exact same thing with the exact same justification, and everyone's pain/reward threshold is different. The argument you are making justifies their usage as well as yours.

That may be true. Ultimately, what I'd advise is for people to be cognizant of their goals and whether AI does or does not help to achieve them.

The thing about anything that actually gets used, is what removes the fun the quickest is when it breaks and people who actually want to use it start complaining.

In that case, it's not about the 'joy of creation', but actually getting everything up and running again, in which case LLMs are indispensable.

I don't disagree. All depends on what you're looking to get out of it.

Getting it up and running is fun but I find maintaining some services a pain. For example, Authelia has breaking configuration changes every minor release, and fixing that easily takes 1-X hours every time. I gave up for 4.38 and just tossed the patch notes into NotebookLM.

Definitely. That's a great use case. How do you use NotebookLM? First I'm hearing about it

I've been mostly using it as what I would call a "medium scope search engine". Instead of searching "$topic" or "$topic site:wikipedia.org", I can pick a few dozen links from different sources (wiki, documentation, tax code, papers, videos), toss it in NotebookLM, submit my search query in the form of a question, and look at the linked source. I see it as an evolution of doing research through library books, Internet search, and Wikipedia. I didn't know I wanted something like this until I used NotebookLM this way. It also seems to handle multiple languages reasonably well.

very cool. thanks!

I don’t give them direct access to my computer. I just use them as an alternative to scrolling reddit for answers. Then I take the actions myself.

yeah. I wrote a little about that here: https://fulghum.io/fun2