This! Good advice! I went this path last year so i can give some extra advice for everyone who wants to start:

Before doing anything, buy a new router and put your iot devices and phones in a isolated guest network. Maintain the router updated. After that, you can work, learn and test without fear. Everything stays in your home.

Then like @webghost0101@sopuli.xyz already said, once you get confident, you can run a vpn tunnel to access your lan. This setup is pretty robust, hard to fuck up, and doable even for newbies. (If i can do it, everyone can, i assure you). Lots of guides out there.

Last advice, which you should already be doing, but setup a backup.

I went into hyperbole there, my bad. I agree wholeheartedly with your reply.

Admittedly, I have a bias here, since using water for food production feels more justified. Same with some industries. But I concede and agree that meat is not the most efficient way nor the most ethical source of food.

I think data centers rub me the wrong way because, for me, they are the straw that broke the camel’s back. We see how lots of countries pull out of the fight against climate change (not that they were really fighting it, but at least they seemed to care a little) and now they waste more resources on things that are, from my point of view, not productive nor useful to most people. (Ethics aside, my view on Gen AI is that it is a tech that is not mature enough, and that the use of brute force to make it better is a waste of resources)

I will try to be more mindful about my comments.

I kid you not, yesterday while reading about the ai bubble and the datacenters boom i was thinking maybe this is THE filter.

Not a nuclear winter, not the angry alien or the big scary asteroid. Just a fucking chatbot wasting all the water and power. We truly live in a boring dystopia.

I should have seen this coming, even then, I am extremely sad.

This was of the few uses for machine learning that I think it was genuily useful. Mature enough to make an impact without destroying the enviroment.

It was also my main argument for people that are full hate AI. Now gone.

I hope others companies continue this research. It’s in this type of problems where machine learning truly shines.

GenAi is still not mature enough, throwing so much compute power at it, is mostly wasting resources.

Imagine what could be done if all the computer power and researchers wasted on chats went to this type of project.