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That is really cool to read. And here I am, still running my home network on a measly 1Gbit Ethernet. I considered upgrading, but the equipment power consumption even when idle makes it an expensive proposition to consider just for fun.

I migrated from Apple Photos to Immich a couple of months ago, removing the iCloud subscription, and couldn’t be happier. It was the most hassle free piece of self-hosted software I’ve had so far. Very easy to install and everything just works. Context and OCR search are amazing. Mobile apps could be better, but they are constantly being improved.

My favorite feature is being able to setup a container on my Linux desktop that has a GPU access and can run ML workloads for image processing whenever I turn the computer on, as my NAS (where Immich resides) is a low power machine without a dedicated GPU. They even have ROCM support, so it works even without an Nvidia GPU. Being able to spread such workloads over your local network feels like a magic that has been forgotten in an era of blackbox cloud providers.


> My favorite feature is being able to setup a container on my Linux desktop that has a GPU access and can run ML workloads for image processing whenever I turn the computer on, as my NAS (where Immich resides) is a low power machine without a dedicated GPU

Okay, sold. This is also my setup and I was being held back by thinking that the experience would be bad due to it. But this will work for me!


Interesting. How did it work getting your photos off of iCloud? Does Apple give you a good way to get an archive of all of your photos? That is, the original quality photos, without manually downloading them individually? (I currently have 446 GB of photos in iCloud…)

Immich iOS app supports backing up photos directly from iCloud in original resolution, with the all EXIF data included. I had 230 GB of photos myself, and I left the phone on the charger overnight with the app running in the foreground and screen locking disabled. In the morning everything was imported.

Some people have instead set Photos app on a Mac to download original photos from the iCloud library and then moved the files directly into the server. I have not personally tried this method though.


> Immich iOS app supports backing up photos directly from iCloud in original resolution

wait that is just crazy!!! Dang my dad is going to flip out when I tell him about this. He's got like 1.5 TB of photos in iCloud and has been searching for a way to get them off. And we're so close to our family storage limit that he gets mad at me when I text him pictures hahaha


There is a community-supported CLI program called immich-go that directly supports reading in iCloud and Google takeout archives, as well as local directories. It works great, and has gobs of import options to set up albums and tags. [ https://github.com/simulot/immich-go ]

i havent seen anyone else mention it so i will. privacy.apple.com lets you export your apple data similar to google takeout

That's the worst service I've ever seen. It asks you the size of each zip file and I said 50G at first. And I couldn't download it because the connection was so unstable. No way to resume it and every 20~30 mins, it failed in the middle. Chrome, firefox, safari were all the same. I tried from a GCE VM as well to see if that's my network problem but didn't help.

I had to request again with 2G and I was able to download files finally. But only one by one. And after download 3~5 files, I had to login again as their login expires so frequently.

I had to do that for days and the download got expired. Oh my god. I had to request it again. And you know what? Their file list wasn't deterministic. I had to download from the beginning. lol

I finally made it and I swear I will never use any cloud service from apple.


Same issue has been going on for me with just about any big download from apple serves. Could be icloud. Could be xcode. Doesn’t matter. It will randomly fail in the transfer and require manual intervention to restart. Been this way for years.

iCloud Photos Downloader isn’t user friendly or pretty, but I finally managed to rip my entire collection without having to install any apple software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578921


How does selecting or uploading photos work on iOS if you don't have any in Apple Photos? Not all apps let you choose to upload from the files app where you can select the provider, e.g. uploading an image to Facebook in Safari always opens the picker for Apple Photos.

Edit: wait I'm dumb, I just checked mobile Facebook and the upload button shows a pop up with choices for "Photo Library", "Take a Photo", or "Files".


Additionally, there‘s a difference between Apple Photos the app and Apple Photos the system component (in lack of a better name, maybe someone knows the correct one). Even if you uninstall Apple Photos the app, iOS still retains its basic functionality, for example when viewing photos in the Camera app. The folders where photos are stored don’t change. You just use a different app to view and sync them.

I have a PiKVM attached to my PC at home, so at some point I'm thinking of setting up a crazy demand-scaling scheme where when my underpowered homelab nodes can power up the PC when they need to run a heavy workload.

You can do this easier with Wake on LAN. See https://danielpgross.github.io/friendly_neighbor/howto-sleep... for prior art.

WoL is easier if it works. My experience has been that with consumer hardware it usually doesn't. Debugging it is more hassle than it's worth IMO. I think if you don't have a proper mobo with a BMC then just throwing in a KVM is easier on average.

WoL is reliable when waking from sleep/suspend. I have yet to see consumer HW that can do it from poweroff. But if suspend is fine, all you have to do is configure your firmware to turn on after power loss (so you always boot into your OS) and in your OS enable WoL and configure suspend on inactivity as you wish. It should be reliable and failures would default to "on", not off.

This sounds like a fun idea to explore!

Can you explain how you’re able to run ML workloads on another computer? Setting up Immich this weekend on a mini Pc and would love to throw my GPU in my larger PC at the problem.


It's just a feature of immich. Administration > Settings > Machine Learning Setting and set the remote ML address.

Obviously you need to setup the ml client on the other computer


You run a Docker container on another machine and configure Immich to point to its IP address. I do that when I have to add a lot of photos or reingest all the photos with a different model, so I point to the "gaming" that has a 3060.

any pointers on how it works with immich on the NAS and your desktop “contributing” processing power?


>he's obviously read KSR's Red Mars

If he had, he was clearly not paying attention to the social and economic message of the book.


Various webcomics, Youtube channels and Github releases for several projects.

[EDIT: This was meant to be a reply to another comment in this thread but I posted it under the top-level comment by mistake. I am leaving this comment intact anyway, in case someone finds it useful.]

The web browsers don't highlight the feed URL information embedded in the HTML anymore, quite unfortunately. But if you go to a YouTube video, say, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM> and then view or inspect the HTML source, you can find the LINK tag for the feed:

  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TNs2ohrc6hnRQ5Sn2w">
So the feed URL in this case is: <https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TN...>.

> Youtube channels

I didn't know you could follow youtube channels via RSS! Where do I find the feed link, given a youtube channel?


Many RSS aggregators automatically convert Youtube links to RSS. You can also do it manually: https://chuck.is/yt-rss/

I have removed Youtube apps from all mobile devices and only watch the creators whose content I'm interested in through RSS, without notifications and distractions. It's a much more pleasant experience, definitely recommend.


You can actually just paste the link to a youtube channel in your RSS reader and it should work. At least for me it works with NetNewsWire. For example, you should be able to copy and paste this directly into your RSS reader: https://www.youtube.com/@freecodecamp

If you view the HTML source of a YouTube video page, there is a LINK tag that contains the feed URL. I have shared an example here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772655#46775759>.

I've seen a lot of developer tooling change and evolve over the course of my career, but with AI it was the first time I've seen people in non-technical managerial positions trying to force the engineers to make a switch. It was extremely bizarre.

What I see today on HN mirrors the processes I've witnessed in Russian speaking parts of the net during the 2010s. Despite the escalation of totalitarianism in Russia, the growing internet censorship and military operations in nearby countries, which left the posters on the same websites on the different sides of military conflicts, some sites have stuck to their "no politics" rule. Both to avoid upsetting people in power and out of their owners' naïve beliefs.

Reading them was like living in an alternate reality where nothing more notable happens than a release of new version X of a framework Y. Large portions of the tech community had exactly the same attitude that could be seen here and now - refusal to consider the societal implications of their daily work, adherence to technical solutions over the real world ones ("I'll just work remotely and use a VPN, who cares") and just simple willful ignorance.

It was around that time that I started to frequent English speaking discussions, which were much more vibrant and open. It saddens me to see the same kind of process repeat itself here.


Thank you. I knew “woman” is “kvinder” in Danish, but I never made the connection with the English word for “queen”.


"Queen" came from "The king and his queen". There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages, and for what ever reason Queen became synonymous with royalty. Originally it just mean "the king and his woman", but I don't know when it changed. Certainly we had more than one word for "adult female human" in old English.

> There is no common word for Queen in Germanic languages

Correct me if I am misunderstanding what you meant, but Dutch has koningin and German has Königin? They are basically a feminized version of king.


It recently occurred to me that it’s been years since it was possible to find some new and interesting app just by browsing the App Store, like it used to be when iPhone and Android were first introduced. Now I open the store knowing in advance what exactly I’m looking for and take care not to accidentally click on a lookalike.


It's a mature market. Maybe the age of new and interesting apps is over? I know I've pretty much settled into a small set of apps that I use on my iPhone, ThinkPad, and iPad and probably haven't installed anything new (ie not upgrades) for five or ten years now.

The last new app I installed was either Fusion360 or Visual Studio Code.

I guess I have had to install apps for other things I bought (like Christmas tree lights), but I don't really count that because the app is only a gateway to the thing I really want to use.


>Maybe the age of new and interesting apps is over?

it's a shame it really feels this way! i discovered some fun social apps recently like Bump and Retro that are a refreshing break from the big algoscrollers, but all my friends are either too locked into the existing big social apps or are determined to not mess with any social apps at all.


Try to find a slideshow app that just plays photos as a slideshow. The first 10 results are all the same app with different skins. You try to make a slideshow and after adding 10 photos it wants you to upgrade to a $10/month SUBSCRIPTION to MAKE SLIDESHOWS.

Only a problem because apple removed the ability to change your slideshow speed. Tried showing my fam a trip recently and it flies through at mach 5


Discovery is social

If you’re optimizing for searchers (SEO) you’ve been out of the loop for a decade or catering almost exclusively to the elderly


Then whats all this "Appstore Optimization" about? :-D ;-)


Not only that, it’s dangerous too specially if you have a family account with a single credit card.

Apple doesn’t care about quality.


Yes. My wife’s mother keeps buying crap in game using my card and I have no reasonable way of blocking her from doing so if I want to keep app purchase sharing.

It’s insane. Does no one at apple have senile in laws? Or is this acceptable?


I’m sure Apple realizes how many senile in-laws can make them money.


I think you could convert her account to a child account. That way, you have to approve the purchases first.


Can you not just make her a separate account and make her put her own card on there?


> if I want to keep app purchase sharing.


That's fair, I must have missed that

Regardless, there has to be a breaking point. The value of sharing those will be exceeded by the microtransactions at some point


I still do this but with F-Droid (or one of the nice frontends like Droidify).

Will some new player come and give us some golden years of VC handouts and pre-enshittification decency? I hope so, but the barriers to entry are mighty.


I've had success finding games in the Apple Arcade by just browsing. The bonus is that the games are all included with Apple+ and don't have any ads or microtransactions.

That said, I completely agree that you cannot find any interesting apps by just browsing the App Store as a whole.


Same on Android.

Except on Android when you search for something and you get the big "match found" with "install" button, it's an ad and the real result is hidden like a search result.

This practice ought to be illegal. These are trademarks, and monopolies are injecting themselves as market makers in a bidding war they created.

This isn't enshittification. This is Roman Empire collapse. It doesn't work anymore.


At least in Android you can use F-Droid which is Play Store for open-source apps.

I installed a regex powered notification blocker yesterday. Works as a charm.


For now, and only but a tiny fraction of you.

99.99% of users never visit the settings. For those that do, they won't get past scare wall #1 of enabling APKs and scare walls #2, #3, and #4 of downloading, installing, and enabling the app.

Google knows this.

Tyranny of defaults, trained user behaviors, ecosystem, scare tactics, and even SERPs manipulation to make this nigh undiscoverable.

But they weren't content with some number of you slipping through the cracks! They're starting to close the ability to release unsigned and self-signed code. You can only imagine what's after that.


Agreed. Far from enough. But at least there's an option for tech savvy folks.


It's only getting worse with the amount of AI Slop being poured into the store.

I'm relatively new to the space, but it feels like more and more of the time of indie devs / bootstrappers needs to get allocated towards marketing.


Thai Cave rescue happened in 2018. It should have already made obvious how completely deranged Musk was to everyone, even if they were not paying close attention before and were dazzled by self-driving cars and Mars colonization promises.


I think that marked a turning point for many. He had been known to say dumb things in the past but that was monumentally stupid own goal. Worse, he was given multiple chances to take a step back but just kept digging.


Yeah, it was mine. That's the moment I thought 'wow that guy is deranged now, he should step back and take some vacations'. Now I realize he was like this from the start, but that was the moment I questioned my hero worship.


That was certainly the first time he did something so obviously blatantly evil, and obviously his own fault, that I wasn't able to ignore it or dismiss it.

It was sufficiently awful, at first I couldn't even believe he'd done it. When I internalised that he was the kind of person to do that, it made it much easier to see his other flaws.


>I haven’t heard of the same attacks facing (for instance) niche hobby communities. Does anyone know if those sites are facing the same scale of attacks?

They are. I participate in modding communities for very niche gaming projects. All of them experienced massive DDOS attacks from AI scrappers on their websites over the past year. They are long running non-commercial projects that don’t present any business interest to anyone to be worth expending resources purely to bring them offline. They had to temporarily put the majority of their discussion boards and development resources behind a login wall to avoid having to go down completely.


Thanks. The scale of this is just mind-boggling. Unbelievably wasteful.


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