Birdnet-go is a real-time sound analyzer that detects bird species. It can take in audio from microphones. I set mine up to stream audio from my security cameras that I already had installed. There’s even a Home Assistant App, if you’re using it.
I live in a more suburban/semi-urban environment, but was really surprised to so many different bird species.
Didn’t downvote you however, are you saying if I ran an AI model local, that scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown is ok with you, just because it’s local?. Because that’s exactly what we’re are doing when we access the internet. Throw AI out of the scope, and we’re still pumping massive amounts of carbon in to the air, still turning the water brown. There are 8.4 billion people on this planet. Approximately 6.3 billion of them are online. That’s just individual humans. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of data centers that aren’t even connected with AI and all the energy production to make them run.
So, who will be the first to actually practice what you preach and shut down your servers and internet devices? C’mon…make the first step towards a cleaner planet.
This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.
That being said, I was addressing someone who refused to believe that local inference was even possible on CPU; this tells me that the efforts to present the current grift as the only and inevitable AI outcome is working, on minds that do not fundamentally grasp what the technology is, nor what it’s doing. I think the tech is great, and highly useful - the way they are implementing has perverse incentives and existential outcomes, and it does not have to be that way, but it is, because capitalism.
But it doesn’t.
But it is.
So, now what are we going to do? Give me real world solutions that will actually fix the issue, which would be implemented by real world corporations and real world data centers. I’m not problem hampered, I’m solution based. So let’s fix it.
Decouple people from big tech, allow people to run, fix, and maintain their own hardware instead of replacing it on an industrial scale every 6-9 months and centralizing ownership in data centers.
My entire stack runs off a 14kw solar array with a battery. Net negative. It’s totally doable.
Edit: also I tested my stack against a stimulated 1k active users and couldn’t get it to break a sweat, so I’m not saying everyone needs to do things this way, but your techiest uncle could host the entire family in a privacy cooperative, for instance
I’m not making fun of what you’ve said, and I’m not talking down to you. That said, I like where you’re going, but that will never happen. You can mark it on the calendar: ‘That irmadlad asshole said - never happen’. On the one hand I applaud you loud and clear. On the other hand, we live in a global consumerist society. Corporate is just giving them their fix. That’s their plug.
I have solar too. Hell I have solar on two barns. I like it. I often think about how far along we might be here in America if a lowly peanut farmer had not been ridiculed beyond belief for putting solar on the white house. Now, they were not what you’d call efficient, but it was a start. I think the next presidency took them down.
Oh no doubt. I’ve long since been a promoter of the notion of a server in every home. We live in a digital society. We have digital assets. These need to be centrally housed on a very secure server and backed up.
However, self hosters and homelabbers make up <2% of the world’s population. It gets even less if you differentiate between consistent homelab/self hosters and those who were just experimenting. Yeah, we do it, but not on a massive scale to even make a ding. Again, I like where your head’s at, but it’s not us we need to convince, it’s them. And they like their crack. Corporate likes their money.
I mean, I’m not saying give up. Keep pushing. But realistically, we’re in a script.
Saying it’ll never happen and giving up won’t make that 2% get any bigger
Make the tools easy enough that the irritation of the original platform gives them enough of a push to try something easy to use.
If you want to help beta test, I’m working on an appliance-level automated installer for provisioning home cloud servers.
Got friends who need help? Help them or send them my way (or to your nearest techie)