This is something I've been working on for about 6 months now.
I often come up with simple projects, lots of which go nowhere, and I thought it would be good if I could just host stuff quickly with no configuration and after some time in the shower, I came up with Nervespace.
Anyway, the wires are still hanging out and you can't create an account yet but you can try it for free by dropping your zipped .NET app on the homepage.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
I'm probably about to show my ignorance here (I'm not neck-deep in the AI space but I am a software architect...) but are they not just dedicated matrix multiplication engines (plus some other AI stuff)? So instead of asking the CPU to do the math, you have a dedicated area that does it instead... well, that's my understanding of it.
As to why, I think it's along the lines of this: the CPU does 100 things, one of those is AI acceleration. Let's take the AI acceleration and give it its own space instead so we can keep the power down a bit, add some specialization, and leave the CPU to do other stuff.
Again, I'm coming at this from a high-level as if explaining it to my ageing parents.
Yes, that's my understanding as well. What I meant is that I don't know the fine details. My ignorance is purely because I don't actually have a machine that has an NPU, so I haven't bothered to study up on them.
> I’ve never done it, but from watching friends do it, it was far too easy to deposit money, or borrow money on credit, and bet it frivolously.
A data point for you...
I was on a train earlier this year and I was standing behind someone out with their wife/girlfriend. He had his phone in his hand the whole time with a gambling app opened (the green one, PaddyPower maybe?). I couldn't read the screen exactly but there was a list of fixtures for football matches and a button next to each one. From memory, I think each button was odds for the game, e.g. 10:1 Luton win vs Exeter or something.
Anyway, the point is that (again, from memory) at least 8 times in the journey, he opened and closed the app and clicked on 10+ of these odds buttons, while in conversation with his girlfriend who had put her phone away at the start of the journey.
I vaguely recall him checking his balance at one point too.
Anyway, I thought I'd back up your story by telling one of mine where I watched someone place 50+ bets on a 30 min train journey! It's frighteningly easy (emphasis on "frightening")
Edit: This happened a while back and I remember telling this story to people at the time so the numbers may be off but they're in the ballpark!
I have an HP Business Printer at home: A Laserjet M477fdw. It's brilliant and I've had it for years at this point. I also use non-HP toner. However, I have never connected it to the internet. Ever.
Since day one, I set a static IP and prevented internet access simply by removing the gateway IP (I've recently upgraded my router and blocked internet access entirely). I also use a driver from 2021.
I genuinely cannot see a need at all to connect it to the internet, let alone allow AI to have access to it.
It honestly reeks of middle-management scrabbling to find a reason to spend budget on AI! In fact, now that I think about it, this is as asinine as the Logitech subscription mouse![0]
The way companies are flailing to include AI in their plans in any way possible seems to be driven by investors rather than anyone in touch with the actual business of the business. Very bubble behavior.
What does the printer do if reset to factory defaults, maybe through a long power outage?
I had a similar no gateway and static IP trick (it was a lazy short term move) for a Windows VM and I found Windows ran the network fixer without my input at some point and had reset DHCP so it could get those updates!
>Since day one, I set a static IP and prevented internet access simply by removing the gateway IP (I've recently upgraded my router and blocked internet access entirely). I also use a driver from 2021.
Printers are cursed like that.
I won't be surprised once we have ink cartridges with builtin fw version numbers which make the printer stop working until its firmware is updated to the latest version, which then can only be done by connecting it to the internet.
They already sucked enough to annoy Stallman to the point of making him come up with GNU back then. They only got worse.
Actual printing tech hasn't advanced all that much.
This ridiculous situation exists only because we do not have an Open Hardware (OSH) printer. If we got one (1), everybody would get that one, and the farce would forcibly end. No more bullshit.
I'm so guilty of abandoning projects in the past before they're even remotely done. It's mainly due to losing interest in the subject itself rather than dealing with the bugs and legacy and bad code decisions as you get further along the journey.
I used to get bent out of shape about it and criticize myself for it but I came to realise that it meant I didn't really have enough interest in the thing I was building in the first place.
Case in point (and a bit of a shameless plug tbh) just this morning I finished, end-to-end my current project I've been working on for 4 months: a .NET hosting site like tiiny host where you drag your zipped .net project onto the page and it gets automatically hosted with a unique url and whatnot.
For the last month or so, I've been at the really fiddly stage where all the moving parts came together and they all had bugs that had to be fixed both independently and together with other bugs and finally it worked this morning (still to polish it though).
I usually don't get to that stage and have abandoned a great many things over the years but this project has captivated me from the start with only a minor loss in productivity (due to a health issue with a family member tbh).
I'm now at the fear stage the author mentions - will anyone want to use it? We'll soon find out!
The long and short is that I discovered that I abandoned things frequently in the past but I realise I just wasn't that into the ideas! I don't worry about it as much now.
I've used this many times myself and it works great.
However, as I mentioned below, I read something recently that says local account options are being removed in an upcoming version (I can't find the article now).
I presume it means the binaries are being removed from the ISO so this may no longer work (except for Enterprise and LTSC I'd imagine).
I read recently somewhere that this has been removed in the latest (alpha?) build now... their intention is clear: this install belongs to Microsoft, not you!
Microsoft shenanigans is the reason I switched recently to a Chromebook (Acer 516 GE 16GB - bought for £400 on EBay) and with minor exceptions it's been really easy.
I am a .NET dev who needs to remote into work via Citrix. I work locally on my own .NET stuff in JetBrains Rider and I can do it on the Chromebook now.
It's not perfect but, damn, it's really close: After installing the Linux Dev Environment I have all the tools I need.
The only issue is that sometimes when I open Rider, the font sizing is off - sometimes it's small, other times it's large. But Ctrl + MouseWheel takes care of it. Once or twice I had to restart the linux VM (right click, Close Linux and it's done) but that's it.
Anyway, the point is that nowadays there is becoming less and less reason to stay on Windows and I think Microsoft knows this too, hence trying to lock you into their ecosystem as much as possible and trying to dangle things in front of you to keep your attention.
But who would have thought that for £400 I can run all my .NET stuff on a Chromebook. Not only that, I switched from a 14700K on Windows to a 1260p running ChromeOS and coding/compiling is just as fast. It's nuts.
Source: I just installed Enterprise 11 on my desktop a week ago and I had to manually install Microsoft Store manually.
reply