Worth a read if you haven’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

but hasnep covered it well. also emoji use, overly wordy and that graph/tree is a common style of llms.

has anyone noticed more “Spotify” created songs in their queue? I had a sleep playlist and discover weekly that had maybe 20% ai generated songs created by “Discover weekly” or Spotify.

Personal privacy is a right. If someone commits a crime and the equivalent of a warrant is issued that data becomes evidence and it becomes your job to discover what’s on the devices.

Jobs like these exist in that balance between privacy and justice. A judge or however your justice system works has said that the potential crimes that person has committed justifies waving that person’s right to privacy in the same way as searching a home.

Your job and scope is narrow and you should take that seriously but would you rather someone who doesn’t respect privacy (e.g. a department inside the police force) does this job?

For the tools, those are the industry standards. they’re just tools and yes they’ve been abused but they or tools like them are necessary to do that job.

looking at the install script it looks like casaOS is installed directly on the laptop. you can check by running

systemctl status casaos

in a terminal. if that’s not found try docker ps -a to list all docker containers including any not currently running.

I’ve never used Netbird or casaOS. I run debian and docker containers. I would recommend looking at wg-easy as a VPN. it also uses wireguard but for me it just works. you open 1 port on UDP and route it to wireguard, it’s a secure way to access your network and is quite hard to detect from the outside.

I’ve heard good things about caddy.

“data at rest/LUKS” is something you should consider if your personally worried about someone physically trying to get information off your computer/server. if the server is running or an attacker gets into your system remotely, it doesn’t matter. as a beginner, I would determine if the data your saving is worth the extra headache of encrypted media, especially if something goes wrong/an update breaks something or your configs/setup messes something up. if you do, keep a copy of your decryption keys on a NEW USB drive (flash drives go bad) or printed out in addition to saved on your workstation/laptop/password manager.

Personally for new systems I recommend Proxmox hypervisor instead of running directly on the laptop. having your debian OS/casa or whatever you use virtualized gives you the ability to take snapshots in time of your OS, makes backups easier and can help when you expand later (backup and restore on the new computer running proxmox). mine is: proxmox on bare metal old office PC

• | debian > docker w/ portainer (I plan to replace portainer w/ komono)
• | TrueNAS > S3 bucket application (garage)

if Casa becomes limiting as you learn and grow, I would recommend docker compose stacks w/ a web gui like komono.

one final note, although AI can be very useful for troubleshooting and getting some code to fix a problem (albiet logic/problem solving isn’t their strength) it’s awful for retaining knowledge and learning in the same way that using a calculator or other tool before fully understanding how to do addition/multiplication manually. I would strongly recommend taking some time to learn the basics without ai if your goal is to understand how everything works. resources to start with are using and reading “man + command”, command help flags, online courses and websites: https://linuxbasecamp.com/ https://explainshell.com/ - copy paste a command with all arguments and it tells you what it does. https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-linux/

you could definitely run proxmox in a VPS but I was thinking more of debian in the cloud. Then exporting that computer from wherever you host it as a ova file then importing it into your local server: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Automatic_Import_of_Full_VM

and on the ram issue, I’m running on over 10 year old workstation hardware ddr3. it doesn’t take much to run.

NAS with zfs storage does typically want a lot of ram (e.g. truenas) but still for a small home environment it works fine with a lot less than 64gb.

I run proxmox bare metal (debian-based hypervisor) and virtualize debian which has all my docker containers.

with virtualization you can take a snapshot and backup everything that way. super simple to roll back if you mess something up. the added bonus is you could probably take a snapshot of your VPS and migrate it to a local vm.

Ubuntu is something I played with about a decade ago and I never felt like I was “missing” something for debian, especially on servers.

ente photos and locker is open source and offers a paid hosted option or self hosted. https://ente.com/

I’m not familiar with the source and they probably have some critical findings but this reads like ai slop wrote it.

Fonts do have patents and copywrite laws as “works of art” or in the methods to convert what you see on a computer to your printer or whatnot. For example here’s the history of Calibri:

The Typography Group at Microsoft is responsible for both fonts and the font rendering systems in Windows. Since version 3.1 the primary font system built into Windows has been the TrueType system, licensed from Apple in a deal (with hindsight) remarkably beneficial to Microsoft. Working with Monotype, the Microsoft Typography Group produced fine TrueType versions of Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, tuned to be extremely legible on the screen; these were all ready for the launch of Windows 3.1. Since then these core fonts have been developed to cover more and more of the world’s languages. In the mid-1990s under Robert Norton a program of truly new type designs was begun, using TrueType technology to render faithfully the bitmaps and outlines designed by Matthew Carter (Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma) and by in-house designer Vincent Connare (Trebuchet, Comic Sans). Until August 2002 these “core fonts” were offered freely over the Web, where they made an undoubtedly positive contribution in terms of legibility and font choice. In 1996 the OpenType initiative with Adobe was announced; this is touted as the end of the font wars’, whereby advanced multilingual text layout becomes available, native rendering of PostScript fonts becomes part of Windows 2000, and unwieldy font formats are rationalized. In 1998 the group announced ClearType. This is a very ingenious method to increase legibility on color LCD screens, individually targeting the 3 subpixels (red, green and blue) that make up each pixel. Such a leap forward in readability on these screens is a crucial element to the success of nascent eBook technology. Simon Daniels at the Group’s website keeps font fans and font developers up to date with most aspects of the digital typography scene, and communicates the technicalities of how fonts work in Windows. Updating us about the current (October 2000) activity of the Group, Simon notes: 1999 saw several members of the group leave to join Microsoft’s eBooks group. These included technical lead Greg Hitchcock, developers Beat Stamm and Paul Linerud as well as former Monotype hinters Michael Duggan and Geraldine Wade. The past twelve months has beeen a rebuilding period for the group, with numerous new hires [sic.] replacing earlier departures. The Group continues to provide font related services for Microsoft, and freely licensed tools and technology to the wider type development community. On August 12, 2002 Microsoft discontinued the free availability of the “core fonts”, noting that “the downloads were being abused” in terms of their end-user license agreements. Most commentators took this to mean the company objected to the fact that the fonts were being installed with Linux distributions.

https://www.myfonts.com/collections/calibri-ms-font-microsoft-corporation