• 14 Posts
  • 261 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 14th, 2026

help-circle
  • I actually wonder sometimes how it’s survived this long.

    There are … alternative methods. Fiddly, you have to roll your own, added frustration… but it could be done. Though I hope I never have to.

    OTOH, it’s a bit like hydra - cut one head off, three more appear. Until google fully locks down YouTube (and they might), there will always be wiggle room.

    Honestly, I think they know that if they get too annoying, everyone will go elsewhere, so they are boiling the frog slowly. I’d bet Smarttube, Revanced, PipePipe etc are the Zion to YouTube’s Matrix - allowed to exist as a pressure release valves.






  • Yeah…this Circlus thing has a particular odor to it. Knew it was too good to be true but wanted to double check, as had not heard of it before. Thanks for confirming.

    I think I will fork Simple LAN Chat and add what I want: https://github.com/nathanielxd/simple-lan-chat

    It’s server-less, which is one less thing to host. Text chat already works. The main problems are broken image/file transfer (literally craps itself with anything > 5kb in testing) and no useful notifications. So I will fix those, then probably add offline message queuing. The codebase is small and simple enough (he said, ominously) and if I don’t scope creep, this should do the job nicely.

    My kids are really into PictoCHAT on their DSes, so I’m thinking of it as something along those lines.

    I want something that only works on the local WLAN, between vetted devices, and does not rely on Google accounts, FCM or other cloud middleware. I don’t allow them unlimited access to the net / social media, so am engineering in house solutions. The base app here already keeps communication on the LAN, and I will add the device-vetting part. It looks like it’s configured down to Android 5.1, so I can install it on old junkers without SIM cards, modern tablets, etc. That way the kids can play around with it (without doing something they shouldn’t), take it camping (hotspot) etc. I’ll need to reroll the Android APK. Could be a fun little project…



  • Nice! I use Redreader on my phone - and for some reason, it still actually works.

    https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader

    There are one or two very niche communities that I visit on reddit for technical know how (though I did visit their version of self hosted recently - typical endemic Reddit clusterfuck). I really should put the effort into posting on !LocalLlama more…I’m doing some shenanigans with LLMs that are probably worth a write up at some stage (if I can pull it all together). It’s probably relevant here too. Urgh…these rabbit hole / squeeze blood from stone projects will kill me one day.

    I’ve actually got to sit down today and do some coding…I know what needs doing but the task is a massive p.i.t.a. Best get the instant coffee brewing, Sisyphus…ain’t nobody writing this shit for you.




  • I’m probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in “OK…shit’s expensive…what’s the MOST I can do with the LEAST?”.

    I think that comes from spending time in the lowspecgamer culture, where folks (hello!) will literally recode the game engine, bridge motherboard pins with paperclips and drill holes into the PC before buying new hardware.

    For example, I specced out a (very decent) “sneakernet” / internet mirror for myself, as an intellectual exercise…and every time I run the numbers, they go from 8TB on the low end to 16TB on the high.

    That includes mirroring somewhere around 3-5yrs of YouTube videos (in glorious 540-720p).

    I can (and do) host an obscene amount of stuff on a SBC with a 256GB M.2.

    Given narrow jobs like DNS, VPN, media, sync, search and automation and you can do a stupid amount with pi4 4GB.

    Same thing with LLMs. People try to solve the problem of LLMs with bigger models, bigger GPUs etc…and I’m over here thinking “actually, the LLM is really just the mouthpiece; everything else around it is just good old programming”.

    Memory, search, STT and TTS, OCR, file tools…none of that needs to live in the model or chew up a GPU…and once normal software handles that stuff, the question becomes: how small can the LLM be and still be useful middleware?

    Turns out…pretty fucking small.

    Honesty, I don’t think prices are coming down any time soon (RAM, 8TB NVMe drives, Threadrippers, 25GbE gear…hell, I saw a Blackwell yesterday on “sale” for $15K USD) so we might need to get creative.

    Personally, I’m building towards resilience and independence. My next DIY will be the solar system… and because I’m paring down my homelab significantly, I can get away with a micro-system for around $2K.

    Do wish hard drives were cheaper tho. Might have to go back to my “DVD as back up server” idea.



  • This is my final reply in this thread. The developer has said their piece, and I have said mine.

    I am a developer. I had genuine interest in this project. I read the Hister documentation and inspected parts of the repository because the documentation did not clearly answer several basic questions I had:

    • How SQLite, Bleve, and stored HTML relate.

    • Whether TTL or storage quotas exist.

    • How browser-history deletion affects stored data.

    • How previews differ from a real web archive.

    • What multi-user isolation actually covers.

    Yes, I used AI to assemble a plain-language summary and labelled it accordingly. Not everyone keeps the Hister codebase in their head, not everyone talks in code review and if I had these questions, I’m willing to bet others did too. The AI wrote for a lay audience because I didn’t ask it to do QA, I asked it to ELI-5.

    The summary contained errors. Fine. That’s AI for you. However, if neither I nor the AI could find clear answers, that supports my point about opacity.

    At no point did I request a line-by-line audit. “Points 2 and 5 are wrong” would have answered the question.

    Declining would also have been reasonable. Hell, side stepping it would have been fine too. Instead the dev decided to note the inaccuracies and rudely brush them off.

    Both you and the dev seem to be under the impression !selfhosted is a one way distribution channel.

    The developer came here, invited questions, then turned the raw prawn when questions arrived.

    I didn’t go to their their Github. I didn’t abuse them. I genuinely wanted to know more about their project and share it, perhaps even work to help improve it.

    They - and now you, ostensibly a happy supporter of Hister - came here.

    Your claims about my effort and intent are assumptions followed by personal abuse.

    Try and walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before calling them low effort and shitty next time.

    This could have gone very, very differently. Now, I’m not touching Hister with a 10 foot barge poll and will actively point people to other solutions at every opportune moment.






  • That is not what happened.

    I fed your GitHub repository to a clanker because the documentation did not answer my questions. I then shared its summary here.

    You replied afterwards and said the summary was wrong. Fair enough. I then asked which specific points were wrong.

    You could have answered, declined, or ignored the post.

    Instead, you deigned only to dismiss the effort, then blamed me for objecting.

    You also asked which parts were confusing, although my previous reply had already listed those issues.

    You did not address them then, either.

    A prospective user should not need ChatGPT, a cloned repository, and several follow-up questions to understand key functions.

    You invited feedback. Your documentation remains unclear on several points, including issues beyond those I listed.

    Your responses show that further feedback is not worth my time.


  • I am happy to narrow it further.

    I took the time to read the documentation, ask ChatGPT to summarise what I found, and then reduced my follow-up to a simple request:

    «Which of points 1–7 are materially wrong?»

    That is not the same as asking you to audit “multiple screens” of AI output.

    If the answer is “2 and 5 are incorrect”, or even “I do not have time to review it”, that is perfectly fine.

    However, dismissing it as “a multiple screens long AI prompt” does not only not answer the question, it comes off as abrasive.

    As for the documentation, the confusing parts are exactly those I listed: retention, lifecycle management, browser ingestion, storage limits, deletion, multi-user behaviour, and, most importantly, what Hister actually is and who it is for.

    What’s disappointing is not that you disagreed with the AI summary. AIs are idiots.

    It that after inviting questions and feedback, your response to a genuine attempt to understand the project is curt dismissal.

    The inner workings of Hister may be obvious to you; they are not obvious to others.

    The point is that you came here specifically to invite questions and feedback.

    “TL;DR” does not encourage the sort of community engagement you ostensibly came here to seek.


  • Excellent - thanks for clearing that up.

    Is there a TTL / max database size per user setting? Say I have 4 users using the server; can I allocate a hard limit of 10GB per user, with 180 day retention rules?

    Additionally, is the other parenthetical information materially correct? If not, which points [1 thru to 7] are wrong?

    I would like to further recommend Hister but your documentation is somewhat confusing at first blush.