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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

The silly part is buying a $600 Mac mini when any $100 NUC or $50 raspberry pi or any cheap mini PC off of eBay will do the job exactly the same.

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The silly part is buying a $50 raspberry pi, then storage and memory and so on, when a $200 used M1 Mac mini is plug-and-play.

The silly part is buying a $200 used M1 Mac mini, when a $5 Arduino clone can be used to blink an LED.

Oh wait—that’s the silly part

That was supposed to be a joke. Guess I won’t give up my day job

"What is my purpose?"

"You turn this LED on or off"

$40 used ThinkCentre Tiny is also plug and play! Or Dell Optiplex Micro, practically the same thing.

Doesn't Moltbot specifically require MacOS for iMessage, Apple reminders, and some other Apple-ecosystem features?

HN is the last place I expected to see someone laugh at self-hosting

If you want iMessage you still need an always-on Mac, whether that's the main moltbot gateway, or the MacOS app running in 'node mode' to allow a moltbot gateway to use it to send/receive iMessages.

> need an always-on Mac

Not really, you can emulate macOS on any Linux/x86-64.

But it is actually a good point to get a Mac Mini instead of a NUC. The Mac Mini is going to deliver better performance per Watt.

Can you really register iMessage on an emulated MacOS these days? I'd love to learn more, the AIs I asked say it doesn't seem possible in VMs anymore.

I think you need to register on a real Mac (2 of 3 of my MBPs use OCLP), but then can use an emulated one if you add it to your Apple account. Either way, I don't recommend to use a protocol behind such a moat. Probably better to use Signal or Threema.

Moltbot is supposed to be a 'personal AI assistant'

with >60% market share in US, you can't really expect people to just 'not use iMessage'. It's what the messages are going to be coming in on

> Not really, you can emulate macOS on any Linux/x86-64.

Intel is going to stop being supported with the current OS version (Tahoe, 2025). OS are supported for about 3 years.

I'm curious what will happen after. If they'll break it or if they'll allow the services to keep running on unsupported hardware.

Got a couple years left

I expect someone will eventually get around to reverse engineering the various M series specific instructions for qemu. Does imessage make use of hardware attestation to register with the remote endpoint?

I noticed when I was reading Federico Viticci's post about it that he was using telegram, which has much better support for "markdown"-y rendering, which looks a lot nicer than iMessage. And then I thought to myself, why would iMessage actually matter? The only other use-case would be interacting with texts, but almost anyone can tell when someone is using an LLM to text - I feel like our texting styles are so personal, and what is there even to gain from using an LLM just with text messages? So is it even worth it to run on a Mac?

I see value in the LLM being able to read/integrate my iMessages since a lot of my scheduling/commitments are discussed on there.

Our SFF HP came out at 150€ with flash storage and 16GB of RAM. I see used M1s for 200-250€ where we live. The only drawback of the M1 is you’d be stuck buying a NAS/DAS for the storage part, whereas the HP has 3 internal SATA ports. Neither option is silly, they have different pros/cons. Managing Linux quirks has gotten frustrating, for example.

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