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Comment by downut | Hacker News Reader

1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis.

It was goddam glorious.

Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.

It was even more goddam glorious.

Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.

I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)

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>I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)

The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available.

That is totally opposite of homelab, you have full control, you flash firmware that gives you full control over devices.

I am hard core Linux user, my wireless access point runs Linux, my router is a Sophos baremetal running OPNSense/FreeBSD Unix. My 3D printer is DIY running Debian Linux.

That is the best thing about homelab, nobody can take it away from you, you own everything, it is yours and yours only.

"The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available."

Yeah, I think that's right.

I only thought in one dimension: reliance on corporate controlled high density existing infiltration of fossil-fuel delivery infrastructure. Which is worthless if the price is occasionally exorbitantly volatile or might even run into zero supply issues.

Another equally important dimension is: that EV car might just be a puppet, and not you running the puppet.

I'm pretty sure the Prius doesn't phone home (2015), but I admit that I've not gone deep into it.

I can't stand this thing I just did in this comment where I tried not to sound like an AI. I might have to give up short comments entirely because I can't generate enough context for authenticity credibility. <= It's a fact, and that right there sounds like AI to me now.

> The difference is that you don't own your EV

You could unplug or shield the cellular modem to take the car "offline."

EV is a computer and designed to work as such.

Make it go offline and watch things going south haha

Like… what? I won’t get traffic on my navigation? My maps will get outdated?

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