Building For Good: How Civil Society Organizations Are Automating On Cloudflare If you’re reading this, you’re probably the de facto IT department for your family, your friends, and maybe even your local community. As homelabbers, we love spinning up virtual machines, configuring reverse proxies, and tweaking Docker containers until our power meters spin. But today, I want to talk about taking those skills and applying them to a slightly different arena: Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). ...

Show HN: Giving Opus 5.5 A Simulated Paint Canvas Welcome back to Self-Hosted Tech! If you’ve been hanging around the homelab and local AI communities lately, you’ve probably seen the explosion of agentic workflows. We’ve been moving past simple chatbots and into territory where LLMs write code, execute it, evaluate the results, and try again. Recently, a fascinating project popped up on Hacker News titled “Giving Opus 5.5 A Simulated Paint Canvas.” The premise was brilliantly simple: what if you gave a state-of-the-art language model a blank digital canvas, a set of virtual paintbrushes, and told it to paint a picture? ...

Nvidia Olympus SMT Optimizations for Vera CPU: Squeezing Out 3-6% Performance Gains in Your Homelab If there is one thing we love in the self-hosting and homelab community, it’s free performance. Whether you’re running a massive Proxmox cluster in a repurposed server rack, hosting your own media empire via Jellyfin, or churning through local LLM inference with llama.cpp, every ounce of compute matters. Recently, a fascinating update dropped in the enterprise hardware space that has direct implications for us local AI nerds: Nvidia has rolled out new Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) optimizations for their Vera CPU architecture via the Olympus platform firmware. Early reports and internal benchmarks are showing a consistent 3 to 6% performance gain across various workloads. ...

Open Source Sustainment And The Future Of Gitea Welcome back to Self-Hosted Tech! If you’ve been running a homelab for any amount of time, you probably have a stack of old mini PCs, a repurposed enterprise server, or maybe a cluster of Raspberry Pis humming away in your closet. But hardware is only half the equation. The true magic of the homelab comes from the open-source software we run on that hardware. ...

Linux Patches Show Promising Results For Lower Latency Of Short Slice Tasks Welcome back to Self-Hosted Tech! If you’ve been running a homelab for any amount of time, you already know that the Linux kernel is the beating heart of almost everything we do. From Proxmox hypervisors to bare-metal Docker hosts, Linux is quietly shuffling resources around behind the scenes. Most of the time, we don’t even think about it—until things start to lag. ...

AMD ROCm vs. Vulkan Performance for Lemonade Local AI Server with Llama.cpp Welcome back to Self-Hosted Tech! If you’ve been following the local AI revolution, you already know that Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem has been the undisputed king of the hill. But here in the homelab community, we love a good challenge, and many of us have AMD GPUs sitting in our rigs gathering dust while we wait for the software ecosystem to catch up. ...

One Year Later: Sovereign Ai And The Fight For Choice It’s been just over a year since the local AI landscape experienced a massive paradigm shift. If you rewind to early 2023, running a Large Language Model (LLM) at home was largely considered a novelty. You needed a deep understanding of Python, complex dependency management, and a willingness to watch your computer sweat through a 7-billion parameter model at a sluggish two tokens per second. ...

What is Self-Hosted AI? A Beginner’s Guide to Running Local Models If you’re reading this blog, you probably already have a soft spot for running your own servers. Maybe you’ve got a Proxmox cluster humming in your closet, a Raspberry Pi handling your DNS, or a media server feeding movies to your family. But over the last couple of years, a new beast has entered the homelab arena: Artificial Intelligence. ...

Getting Started with Proxmox: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide Welcome to Self-Hosted Tech! If you’re reading this, you’ve probably caught the homelab bug. You’re tired of paying monthly subscription fees for cloud services, you want to reclaim your data, and maybe you’re itching to run your own local AI models without relying on someone else’s API. ...

GPU VRAM Explained for Local AI Welcome back to the blog! If you’ve been hanging out in homelab circles, browsing local AI subreddits, or watching our channel lately, you’ve probably noticed one term being thrown around more than any other: VRAM. When you build a server for traditional self-hosted apps like Plex, Nextcloud, or Pi-hole, you usually worry about CPU cores, system RAM, and storage speed. But when you step into the world of local AI—running your own Large Language Models (LLMs) or generating images with Stable Diffusion—the rules change completely. The CPU takes a backseat, and the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) becomes the star of the show. ...