A huge amount of why normal office workers like using AI, in my opinion, is that they never learned how make even simple scripts which would have helped them in a lot of their tasks.

Most office workers do not have the access rights and programs to run scripts. I know how to write them, but there is no way that local IT would allow me to run python on my work machine.

My need for control/understanding stuff I create

And that is really important from a mental health perspective: People are being held responsible for their work. If something does break that they’ve built, their boss & coworkers expect that they are able to fix it and that the error will not happen again. If you understand your system, you are able to do that. If you are responsible for some kind of AI-driven house of cards that you do not understand and can’t fix, that is really bad. It’s triggering some kind of imposter syndrome

Isn’t it obvious? There is no vaccine. We’ve seen human-to-human transmission even with short contacts like a flight. It’s able to kill people. And we know that at least in the USA the government will not do anything to protect the people.

Implement GNU Terry Pratchett on your servers:

http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/

Als Privatnutzer bekommt man ja eher seltener gigantische Mengen an Papier per Post. Das sind dann maximal ein paar Briefe pro Woche und dann ist es auch total egal, ob die OCR 10 Minuten pro Brief braucht. Und wenn du als Firma wirklich noch eine größere Menge an Briefpost zu verwalten hast, dann ist ein Raspi definitiv die falsche Wahl

$3/mon is $36 a year. That adds up - most people have to work several hours to earn that money.

In my case I’ve taken the really important stuff like birth certificates, etc., and put them into its own folder. Everything else is going into a simple box. I’m not getting that many documents by snail mail. It’s actually quite easy to find the physical document: I know from the scam that I’ve received the document on first of June two thousand eighteen. So I can go back to two thousand eighteen June and then there are maybe two or three documents which I’ve received in that time frame. You can also simply write an ongoing number on the document.

And how do I tell from the scan if there is a paper document? My scanner is naming those PDF in a typical method. If it is called Receipt_000123.pdf, I know that it is coming from my scanner and that there is something physical

I’m not aging out papers. I’m still on the first box, so everything is okay storage wise.

even more demanding services (Immich, etc).

Just for your information, I’m running Immich on an old Optiplex and it does work without demanding a lot of power. Yes, if you import your library, it will take some time to process everything. But after that is done, the amount of computing you’ll need is actually near nothing. Processing the images is a one-time job. And if you’re not going around taking thousands of pictures every day, Immich will not demand much power. Most of the time it sits idle while not new pictures are uploaded and nobody looks at the pictures.

(it’s the same with Plex or Jellyfin BTW: If you’re not running the server for your extended family, you get away with cheap hardware)

If it’s digital, I’m keeping it. A scan it’s just a few kilobytes. And for a normal private person, the storage amount needed is absolutely minimal. Even if you get one important document per mail per day and scan it with a 1MB filesize, you’re looking at 365MB per year. If you’re 20 right now and are looking at a life expectancy of 85, that would be 365MB*65 = 23GB of storage.

My opinion: Plex has made it clear that they want your money. They don’t want you to host your own media and be happy with that. They want you to pay a subscription.

The whole Plex Pass Lifetime subscription is kind of a trap. You might be getting away with paying once currently, but let’s be honest: That means that they have taken your money once. And a some time in the future, a MBA dude will notice that they have a lot of non-paying heavy users (meaning: users who have paid several years ago, which is not relevant for the revenue goals of the current quarter) - and they will try to get you to pay again and again. You might be okay with that, but if you don’t want to get hassled, you need to switch to something else.