Thats my strategy for going to food markets. I take $20 of cash and leave my wallet at home. That way I don’t end up buying and eating everything.

Exactly. Much like crypto, the productivity and capability gains are there, but the toxic shareholder value culture hijacked it for its own purposes.

What I have observed in busienss is that smart people do smart things with AI. Just Like a well skilled person can do great things with a spreadsheet.

Stupid and lazy people do stupid and lazy things with AI, while looking smart. Just like that guy who build crap spreadsheets, but knows how to make them look pretty.

Most of the labour destroying practices come from market capitalism and shareholder culture. AI is just the excuse.

The IP theft is part of the business model in my mind, but I take your point. Its similar to the early days of the internet and the dot com boom and bust.

Its not AI that is the problem. Its the current investment and business model around the AI tech industry that is the problem.

And it manifests in way more places than just AI.

And its getting better more modern implementations. Not code from the mid 2000s that has been run though dozens of code translations and compatibility layers.

Reality

It’s called incumbency.

I remember a time when IBM had 95% market share of the PC market.

Then Apple and Microsoft innovated them out of the market, in software.

Blackberry had 80%+ market share of the smartphone segment they popularized. In 4 years it was almost entirely gone.

It happens when the engineers are sidelined and the finance and marketing people take over.

They are blind to any trends that they do not control. They are unable to innovate and unwilling to take risks. It kills gigantic companies slowly at first and then very quickly.

The older your CPU, the more dramatic the benefits get, due to the lack of windows bloat, kernel level anticheat, etc.

Copyright killed the internet star.

Its not about forcing anyone.

Its about empowering them with a more complex communication medium that allow them to send and receive photos videos and voice notes. Not just with you, but with other people as well.

The process can be quite empowering for them. I would say discuss the option with them and let them decide.

I know many grandparents that made the effort to stay in touch with Children and Grandchildren.

They are not incapable of learning, they just need sufficient motivation and support.

Something like signal is simpler and less likely to push slop their way.

Also look at some of the simplified launchers available for android. It allows you to setup a locked down UI for them that hides everything they don’t need.

EDIT: I used BIG launcher in the past with my 84 year old grandfather to great success.

Why is VoLTE important for you?

If you are worried about privacy, you should not use normal phone services.

In my case, I setup a ZFS pool of my disks in my old desktop PC running Proxmox. Then I allocated some storage to an LXC container running Debian and Samba for file sharing.

In your case, since the QNAP already runs Samba, it would be best to run it directly on the NAS.

But if you want to do it for the learning experience, you can setup an NFS share on the QNAP and link it to the Proxmox. The Proxmox can then use the NAS for storage and you can have VMs or LXC contsiners use for virtual disks.

I am quite satisfied with the unifi ecosystem so far as networking and CCTV systems go. They are cloud enabled without being cloud dependent. Since the early 2025 networking update, their routers are pretty good now. The UDM SE is a pretty compelling router/POEswitch/NVR in the home context.

Their NAS ecosystem is still very new and I would not it a viable option yet. They are also leaning towards the vendor lock-in direction with drives. Its the same reason I would stay away from Synology and QNAP.

Personally, I run a old desktop as a NAS/homelab running Proxmox(FOSS based hypervisor). I run ZFS on it and its “fine”. It performs fine even with a mixed bunch of disks, provided you have them in pairs or groups of 3 that perform close to identically. I just run a Debian container on the Proxmox as my fileserver and a few VMs for homelabbing.

One player that works well in a home environment is UnRAID. It a Linux distor that runs on commodity hardware and handles redundancy with “just a bunch of disks” better than most. The UI is friendly to non technical users. The catch is that UI is commercial software. Many consider it a fair exchange for the convenience it brings.

These people should get grant funding for reducing e-waste and Apple should pay for it.

I have had this with some laptops if the charger is faulty. The laptop goes into a limp mode, where the CPU locks to its lowest clock speed.

Since the display is using USB-C it may be triggering the slowness. Some USB-C monitors also deliver power to the connected device.

Is the laptop slow, even when running off battery, or only when running off battery?

Keeping an eye on the CPU frequency with something like Btop can maybe help troubleshoot the issue.

Would love to see work on getting broader application support like for microsoft office.

If you get stuck with Winboat, as its still a very new project, you might want to have a look at winapps, which is very similar

https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps

In addition to other advice, with only hardware, have 1 cold spare drive for every 2 years of remaining life of the hardware. It gets difficult to find similar spec drives the older they get. So if you want to use the drives in the NAS for another 4 years, get 2 spares. After that you start getting into the territory of replacing the drives anyway.

My rule for older hardware, before trusting the ZFS fault reporting, I would follow the following steps.

(Note these are homelabber steps and not what I would do in the enterprise, where risk and time is a lot more expensive than replacing hardware)

0. Check the Smart data of the drive. If it reports the drive as faulty, replace it.

1. Zpool clear the error and see if it comes back. Sometimes drive errors are not cause by the drive itself

2. Reseat the drive and the cables between the motherboard and the drive. Clear errors after this step. Especially with older hardware and it having travelled from its previous owner to you, something might not be seated properly.

3. Move the drive to another drive bay, or swap it with another drive. If the errors move with the drive, the drive is faulty. If the errors move to the bay, you probably have a good drive, but a faulty drive bay/cable.