Sure, works fine for inference with tensor parallelism, USB4 / thunderbolt 4/5 is a better (40Gbit+ and already there) bet than ethernet (see distributed-llama). Trash for training / fine tuning, that needs higher inter GPU speed, or better a bigger GPU VRAM.

Fair enough, I got the wrong impression with the post (which I did read) finishing with

It is not impossible to circumvent these issues, for instance by paying for a jmp.chat phone number with monero XMR. In this case you don’t actually have the sim, but rather access it remotely over XMPP. If you do this over Tor very little can be used against you.

and so on, which I found wanting from a privacy perspective at the implied threat level. No phones (or perhaps faraday bags, or aircraft mode, if tested, depending on threat model) is a much more astute take home, hence the spycraft suggestion.

Anyhow, best of luck.

So, your key takeaway seems to be getting an untraceable phone number. From an opsec point of view I see a few problems.

First, this is implicitly aimed at going against state level actors, which is a whole other game than random internet services. With that in mind…

You assume TOR is actually anonymous, but it has been shown that with enough compromised exit nodes that fails. It’s also a NSA project originally, which may or may not be relevant, the code may be good and is open and has had eyes on, but at the least shows they are intimately familiar with it.

You assume acquisition of Monero is uncompromised and untraceable. Perhaps cash at a machine might be pretty good, but a camera could easily invalidate it, or the machine itself be compromised, wouldn’t be hard to imagine a profit motive or false flag driving that.

What’s the security implications of the XMPP protocol ? Just using TOR may not be enough (I don’t know, just asking the questions). What about the other end of the phone call?

One approach, especially for local efforts, is just using old school spycraft, dead drops, one time pads etc.

You asked for feedback.

Until next week, sigh.

Huge kudos to Freetube, I love it. Just the opposite to Alphabet, go on, be evil again.

Seems like data integrity is your highest priority, and you’re doing pretty well, the next step is keeping a copy offsite. It’s the 3-2-1 backup strategy, 3 copies, 2 media (used to mean CDs etc but now think offline drives) 1 offsite (in case of fire, meteor strike etc), so look to that, stash a copy at a friends or something.

In your case I’d look at getting some online storage to fill the offsite role while you’re overseas (paid probably, but a year of 1 or 2 Tb is quite reasonable) leaving you with no pressure on the selfhosting side, just tailscale in, muck around and have fun, and if something breaks, no harm done, data safe.

I’ve done it for what seems like forever and I’d still be worried about leaving a system out of physical control for any extended period of time, at the very least having someone to reboot it if connectivity or power fails will be invaluable, but talking them through a broken update is another thing entirely, and you shouldn’t make that a critical necessity, too much stress.

I say go for the desktop for grunty work and pick up an older thinkpad for the mobile use case or just remote in with your macbook. I have a T580 (last of the dual batteries, infinite battery life baby), works an absolute treat on linux and next best build quality to a macbook but with a repair manual and massive upgradeability.