pibox-os VS Node RED

About my business? Sure! It's at https://kubesail.com and we sell our hardware at https://pibox.io :)

Our best feature is that the website will detect if you're on the same network as your machine and if so, offer "local" links instead of remotely proxied ones. That way non-technical users dont need anything fancy. On top of that, the "local" urls still get valid HTTPS certs for free, so non-technical users dont get any scary browser warnings.

We started out as a way to make self-hosting easier for corporations, but the users who joined our community were mostly home-hosters, so we leaned into that! Jellyfin is now our most popular app.

I built a small business around this idea (particularly your last sentence about it evolving quickly), so I can’t not promote https://KubeSail.com and our hardware at https://pibox.io

That said, I use an old workstation as my home router and server. It’s worth the power bills in saved subscription cost alone. Much more relevant is how much of my time I spend on it!

We make tiny Linux servers packed with real devops tools (but also sporting a somewhat-easy-ish-to-use UI) for home-hosting and self-teaching: https://pibox.io - works great with Jellyfin!

I am really loving my https://pibox.io, it might fit the bill if you can get your hands on one. A raspberry pi 4 should be okay too with the usb 3, it just might be not as neat

I do but my side business doesn’t make 6 figures! Curious why you don’t think focusing on growing that isn’t a better path forward. Obligatory link to said side business: https://pibox.io

I saw solutions like https://pibox.io/ which is interesting, maybe ticking all the boxes, but all the versions are sold out. While I am waiting for them to be back to stock, have anyone used it and what is your thought? Does it work for my need? What is the alternatives?

I watched a video about OpenMediaVault and I don't like three things about it. Firstly the user interface doesn't look as user friendly as in TrueNAS for example, secondly the guy in the video I watched said there is no RAID with OpenMediaVault and thirdly the cheapest Raspberry Pi 4 Modell B, 8 GB costs around 160 USD where I live which is much more than I thought. There are Kits like the PiBox but they are very expensive too.

I am quite happy with pibox. It's only two 2.5" drives, but they are also working on a 5x3.5" version.

And Pibox from Rasperry pi too - https://pibox.io

I am using the pibox as a NAS, but that might be an overkill for you.

Good question.

I expect that we're moving into a phase of AIs talking to AIs, and initially it'll be wasteful (because it'll be mostly English), but eventually, they'll derive their own language and seamlessly upgrade protocols when they determine they're talking to an AI. No clue how that will come about or what that language will look like, but honestly, it's kind of exciting.

Really interesting to think about how they might handle context, as well. Even though we have much bigger context windows (and they'll only get larger), context management is still a resource-management issue, which we'll probably continue to refine, as well. Imagine different strategies for managing both what is brought into the context of each request, as well as what form it could take (level of detail, additional references or commentary on it, etc). Things could get really unreadable even in English, and still be very interpretable for an LLM.

W.r.t. the graph-oriented interfaces, are you thinking something like Node-RED [1]? I'm seeing more and more people mention having LLMs produce non-text or structured outputs, like JSON, UI, and other things. Easy to imagine an LLM that wires together various open-source platforms, on-demand. Something like Node-RED for pipelines/functions, some UI tools for visualization/interactivity, other platforms for messaging, etc...

[1] https://nodered.org/

I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article.

The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time.

That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't.

- n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/

- Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in this thread)

- trigger dev: trigger.dev

- automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/

- Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introducti...

- Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

- budibase: https://budibase.com/

- windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/

- tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows

- Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce <-> PostgreSQL)

- Zapier: zapier.com/

Anyway I hope some of these are fun!

Source: https://github.com/node-red/node-red

I believe Node-RED (https://nodered.org/) the way to go. It's just an NPM package to install and you can run it how ever you wish (even on Windows). It has a friendly and helpful community with even the main developers tirelessly answering even beginner level questions. In fact the community forum its THE friendliest forum I've ever been a member of by a large margin. Node-RED's development is supported by the JS Foundation and it's completely free and open source. It's widely used in the industrial automation industry and even integrated by some PLC manufacturers such as Siemens.

Does anyone know if their are plans to implement something like this (or if there are already custom nodes out there). I'd like to experiment with things like looping and incrementing values (like a for loop) for a Ksampler for example. It's only an example though, so I am not looking for a ksampler specific solution; just a generic way to have a variable (e.g. Seed value), run some nodes that use that value, increment the value, and then loop back to the beginning until some sort of condition is met. Node-Red (an event driven node based programming language) has this functionality so it could defintely work in a node based environment such as ComfyUI (see here).