Comment by rahimnathwani 5 days ago
Maybe those folks buying Mac Minis to host at home weren't so silly after all. The exposed ones are almost all hosted on VPSs which, by design, have publicly-routable IP addresses.
But anyway I think connecting to a Clawdbot instance requires pairing unless you're coming from localhost: https://docs.molt.bot/start/pairing
Doesn't Moltbot specifically require MacOS for iMessage, Apple reminders, and some other Apple-ecosystem features?
HN is the last place I expected to see someone laugh at self-hosting
If you want iMessage you still need an always-on Mac, whether that's the main moltbot gateway, or the MacOS app running in 'node mode' to allow a moltbot gateway to use it to send/receive iMessages.
I noticed when I was reading Federico Viticci's post about it that he was using telegram, which has much better support for "markdown"-y rendering, which looks a lot nicer than iMessage. And then I thought to myself, why would iMessage actually matter? The only other use-case would be interacting with texts, but almost anyone can tell when someone is using an LLM to text - I feel like our texting styles are so personal, and what is there even to gain from using an LLM just with text messages? So is it even worth it to run on a Mac?
I see value in the LLM being able to read/integrate my iMessages since a lot of my scheduling/commitments are discussed on there.
> Not really, you can emulate macOS on any Linux/x86-64.
Intel is going to stop being supported with the current OS version (Tahoe, 2025). OS are supported for about 3 years.
I'm curious what will happen after. If they'll break it or if they'll allow the services to keep running on unsupported hardware.
Got a couple years left
I expect someone will eventually get around to reverse engineering the various M series specific instructions for qemu. Does imessage make use of hardware attestation to register with the remote endpoint?
Our SFF HP came out at 150€ with flash storage and 16GB of RAM. I see used M1s for 200-250€ where we live. The only drawback of the M1 is you’d be stuck buying a NAS/DAS for the storage part, whereas the HP has 3 internal SATA ports. Neither option is silly, they have different pros/cons. Managing Linux quirks has gotten frustrating, for example.
The silly part is buying a $600 Mac mini when any $100 NUC or $50 raspberry pi or any cheap mini PC off of eBay will do the job exactly the same.