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You think it's a not? I read that other post as a person with too much faith in an LLM, but a person.

Fair. But, in your/their world, how does one seek the information? If they aren't allowed to ask, should they then just ask AI, or read an article otherwise written from Reddit/forum posts?

To ask it another way: How do you justify a person being curious and asking in good faith if an AI could just farm the post later? I think, but I'm not sure, that Lemmy has some kinds of safeguards against that? I know with Reddit it was wide open. I used it for the better part of a decade, wrote long-winded posts full of information; I know AI was trained in part based on my posts (among millions of others).

What I have is a Mac mini (M2 Pro, 16GB RAM) and a MacBook Air (M2 base, 16GB RAM). The desktop (the mini) would be absolutely overkill, but I don't want it doing a bunch of stuff when my wife and I are trying to actively use it as a server.

The last Intel box I had shit the bed and I no longer have it. I had a 4th gen Xeon (1231-v3) with 16GB DDR4 and a 3GB Radeon 280. If I still had that tower, I'd start with that for sure.

Didn't see it mentioned, but would recommend openmediavault. It runs on headless debian and is very stable.

It isn't nearly as much fun a building a dedicated server, (or what I like to do -- repurpose old junk) but the services you mentioned will run just fine on a decent desktop or laptop, especially if you aren't doing some hungry task while they are running. -1 for Plex. +1 for Jellyfin.
You can run them all on your LAN and access them around the house by the machine's LAN IP and the services' port number.
You can do the same thing if you have tailscale on your phone or other remote computer, just use the tailscale IP and the service's port.
You can use Nginx Proxy Manager to send your services through a cloudflared tunnel to a hostname you buy, and keep access limited to just yourself and a select few (FYI I hear Cloudflared doesn't like a lot of video streaming, so don't give access to too many folks).

Jellyfin will run on a windows machine without screwing with docker, and will host your music too, though the UI isn't great.

You can use a simple fileserver on windows to host other stuff like pics.

Just start somewhere and you'll be neck-deep before you know it.
You can use

I'm running a simple COMAI instance on my desktop that recommends linux commands and does limited chat. it was easy. It spins the processor up to 50% to give a response and takes a couple of seconds depending on complexity. I run the other stuff on a dedicated server, but with nginx proxy manager, I can send the COMAI instance to a page on my domain even though it is on a different computer on my LAN.

With unprecedented temps in excess of 106 F, running a couple of old lenovo desktops is nothing compared to my AC bill.

+1

I’ve used OMV for a few years now. It’s relatively straight forward to just get working with plenty of options for more granular control. The documentation, in my experience, has also been quite good.