alt Hacker NewsAn 8-bay Synology costs about $1000. It'll hold an eighth of a petabyte pretty comfortably (with sufficient redundancy). It's bizarre and disturbing to me how few of you seem to be interested in having your own libraries, even though technology has finally delivered that ability to you. You'll come on here once every 3 months and whine about how we have to do more for public libraries, even though they seem to largely be little more than daytime homeless shelters and free internet for perverts, and you don't even want libraries for yourselves.
The "library" is dying for the same reason the newspaper (and the book!) is dying. Literacy was only interesting for most people as a means to pass the time until they could get their hands on AI slop Tiktok feeds.
I don't need a carveout. Some large fraction of my internet bandwidth is downloading books and whatnot off of Libgen and Anna's.
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The same argument could be made about any public service. Certainly, if libraries were funded to the tune of $1000 for every household, they would be very different places.
The price for that storage system will be far more dominated by drive prices than by the cost of the NAS box itself. Drive prices have approximately doubled in my area vs. 2 years ago.
This is also generally a selfish attitude where you personally benefit while structures that used to benefit society at large are eroded.
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> even though they seem to largely be little more than daytime homeless shelters and free internet for perverts
And, of course you know this to be objectively true and hence can produce a valid source for your claim?
Libraries serve a lot purpose than you are giving credit for.
Libraries are a general facility for the public, they offer the standard books and other rental type arrangements although they are so much more than that!
- Access to computers
- Access to internet
- Access to printing
- Access to 3D Printing
- Access to Meeting rooms
- Access to Mental Health Services
- Access to Archive Rooms (newspapers, seed archives, etc).
They serve as a repository for everything physical. Most libraries have archive rooms with various artifacts from the region, including newspapers, publications, recordings, etc. Most of this stuff isn't available online.
Visit a library near a University or School and it becomes packed full of students researching and studying, even if most aren't accessing the books, the rooms, desk and facilities themselves are important.
Not everyone is willing to pirate books, willing to setup Synology devices, etc. A library grants an official place to access things in a legal way, easily (and for free!) among many other things.