Keeping your machine yours

The fastest way to lose a host is to make their computer feel borrowed. So the defaults are arranged around one rule: the person sitting at the machine wins, always.

It pauses itself when you sit down

mahout watches the desktop's idle hint. When you start using the machine it finishes the job in flight and stops claiming new ones; when you step away it resumes. This is on by default — --no-auto-pause turns it off for a machine that is only ever a server.

The big red button

$ mahout pause      # drain: finish what is running, take nothing new
$ mahout status     # what it is doing right now, and why

Pausing drains rather than kills: a customer mid-answer still gets their answer, and you still get paid for it. A drain completes in under a minute.

What it will never do

Run as root. mahout is an ordinary user process. It cannot touch anything your login cannot.
Open an inbound port. Only outbound HTTPS. Your router stays as it is.
Download something we did not pin. Every artifact — the engine, every model file — is checked against a digest compiled into the binary or the catalogue, while downloading and again at every load.
Touch your files. It reads its own cache directory and writes its own state directory. Prompts are never written to disk at all.

Leaving, cleanly

$ mahout uninstall
  will remove:
    ~/.cache/mahout        18.4 GiB   (models and engine)
    ~/.local/state/mahout   1.2 MiB   (receipts, logs, work state)
    ~/.config/mahout        4.0 KiB   (identity — keep with --keep-identity)
  proceed? [y/N]

It prints the plan with sizes before touching anything, and earnings already accrued are still paid out at the next cycle. Trying should cost nothing, including the leaving.

What hosting actually costs you

Electricity and wear. A card drawing 300 W for an hour costs roughly €0.10 at Belgian rates — that is the number to compare any hosting income against, and it is why we pay per token produced rather than per hour switched on. An idle hour costs you power and earns nobody anything.