What a host can refuse
The limits a GPU owner sets and we obey: models, hours, power, disk, and the big red button — plus the two things you cannot refuse.
Lending a computer to a network is a trust exercise, and trust is mostly about what you can say no to. Here is the full list, from the host's side.
No, not now
mahout pause finishes what is in flight and stops accepting new work. Nothing is
abandoned mid-generation; nothing new arrives. The dashboard shows the machine as paused.
Automatically, and on by default: work stops within seconds of you touching the keyboard, and while any fullscreen application or game is running. You do not have to remember.
No, not then
Availability windows restrict the machine to hours you choose. Outside them it takes nothing.
No, not that model
models_allowed narrows the machine to specific model ids. There are legitimate reasons
— a licence you would rather not serve under, weights you would rather not keep on your disk, or
simply the model that pays best on your card.
And a limit that is not yours to set but protects you anyway: mahout only ever runs artifacts pinned and checksummed in its own release. There is no mechanism for us to hand your machine an arbitrary binary or URL, so "no" to that question is structural rather than a policy we promise to keep.
No, not that much of my machine
A power cap, VRAM held back for your own use, a disk budget for the weights cache, and a share of
your upload bandwidth for helping other hosts download models — which you can set to zero. All in
mahout config or the dashboard.
No, not at all
mahout uninstall removes the cache, the state and the identity. It prints the deletion
plan and waits for confirmation before touching anything, and --keep-identity
preserves your signing key in case you come back. Earnings already accrued are still paid out;
leaving is not a forfeiture.
Revoking a machine from the dashboard does the same from the other end: its heartbeats start failing and it stops being offered work.
What you cannot refuse
- What is in a prompt. You serve requests without seeing who sent them and cannot filter by content. A prompt is data passed to a model, never instructions to your operating system, and nothing is written to your disk — but if serving unknown text at all is not acceptable to you, this network is not for you, and that is a reasonable position.
- The price. Rates are set centrally and published on the models page; there is no per-host bidding today. Your lever is which models you serve and when, not what they pay.
Related
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