It heavily depends on how close you are and their hover system and how much work has been spent to make them quiet. You probably heard about the Amazon ones, which are loud and hover low to the ground. There are other ones, such as the ones Zipline makes, which are quieter to begin with and hover very high, using a powered descend module on a cable. Those are basically silent from ground level.
Avoiding traffic and using an electric vehicle instead of a ICE one. In Bay Area traffic an electric drone can do a delivery in five minutes that would take a car thirty. And the Zipline style high hover + tethered descent drone is quieter than a car. I’m not sure if these are using that style or the low hover type like Amazon had been using, which are much louder.
You definitely don’t have to go full LLM for this. There are a wide variety of local spam filtering tools available, depending on what email application you use. If you really want to use modern ML, I’d go with something like Laya as it is tunable and runs locally.
Easily! My Pi runs PiHole and a print server and I’ll could probably run almost my entire stack in it if I wanted. Jellyfin would be the hardest due to transcoding CPU usage, but it’s probably ok for one stream at a time.
The other issue for me would be storage. Since I have a 32TB NAS I run everything that requires large storage on it, but a USB RAID attached to a Pi would probably work just fine.
The other issue is RAM. I rarely hit 8GB, but do use more than 4GB fairly regularly.
I have a git repo with all my docker files, config, notes, etc. I have a main overview file covering the overall system and then a directory for each machine. I edit things on my local machine, then scp and ssh to the various remotes. Once I’m happy with my changes, I commit and push to my Forgejo install on my NAS in case my main computer fails. Secrets, passwords, and keys are in my Vaultwarden.
I don’t use AI for it, but a local model could probably give me the commands to do whatever I wanted based on the repo.
My first thought would be to try and fix it, then you have a nice laptop or get to be the family hero when you return it working to your brother.
Past that there are several services you might use that can take advantage of the video card: Immich image recognition, Paperless OCR, some of the local Whisper servers.
Or you have a nice set-top PC for big screen gaming and media playback.