21–30 of 114 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither would be fucked if they were open source. Or if they had a ton of viable competition.
Is not most cloud tech based on open-source? Without Linux I feel like we would have seen cloud take off 20 years later than it did.
Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years. I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated. Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secure…
I think the drive that held my old home directory might have died, though.
As it appears to be hugged to death, archive link: https://archive.ph/qsdc3
Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era. 2020s, people are going offline to have fun. Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad. Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are mo…
Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.
To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.
A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).
And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).
For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.
You never go full cloud.
Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era. 2020s, people are going offline to have fun. Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad. Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are mo…
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ... Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc. To me a homelab…
I guess I'm just old though.
Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years. I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated. Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secure…
The primary exception would be Google Photos pictures which were auto-uploaded from my phone that I haven't curated and downloaded yet.
I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address much longer than if I had used Gmail, given the attrition rate of bannings without support.
> on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured.
Hold up, is this OR or XOR? It sounds like you're trying to add unreasonable (dis-)qualifiers. TFA isn't saying one must boycott "the cloud" and erase all data, it just advocates that you retain an independent copy.
> Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services.
I think that's conflating different use-cases.
* Having a regular offsite backup into S3 isn't that different from when the data was rsync'ed to a Linux machine I paid for an account on. Any cloud-ness is a remote implementation detail, not a change in the consumer relationship.
* In contrast, "all my photos are in the cloud and my friends and family can collaborate on shared albums" is different, it permanently moves the locus of control.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ... Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc. To me a homelab…
It's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era. I guess I'm just old though.
It was goddam glorious.
Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.
It was even more goddam glorious.
Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.
I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
As it appears to be hugged to death, archive link: https://archive.ph/qsdc3