Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

GP said:

>you shed a layer of security by deciding to make your address public, non of which would benefit the whole point

It's possible to host something with no intention of making it internet-public. I also have services like that, that I only use myself or with friends. GP argument is that they don't want to share the onion link to their website, because (bluntly) we are not invited. Onion domains are actually relatively private (i mean unguessable - unlike clearnet domains), so it's possible to host private websites without any additional authorization.

Having said that, onion links carry a implicit baggage, so while I think they're great for sharing things with (technical) friends or a private VPN, they're probably not the best way to host services intended for public.

With a free service it's given because they have to monetize end of the day. For paid services different businesses will have different strategies. Some have a solid business model and are content with it, some want to differentiate themselves using privacy, some simply don't want to take the reputation risk that comes with moves like this. Will there be some sleazy bastards who take your money and your data (cough cough gith*)? Sure, but they will get found out eventually and astute people will be able to steer away.

This guy is right. Physical memory isn't flat. Every system with more than a few cores is NUMA. There are caches and cache lines. Memory channel interleaving. Ranks and banks and rows. Each DRAM chip keeps the last selected row and can access addresses within that row more quickly even if other accesses to other chips occur in the middle, unless a refresh cycle occurs.

It's all a layer below even OS programming. It's configured at the BIOS level and then performed in hardware. But that's the point, isn't it? Virtual memory is below the application programmer, too, but here we're chastising him for not understanding it. If we do that, shouldn't we equally chastise people for not understanding physical memory? Or speculative execution? Or head seeking and servo tracks? Or Ethernet line coding?

I agree that files aren't sacred, they are just another abstraction at the end of the day, but what the other user (I think) is referring to is the trend in which, as smartphone use becomes ubiquitous, users lose sight of the technical side of things.

It's not that the average user is ignorant of the many ways in which data can be stored and retrieved. It's that they are becoming ignorant of such abstractions existing altogether. It's hard to start thinking about how images are stored if all the user knows is "they are in the gallery".

It's a complex feeling, really.

I've got a friend, I'll call him Bob, mostly because Bob is nowhere near his real name and I'm about to say some not very flattering things about him. He is my friend and not my job colleague or anything, so there's certain objectivity to this, in fact I appreciate Bob and I wish nothing but the best for him.

Bob has been programming for a bit more than a decade. He is, barring the people I know from other countries, the best paid programmer I know, and I know well over a dozen.

Bob has no interest whatsoever in any programming language that is not what he has been using his whole career, nor does he have any interest or curiosity in dipping his toes in other related fields, web development, tinkering with arduinos, home servers... Nothing. Bob has not built a computer, ever, doesn't know how to do it, nor what each part in that object does, beyond the hard drive because he did plug an extra one once or twice.

More anecdotally I played some Factorio and Satisfactory with Bob, now I know these are not excellent representations, but I expected a degree of order, planning and foresight, I was very much surprised when facing the reality of none of that being present, and I very much did not expect to see the same thing the few times I've looked at his code, but I did see that same thing.

I promise you Bob doesn't make up for all of this in social skills.

Now, is Bob a good engineer? I really, really don't think so. Is he a curious person? A bit, not much, I get the feel he just ended in CS with no particular interest for it, but I'll say it again: He is the best paid programmer I know.

Is that frightening? Well yeah, in a way. It's also endearing in a "Well damn if this guy can do it then surely I can too" sort of way. Money is not everything of course, but it's as good of a proxy as any.