241–250 of 334 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But this is a company building on AI.
The project itself is open source and doesn't have any AI features. Also while Imbue is in some sense an AI startup it does have a very different ethos from a lot of tech companies: https://imbue.com/about
This is a great idea and I wish it success. Self-hosting shouldn't be a nightmare of researching and setting up 20 different applications. Is there something similar in progress for a "tech company tech stack"? As in, rather than trying to assemble your own custom infrastructure by finding an RPC system, permissions/group manager, credential management, storage, database, service discovery, job management, monitoring…
I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.
At the same time buying compute is more expensive than ever, and the gap between homemade projects and what's available online in term of speed, functionality and LLM capacity is bigger than ever. Building the equivalent of Google Photos locally wasn't that hard 10 years ago, given enough tolerance for speed and indexing lag issues. Trying to do the same today will cost two arms and leg and require a lot more overall…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't mind me asking a question to better understand your perspective: Are you old enough to have personally experienced and built self-hosted things before the advent of AWS, cloud hosted stuff, or is your text above (which I do not disagree with in any way) the point of view of a person who began working on this stuff in the "cloud-native" era, post-2012 or around then? I'm thinking from the "20 years ago" i…
Yeah, self-hosting is definitely having a come back. Lots of content creators who would have been evangelizing cloud solutions in the past have been instead going into the various self hosting rabbit holes. There is a bit of a pendulum swing. You now have access to so much information and tooling to host your own things, it’s pretty awesome compared to what we had before 2010. Not sure how much impact that will have…
I've worked for another corp that spent insane amounts for a CMS that nobody understood and required a full time engineer on duty to "unlock" files for the content team - this company later built a simple CMS that just stored a title, body and image in a database because I shit you not: thats 90% of what they needed from a CMS and to do quick announcements/news in a mobile app would have taken weeks longer to develop if they had to integrate with the real CMS.
This was a few years ago before LLMs btw, so I can only imagine how crazy it is today
The cloud space is absurd, we've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation. Containerisation was supposed to mean host anywhere, literally redeploy a complex set of services and their connections on any cloud provider at the drop of a hat. That is what a f**ing shipping container is, you rock up to any port in the world and the same container is lifted…
The cloud space is absurd, we've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation. Containerisation was supposed to mean host anywhere, literally redeploy a complex set of services and their connections on any cloud provider at the drop of a hat. That is what a f**ing shipping container is, you rock up to any port in the world and the same container is lifted…
The problem comes when developers start building things without this in mind. I see simple site analytics apps in github, where the docker compose file is a web os services and the repo itself is full of init scripts and the sort. You have redis, mongo, an RDBMS container, an analytics db, kafka, all the kafka tooling like bookkeeper, then you have outsourced auth liek clerk or supabase (when the whole thing is not just some supabase chimera with edge functions and whatever else supabase is supposed to run outside your infra).
And the repo description is: simple, anonymous wesbite analytics. The entire thing is more complex than the thin you want to do analytics for. So you bring that into a cloud, and instead of a container, you are now advised, but both AWS and your HN peers that you need to replace each component with it's cloud version, such as elasticache, AKS, cognito, firebase, whatever.
All of these services as you set up, trap you into overprovisioning. Your DB needs to have 3 replicas or you have no guarantees, your auth needs an entire instance of something running somewhere or unicorns start dying.
By the time you come out for sunlight your bill could pay your rent. So you don't self host, you signup for google analytics.
Everytime I find a project on GitHub, the first thing that makes me close it immediately is whether it has a docker-compose.yaml and if it's a single, sane/dumb, low footprint deployment or a chimera.
So self hosting is alive and well, whether your app is easy to self host, and whether you know how to use just what you need from cloud vendors are different questions.
This is a great idea and I wish it success. Self-hosting shouldn't be a nightmare of researching and setting up 20 different applications. Is there something similar in progress for a "tech company tech stack"? As in, rather than trying to assemble your own custom infrastructure by finding an RPC system, permissions/group manager, credential management, storage, database, service discovery, job management, monitoring…
Ruby ln Rails and are you sure you need all that? Do you have dozens of interrelated products with a billion users for each?
My goal is something that would work for startups that plan to grow beyond a single person/single server project. If you build the architecture for a too small size, you start running into walls as soon as you exceed that size.
But even if you are small, you probably want some kind of Grafana/Prometheus monitoring to tell you what's breaking. You want your framework pre-wired so it automatically reports data (e.g. requests/failures per service) without you having to set it up, because it it isn't automatic, you probably won't get around to setting it up until it's too late. You also want some kind of build system, CI/CD to handle deployment. An easy way to set up staging environments would be nice. If you don't want to use a hosted forge, then a self-hosted forge connected into all this.
My idea is to have one somewhat commonly adopted stack, where most of the stack "self-deploys" so you don't have to set up, connect, and coddle all of these services. If you want to deploy something within the stack, you're somewhat limited because you have to do it "the stack's way", but in exchange, once you've set it up, adding a staging environment consists of not actively disabling the default staging environment that the stack would set up for you otherwise, and once you've deployed your service, it's already pre-wired into your monitoring.
Popular packages would then over time likely get packaged for this stack, with service-specific monitoring exports (e.g. the postgres container could export query details rather than just the default-collected values like CPU usage and requests-through-the-standardized-RPC-framework).
I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.
The biggest difficulty is probably that from my observation, there's a sharp cutoff line somewhere between Gen Y and Z where anyone born before that (and don't work in tech) genuinely have no idea how to navigate their digital life and gets preyed on by those subscriptions. And these people are still a super large portion of the population paying for those subscriptions. Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and…
There seems to be a lot of variance between stated and revealed preferences around self-hosting. It often seems like presenting the image of being autonomous to our peers seems more important than actually achieving it. It takes a lot of energy to replicate what AWS and friends have done once we factor in concerns like the passage of time and entropy. I've never been able to keep a media/NAS appliance alive for much…
Yep, even with something like NextCloud or ownCloud it gets tiring pretty fast. I do get the appeal of handling everything on your own, but it also brings any of the downside of handling everything by myself. I just need a working cloud storage with sync, redundancy, and availability. Can I get it up to spec? Definitely but it will cost more both in time and money than getting OOTB solution. I gave up sync and availa…