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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#221

Post by josmar »

gregoriol wrote: post #212
saadn92 wrote: post #201

The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's servers. Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it j…

You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long…

Since using NixOS for my home server, I've found it to Just Work™ flawlessly every time.

If anyone reading this has struggled with servers accumulating cruft, and requiring maintainance, I recommend NixOS.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#222

Post by esseph »

gregoriol wrote: post #212
saadn92 wrote: post #201

The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's servers. Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it j…

You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long…

There are a lot of people that have made a lot of money and careers because developers in particular don't want to know or don't care to know how to manage this stuff.

They need to get over it.

Pick up some Ansible and or Terraform/tofu and automate away. It can be easy or as involved as you want it to be.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#223

Post by daveidol »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #94
bluejay2387 wrote: post #61

The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people…

To be fair the people that have ipad as their only computer device now didn’t have a computer back then

Not my 70yo mom. She used to have a big gray PC but switched to a Chromebook (one I gave her) about 15 years ago, and now only uses her phone and tablet.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#224

Post by duskdozer »

sfn42 wrote: post #170
vladvasiliu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has. I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.

Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an applicat…

The web browser on my phone instantly gets killed the moment I switch to another app because it eats up so much ram.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#225

Post by Arch485 »

kibwen wrote: post #169
TeMPOraL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere . Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.

The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall below the price of mining, that creates a market opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted electricity is the product.

I think that's only because electricity is the bottleneck, though. If it was no longer the bottleneck, crypto miners would expand rapidly with more hardware, mining difficulty would increase, and eventually the bottleneck is storage space for all your GPUs, if not the GPUs themselves.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#226

Post by tangotaylor »

I'm going to fight pessimism with cynicism here: the Department of Defense is not going to let everything move to the cloud because they need compute at the edge for AI-enabled weapons and R&D. For example, Anduril's products, Eric Schdmit's secretive Bumblebee project, or startups like Scout AI. Communications and GPS are just too easy to jam and their answer is giving weapons more last-mile autonomy to operate in radio silence.

War aside, I also bet there's going to be a huge demand for edge-compute for other kinds of robotics: self-driving cars, delivery robots, factory robots, or general-purpose humanoids (Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics Atlas, 1X NEO, etc). Moving that kind of compute to the cloud is too laggy and unreliable. I know researchers who've tried it, the results were mixed.

Also, the engineers working on these platforms aren't going to reinvent the wheel every time they need to connect hardware together and they're going to use interoperable standards, like PCIe for storage or GPUs, DIMM slots for memory, ATX for power, etc. So I don't see general-purpose computing dying.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#227

Post by barrkel »

sfn42 wrote: post #192
barrkel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People spend a lot more than that on a car they use less, especially if they're in tech. The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to 128GB DIMMs. That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference, or paged on dem…

I bought a 4 year old car for significantly less than that. And I can get a computer that can do 99% of what your monster can do for like 10% of the price. And if I want LLM inference I can get that for like $20 a month or whatever. I don't mean to judge, it's your money but to me it seems like an enormous waste. Just like spending $100k on a car when you can get one for $15k that does pretty much exactly the same jo…

Sure. You're right, it is my money. And I pay even more for inference on top; I have OpenRouter credits, OpenAI subscription, Claude Max subscription.

It's not so easy to get nice second-hand hardware here in Switzerland, and my HEDT is nice and quiet, doesn't need to be rack-mounted, plugs straight into the wall. I keep it in the basement next to the internet router anyway.

The "sensible" choice is to rent. It's the same with cars; most people these days lease (about 50% of new cars in CH, which will be a majority if you compare it with auto loan and cash purchase).

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#228

Post by saadn92 »

gregoriol wrote: post #212
saadn92 wrote: post #201

The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's servers. Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it j…

You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long…

yes, I do agree with that sentiment, there are times when I'm spending way too much time restarting a service that went down, but it doesn't take as long as it used to, especially with AI assistance nowadays. If I'm spending too much time on it, then I'm also probably learning something along the way, so I don't mind spending that time.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#229

Post by horsawlarway »

gregoriol wrote: post #212
saadn92 wrote: post #201

The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's servers. Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it j…

You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long…

This point is oversold.

Sure - self hosting takes a bit more work. It usually pays for itself in saved costs (ex - if you weren't doing this work, you're paying money which you needed to do work for to have it done for you.)

Cloud costs haven't actually gotten much cheaper (but the base hardware HAS - even now during these inflated costs), and now every bit of software tries to bill you monthly.

Further, if you're not putting services open on the web - you actually don't need to update all that often. Especially not the services themselves.

Honestly - part of the benefit of self-hosting is that I can choose whether I really want to make that update to latest, and whether the features matter to me. Often... they don't.

---

Consider: Most people are running outdated IP provided routers with known vulnerabilities that haven't been updated in literally years. They do ok.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#230

Post by jameshart »

zozbot234 wrote: post #100
rswail wrote: post #88

A long article begging the question when the last paragraph or two countered the panic of the beginning. Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening as the existing producers move to selling to enterprise/hyperscalars. There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the time. The AI boom/"…

> Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening Yes but these Chinese firms are a tiny share of the overall RAM/SSD market, and they'll have the same problems with expanding production as everyone else. So it doesn't actually help all that much.

The fact that there’s been a massive expansion in the nonconsumer market means the consumer market makes up a smaller proportion of the overall market, but it doesn’t mean the consumer market is any smaller than it used to be.
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