501–510 of 559 posts
Articles entire thesis looks like it can be completely de-railed if one activity happened: ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital. Is that likely? History says it's inevitable, but timeframe is an open question.
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Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?
16MB still seems massive for this kind of app. I ran Visual Studio 4, not an app, but an entire app factory, on a 66MHz 486 with 16MB RAM. And it was snappy. A TODO list app that uses system UI elements could be significantly smaller. What do I gain if more developers take this approach? Lightning fast performance. Faster backups. Decreased battery drain => longer battery service lifetime => more time in between hard…
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All the other browsers managed it fine. That sounds like a Safari problem. Which would be totally in line with Apple's modus operandi.
No, they didn't. It was straightforwardly unsafe and broken, the heaps of effort that went into supporting it were largely just to paper over that fact. It's no accident that the other browser vendors went along with dropping support so quickly after Apple did.
The main reason other browsers stopped supporting Flash was websites stopped being built with Flash because iOS didn't support it, and a lot of people thought that mattered even though iOS had (and still has) a small market share world-wide.
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We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
The problem is that there is a very large incentive for three large companies to corner the market on computing components, forcing consumers to rent access instead of owning.
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We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
If they choke the consumer PC long enough the segment will die
Meanwhile people who can't afford new systems because of high prices don't buy them, but that only creates pent up demand while people continue to use their existing systems. Then as soon as RAM prices get back to what they used to be, all the people who have been wanting a new PC can suddenly afford one again and instead of having below average sales they get catch-up demand.
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I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software d…
We have an open, universal application platform. That alone is something to celebrate.
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…
I've been renting a VPS for 15-20 years from a small provider. It runs a webserver, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a bunch of other things, and I spend maybe an hour or two per month maintaining it. Add a few non-recurring hours if I want to set up something new or need to change something big.
Self hosting is not hard. It's not scary. It's not a security nightmare. All of that is just FUD.
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I have been self hosting for years. The maintenance is minimal to nonexistent. You are conflating modern SaaS with a stable OSS docker image.
Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work. I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures. Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - on…
* A rented VPS that's been running for ~15 years without any major issues, only a couple hours a month of maintenance.
* A small NUC-like device connected to the TV for media. Requires near-zero maintenance.
* A self-built 5-drive NAS based around a Raspberry Pi CM4 with a carrier board built for NAS/networking uses. Requires near-zero maintenance.
* A Raspberry Pi running some home automation stuff. This one requires a little more effort because the hardware it talks to is flaky, as is some of the software, so maybe 2-3 hours a month.
The basics (internet access itself) are just a commodity cable modem, a commodity router running a manufacturer-maintained OpenWRT derivative, a pair of consumer-grade APs reflashed with OpenWRT, and a few consumer-grade switches. There's no reason for me to roll my own here, and I don't want to be on the hook for it when it breaks. And if any of the stuff in the bulleted list breaks, it can sit for days or weeks if I don't feel like touching it, because it's not essential.
And yes, I've hard hardware failures and botched software upgrades. They take time to resolve. But it's not a big burden, and I don't spent much time on this stuff.
> I have a much more complex setup than necessary
Yup.
> Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work.
You don't need this. Trying to get even remotely there will eat up your time, and that time is better spent doing something else. Unless you enjoy doing that, which is fine, but say that, and don't try to claim that self-hosting necessarily takes up a lot of time.
This may not be entirely appropriate to the reasons behind the article, but it feels tangentially related: I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us. I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future, but it seems th…
> golden period of globalisation The largest upward transfer of wealth in Earth's history. > was able to bring us. A useless race to the bottom. > that can be learnt about what we had Rebadged imperialism. If you constantly screw native populations out of the value of their resources you will lose everything you build with those resources. Literally the lesson: make fair deals or die.
The uber-profit-driven enrichment of a very small group of people at the cost of entire communities or even populations should be rewarded with, like you say, death.