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Fuck the cloud (2009)

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Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#61

Post by purplehat_ »

I'm surprised people are advocating self-hosting as a viable solution. It takes a lot of knowledge to do sync and backup yourself, most of it implicit knowledge that people here don't realize we have and so for us it seems very easy.

There was a comment in another post on the front page about how anyone "remotely technical" can set up a docker container, and I think this is a good example because the mechanics of it are simple (edit a couple text files, run a couple commands), but half the world couldn't tell you what a terminal is and they're focused on other things in life instead of learning how computers work. Cloud succeeded because cloud is easy (at least in the beginning), it's that simple.

If we are to solve this problem, we're going to have to make self-hosting easy enough for the average 7-8 year old to do it without struggling. One promising way forward is with local-first E2EE sync and backup. The only good implementation I know of personally is Obsidian Sync, which has a UX that I adore, and hope to see more of in the future. There's other good options too, but none that I'd feel comfortable trusting a seven-year-old to execute correctly first try.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#62

Post by downut »

h4kunamata wrote: post #33
downut wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis. 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 brow…

>I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.) The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available. That is totally opposite of homelab, you have full control, you flash firmware that gives you full control over devices. I am hard core Linux user, my wireless access point run…

"The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available."

Yeah, I think that's right.

I only thought in one dimension: reliance on corporate controlled high density existing infiltration of fossil-fuel delivery infrastructure. Which is worthless if the price is occasionally exorbitantly volatile or might even run into zero supply issues.

Another equally important dimension is: that EV car might just be a puppet, and not you running the puppet.

I'm pretty sure the Prius doesn't phone home (2015), but I admit that I've not gone deep into it.

I can't stand this thing I just did in this comment where I tried not to sound like an AI. I might have to give up short comments entirely because I can't generate enough context for authenticity credibility. <= It's a fact, and that right there sounds like AI to me now.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#63

Post by mikestorrent »

purplehat_ wrote: post #61

I'm surprised people are advocating self-hosting as a viable solution. It takes a lot of knowledge to do sync and backup yourself, most of it implicit knowledge that people here don't realize we have and so for us it seems very easy. There was a comment in another post on the front page about how anyone "remotely technical" can set up a docker container, and I think this is a good example because the mechanics of it…

> If we are to solve this problem, we're going to have to make self-hosting easy enough

It used to be easy enough in the 90s, when plenty of folks had their own custom website. You signed up with a hosting company; they provided you with a bunch of different ways to upload files; your website was hosted.

Of late, I've decided that the problem is that HTML development halted at what is still a very beta product. HTMX is a reasonable attempt to continue the spirit of HTML; where I'm going with this is that I think HTML should have continued to add enough reasonable features, without needing Javascript or massive amounts of CSS, so that most websites most people wanted to develop would still be straightforward enough to do. HTML stopped before it even had a usable with sorting and filtering defined, so we've spent decades with inferior tables in every web app that all suck compared to what we got used to with even Windows 3.1 apps. HTML finally grew date and colour pickers but it should have had all kinds of rich UI controls and behaviour that would have made it totally unnecessary for people to build all the Javascript middleware that essentially treats the browser as a display canvas and otherwise totally reimplements the GUI from scratch. And we wonder why the beautiful new Macbook Neo is kneecapped by only having 8GB????

It's time for HTML6. My standard will be: everything a restaurant website needs should be basically batteries included, with the exception of an e-commerce backend. It should all be doable in static HTML files with almost no Javascript and really just enough CSS to set artistic theming elements instead of having to do arcane shit just to position things.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#65

Post by echelon »

operatingthetan wrote: post #60
echelon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please show me the open source AWS. It's an encrustified open source offering where the original vendors aren't compensated. Where there's lock in, proprietary offering creep, and highway robbery billing.

>Please show me the open source AWS. I will not, because that is not what I asked. >Is not most cloud tech *based* on open-source?

No. It's not.

The proprietary pieces are 99% of the offering. It just wouldn't have ever worked without the open source bits.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#66

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

h4kunamata wrote: post #18

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, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad."

Does the term "hosting" come from "web hosting" or some earlier terminology

Does the term "hosting" in the "homelab" context mean storing data locally on own computers, or running locally stored programs

If yes, could the the term "storing" be used instead

If no, then why is "hosting" the term used

This is sort of rhetorical question. I think I know why but I'm looking for clarification

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#67

Post by yangm97 »

j45 wrote: post #53
seabrookmx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> home lab Well that's your problem right there. The home labber setups are for experimentation or "hot rodding" purposes and they typically way overbuild their solutions. What most people need is an old desktop in a corner somewhere (preferably close to your router so you can get to it with an ethernet cable). It's won't be Grandma proof, but if you're remotely technical you can write a docker compose file that glue…

What makes it grandma proof is software that makes it extremely simple, which is like a home appliance, which is within the realm of possibility. The simpler way to go on most fronts is some form of Proxmox with things like the above managed, it takes care of much of the overhead and doubt on it's own or through a reasonably point and click interface, which could be pre-configured.

Sounds like you’re describing Umbrel.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#68

Post by j45 »

yangm97 wrote: post #67
j45 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it grandma proof is software that makes it extremely simple, which is like a home appliance, which is within the realm of possibility. The simpler way to go on most fronts is some form of Proxmox with things like the above managed, it takes care of much of the overhead and doubt on it's own or through a reasonably point and click interface, which could be pre-configured.

Sounds like you’re describing Umbrel.

Could be, there should be more and more every year.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#69

Post by esseph »

asveikau wrote: post #26
TacticalCoder wrote: post #25

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.

"since 1998"

We're old.

A lot of HNers weren't born yet.

Re: Fuck the cloud (2009)

#70

Post by balamatom »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #66
h4kunamata wrote: post #18

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, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad." Does the term "hosting" come from "web hosting" or some earlier terminology Does the term "hosting" in the "homelab" context mean storing data locally on own computers, or running locally stored programs If yes, could the the term "storing" be used in…

Well, we're talking about network services. Which run on a host machine.

Not entirely unlike how viruses (or memes) execute on a host organism ;-)

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