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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I can understand why it excites you. But I’m old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I’m perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.

    Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that’s designed to do exactly this.




  • I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.

    I agree with this part.

    GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization.

    Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, “Yeah, no! I don’t want to learn that many tools”.

    Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools.

    The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.





  • I switched nearly two decades ago after I used a freeware network monitor on Windows and realized that it was making dozens of silent TCP connections online. Some were to Microsoft, while others were to unknown third parties. Just imagine your personal machine doing this!

    Linux is actually easy to use these days. Installation is often easier than windows and hardware just works most of the time. Despite that, people have a habit of exaggerating the difficulties in using Linux or BSD. They very often feel like excuses to avoid checking it out.








  • My sincere belief is that the difficulty in self hosting is due to the lack of priority, investment and development, due to the perverse incentives of the SaaS model. I don’t think it’s a technical problem that cannot be resolved with sufficient work. There are PoCs that prove that it can be made as simple as desktops and mobile phones.


  • That page pitches Nomad as a direct and better competitor to K8s. Both are considered as container orchestration platforms, though nomad can orchestrate other types of jobs as well.

    When it comes to scalability, the anecdotes I’ve heard says that Nomad is better. Even the page you provided says the same. (I did try Nomad. But didn’t scale it enough to test this).

    The only real issue that I faced with Nomad in comparison to K8s is running certain infrastructure loads like CNI and CSI plugins (like longhorn and mayastor). They don’t just talk to K8s through the standard interfaces (which Nomad also has), they often integrate deep into K8s using operators and CRDs. Nomad doesn’t have the provisions to support such nonstandard deep integrations.


  • I have to disagree with both those assertions.

    If a software is easy to self host, then there is no need to make it harder to deploy as SaaS. The latter will be irrelevant for most people.

    And the problem of self hosting isn’t a circular problem as you project it to be. There are architectural changes that can make it positively easier to self host without exposing the sysadmin to needless complexity. The example I quoted before - sandstorm - was a step in this direction. Deploying and administering applications on sandstorm would have been as easy as deploying one on desktop (including cross app integrations). The change needed was to modify the app to work with the sandstorm platform. Unfortunately, the platform didn’t gain the momentum needed to ensure that all available apps would be ported. But it shows that the concept is viable.