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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • The thing is business is more booming than it’s ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool’s errand, at some point you’ll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.

    If you make a hammer that’ll last 100 years, you’ll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you’ll be punished when sales fall because you’ve solved a problem for most people.

    Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that’s actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it’s great, and you’ve spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it’s good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it’s profitable. And that’s all they care about. It’s basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they’re told they’re allowed to care about.



  • Agreeing with this, expanding a RAID array is not necessarily impossible, with something like RAID 5, and the right RAID setup, you could theoretically add an identical disk without wiping it all in the rebuild. RAID 1, you’ll 100% need to copy the data somewhere that isn’t the 2/4 disks in the meantime. In an environment where storage is expensive, RAID 1 is not suitable imo.

    ZFS makes it so easy though. Throw a mismatched disk in? No big deal, it’s in your pool now. Want double parity for extra peace of mind? You can do that. It self-heals so you don’t need fsck, its maximum limits are too big to realistically matter on human scales, and the documentation on it is pretty good.



  • I suspect there’s a tendency of experts in something to think of people who do it narrowly as people doing at least as much as they are.

    The people who have a bunch of docker services, or complex multi-machine infrastructure are self-hosted software users, and probably in that 1-2% range. People who heard piholes are useful, so they bought a pi 3 and set it up are self-hosted software users. Somebody using an old desktop they got on Facebook marketplace for running Plex media are self-hosted software users… and so on. So are the people in their houses, some of their friends and family.

    Using that inclusive definition, being closer to 10% than 1% makes sense to me.




  • I’ve long had a mix of Windows and Linux machines, and currently have a gaming desktop with Win10, my old gaming desktop/media center PC on Win10, and my laptop/homelab machines all running Proxmox or Debian. At first I hadn’t migrated to Win11 because Microsoft hadn’t convinced me it’s an upgrade, but Copilot has now convinced me it won’t be an upgrade.

    I haven’t decided exactly when, but the Windows 10 EOL is going to drive me to remove Windows from my remaining computers, and just use Linux.


    1. I’ve learned a number of tools I’d never used before, and refreshed my skills from when I used to be a sysadmin back in college. I can also do things other people don’t loudly recommend, but fit my style (Proxmox + Puppet for VMs), which is nice. If you have the right skills, it’s arbitrarily flexible.

    2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day. Pricier hardware could have saved me money in the long run. Bigger drives could also mean fewer, and thus less power consumption.

    3. Google, selfhosting communities like this one, and tutorial-oriented YouTubers like NetworkChuck. Get ideas from people, learn enough to make it happen, then tweak it so you understand it. Repeat, and you’ll eventually know a lot.




  • It’s worth noting that the barrier to entry as a maintainer depends on which distro you’re using at the time. It’s not uncommon for a distro to have a community repository system, like PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR for Arch, MPR for Debian, etc. I’m not very familiar with Mint, and couldn’t easily tell if it has its own or just uses PPAs from upstream.

    It isn’t especially taxing on programming skills, and if you don’t pick too complex of a package, the Linux skills required shouldn’t be wildly above your level, but may push you to learn some new things by digging a bit deeper. I haven’t formally maintained public packages, but I’ve needed to build a few over my years using Linux, and it was easier than I’d expected to just build one. It may be easier than you think, too.


  • I think the biggest issue is titles; what people expect of mobile games, perpetuating itself into a weak catalog of original titles, with a few good ports. Mobile games are largely designed to be heavily-monitized, Games as a Service, and/or gacha titles… profitable design choices, but not because they make games better.

    Having a more standard control scheme would help get more ports of console games, but I’d love to see more mobile games that use the existing interface/formfactor well. Pokemon Go circa 2018 was a good game that only works on mobile, and I’d love to see more of those.