What do you want to run? Small services with an handful of users? Anything can serve them.
Media libraries? As long as you have a CPU with QuickSync you’re good for on the fly transcoding and the real limiting factor becomes storage.
A TinyMiniMicro https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... used PC is more than adequate for most workloads (except for local AI and if you want to have a huge amount of storage).
Last time I checked the prices were in the ballpark of $100/$150 for a working machine.
New machines with a N series Intel CPU are in the similar ballpark.
If I am being honest, My father is in the broadband/bandwidth business where I live and I recently told him about the fact that I was thinking of opening up a simple cloud/extremely low cost (in hardware)/mini datacenter or just thinking about it/tinkering with the software sides of these things (proxmox,incus a lot more) and all and he was interested in converting his office into a rack and he can get a lot of static ips and power supply so I was thinking something about this workflow as I had thought about it and the biggest problem to me seems to be the hardware
He is really excited for this project, he brought me newspaper clippings the other day showing that my idea has potential and other things so that's nice and I have given him the task to get his contacts in our small city for hardware, auctions and rents and try to get more information about some cheapped out specs starting out as I don't want us to invest in with a lot of hardware/investment up front but rather reinvesting the profits and maintaing a clear transparency.
Do you think we should postpone this idea till 3-4 years (I am thinking so) honestly because I would love to build my own software and I am thinking that within these years I can try more pain points of other providers and build a list of the nice features I like (If you know of any, please let me know as well as I still am making the list)
I am not trying to achieve AI purposes at all but rather simple compute (even low-end compute starting out)
Power consumption comparison isn't that much of an issue I think
Honestly I am thinking that we should wait out this cycle of rising hardware so that the hardware prices can go down in the start of the next cycle but I am interested if NUC's would be good enough for my workflow as I can redirect my father more about it because I am not that expertised about the hardware side of things so much so I would really appreciate it if you can tell me more about it/what could be the best use cases for that?
I saw from your article that chic-fil-a uses intel nucs to run their kubernetes clusters so I am assuming that it can be good enough for my use case as well?
Also, there is no guarantee that I end up doing it and its still more so an idea than anything and as I would probably do some projections to see if its worth it and a lot of other things before we get ourselfs some basic cheap equipment to even start and If we do we would probably start out with homelabbing equipment itself but just to be more clear, storage compactness isn't that big of a worry starting out as I think his office is good enough.
Honestly right now, In my understanding Ram Prices are the ones which extremely kill the project and makes me want to reconsider the software side of things (to build things myself/learn more) for a few years so that we can then build the hardware. I think this is the way to go but talking to my father and he was super excited about it I am not exactly sure but still it might give him a few years of his spare time to be more familiar with the hardware side of auctions etc. that he can find us better deals etc. too so please share any advice that you (or anyone) has about it as I would love sharing it down to my father so he that can do some queries about somethings in the local markets / his contacts as well.
The Plex rug-pull from excellent software to commercial gimmick happened years ago when they removed your ability to search your personal media library.
I assumed that they were being forced by the copyright mafia, but they’re perfectly capable of making these decisions on their own.
It’s sad that we replaced manual curation with recommendation algorithms because they were doing the hard job of surfacing relevant content for us and the end result is that you’re spending more effort and intellectual energy into steering the algorithms in the right direction than we ever did before
Manual curation would be waste of time. Why should I spend hours looking through slop when I can get algorithm do it reasonably well.
Youtube actually works reasonably well, as long as you remove from history content you disliked, use do not recommend channel and possibly not interested option. It might not be highest of quality, but at least content stream then is passable.
Reminder that you don’t have to play by YouTube rules.
Unsubscribe from everything and disable video history, that also stops the slop recommendation engine.
YouTube search still works, you’ll still come across interesting YouTube links and if there are channels you want to subscribe to there is a way to get them in your RSS reader.
You can also get the feed to be full-length videos only, ignoring all the noise coming from shorts.
Does it? Last time I tried YouTube search it was useless. It showed two or three relevant results, then a bunch of shorts, then a long list of totally unrelated "you might also like" results.
> From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability
He didn’t have to care that deeply. Alphabet expected from him L4 work. He got paid as a L4. It’s just fair that he also delivered L4 work and spent his effort on something more useful
I don’t think it’s surprising. The ideal setup for many people here is an OS that gives them control over what they run and over their data.
An App Store that restrict us from running the application we want is bad. An App Store that prevents applications from tracking us is good. The former restricts our freedom, the latter restricts the freedom of developers who want to take advantage of our data.
It wasnt until recently that we could even have emulators to play old video games we grew up with, instead of having to buy "clones" one by one for $5/piece. The only thing that was protecting was Apple's profits
As the platform owner, they explicitly reserve the right to do this - see also Meta, Google, Amazon, etc.
Apple collects data, but they usually keep it for their own use, that's the difference.
Third parties trying to do the same level of collection and also share it with partners is the issue. As such, the platform owner putting constraints on them by applying rules related to privacy shouldn't surprise anyone.
Have you ever read a comment in favour of Apple Store ads? Every time the topic is discussed here the opinion is very negative.
What I said it’s that I don’t find it surprising that people generally dislike the App Store but that they also aren’t against limiting tracking from apps.
As much as I would like my job to be exclusively about writing code, the reality is that the majority of it is:
- talking to people to understand how to leverage their platform and to get them to build what I need
- work in closed source codebases. I know where the traps and the foot guns are. Claude doesn’t
- telling people no, that’s a bad idea. Don’t do that. This is often more useful than an you’re absolutely right followed by the perfect solution to the wrong problem
In short, I can think and I can learn. LLMs can’t.
> telling people no, that’s a bad idea. Don’t do that. This is often more useful than an you’re absolutely right followed by the perfect solution to the wrong problem
This one is huge. I’ve personally witnessed many situations where a multi-million dollar mistake was avoided by a domain expert shutting down a bad idea. Good leadership recognizes this value. Bad leadership just looks at how much code you ship
right, I think in the near term, the worry isn't about replacing people wholesale but just replacing most or more people and causing serious economic disruption. In the limit, you would have a CEO who commands the AI to do everything, but that seems less plausible
This sounds funny now. But Hetzner has been moving into a cloud direction consistently. They recently rolled out VPCs, load balancers and all that. They are slowly building the blocks to provide what we generally call a cloud.
Lmao but in all honesty, there are a lot of european cloud providers that I know and they are even cheaper than american counterparts like aws, azure, gcp. Personally I like european cloud too but I dont have so much as an preference and it depends but the current environment of america does seem a little hostile but not the fault of datacenters in america but I hope that hostility slows down
There are a lot of European “cloud” providers, but there’s not one that offers anything even close to AWS/GCP/Cloudflare. If you need more than compute and S3, you’re pretty much SOL.
Absolutely not. There's a gazillion cloud providers out there with hosted postgres+kafka+redis and the other big open source softwares. Hetzner is just not one of them.
Hetzner, OVH and Upcloud. All of them have object storage, managed Redis,Postgres and K8S.
Most of the time the missing things are homegrown SaaS offerings of big 3 and identity services. You will not find equivalent IAM or BigQuery in indie clouds.
Welcome to the real world. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but this is what’s happened. That’s why everyone is doing AWS. To pretend this is a non-issue and can easily be fixed by investing a bit in development does not reflect reality.
Because they don’t offer every service AWS offers? They offer plenty of hosted databases, queues and what not that it shouldn’t be too hard to move things over. Especially not if you are on Kubernetes. Not if you are all in on lambdas of course but that is a problem in and of itself.
I had created this comment on your other comment on one of my other comments that there are no cloud providers and so I am wishing to talk about both of these at the same comment perhaps
I do not know about the others but OVH (even with all of its flaws) is definitely a cloud provider
I got so damn overwhelmed looking at all the services offered by OVH once and I found some niche services which would most likely be underrated by many but if one wants at scale cheap cold storage, I recommend OVH's cold storage because they cost only 2$ per month/TB storage long term but have only 12$/TB ingress/egress compared to the egregious 100$/TB (or so I have heard) AWS's outage and where you have to play this little dance of shutting down AWS itself or something to not pay it but I genuinely think that OVH has a lot of features
I am not kidding but when I say overwhelmed, I truly meant it so much that I had to take a walk outside to put things into mind, I was looking for partnership opportunities for OVH tho that time but in my mind I have rejected them because they are too big to partner at a small scale In my opinion
OVH has the 2nd most meaningful high content or similar metric (I forgot the website which shared it) after AWS, it had more high traffic websites overall even more so than gcp
Personally I do not like this complexity. Just give me compute and storage and let me handle the rest but I don't really like OVH thaat much (my opinions change overtime too) but please look more into it if you genuinely want european cloud provider, I am interested to know about it, What are the metrics which qualify for the "long shot", I am genuinely curious and wishing to discuss honestly.
But to give you another example (from the article): Try migrating Google Workspace to an EU solution. Actually impossible. I tried it myself, and gave up. The closest you’ll get is Proton, which isn’t EU to begin with and doesn’t even have half of the features Google Workspace offers.
Well proton isn't Eu but its switzerland and I think that proton is going to move some of their servers to germany after switzerland had this questionable decision which feared privacy services (including proton)
Proton recently got proton sheets/proton docs
Personally one of the largest issues I have with proton is the lack of extensibility. Like google has app scripts and similar api's but proton's lack of api's have frustrated me so much that I have built an api over scraping/using a puppeteer instance over it but its still in very finnicky state
Well, I am not sure about the newer BTP-based stuff, but the main ABAP-based core of an SAP S/4HANA system certainly does not need those capabilities, as it is still basically the same running in on premise systems. The priority of a couple of BTP apps might be quite low, if they are not starting from scratch.
Scaleway and OVH offer all the basics and more (kubernetes, networking, hosted dbs, queues, storage, GPUs etc). It’s google workspace/microsoft 365 that has no equivalent.
A TinyMiniMicro https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... used PC is more than adequate for most workloads (except for local AI and if you want to have a huge amount of storage). Last time I checked the prices were in the ballpark of $100/$150 for a working machine.
New machines with a N series Intel CPU are in the similar ballpark.
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