Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don't think I'd be as devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I've allowed my iCloud photo library to become a single copy.
How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..
It's fun to read some of these historic comments! A while back I wrote a replay system to better capture how discussions evolved at the time of these historic threads. Here's Karpathy's list from his graded articles, in the replay visualizer:
Love it, great idea. My humble advice: you’re on the top of HN right now—make it completely free. Overnight you could get some serious adoption (strike while the iron is hot!) Then build a few more features that people won’t be able to live without and THAT can be your paid tier.
PowerToys (https://legacyupdate.net/download-center/powertoys) used to be on my "first software to install" list on a new machine. Between Tweak UI and Deskman, you could _almost_ get a minimal X Windows-like UI. Get those set up and add on LiteStep (http://litestep.net/) and you were pretty much good to go, with the exceptions of the kernel, network stack, and CLI toolset, of course.
Big thanks to MinIO, RustFS, and Garage for their contributions. That said, MinIO closing the door on open source so abruptly definitely spooked the community. But honestly, fair play to them—open source projects eventually need a path to monetization.
I’ve evaluated both RustFS and Garage, and here’s the breakdown:
Release Cadence: Garage feels a bit slower, while RustFS is shipping updates almost weekly.
Licensing: Garage is on AGPLv3, but RustFS uses the Apache license (which is huge for enterprise adoption).
Stability: Garage currently has the edge in distributed environments.
With MinIO effectively bowing out of the OSS race, my money is on RustFS to take the lead.
The Whisperfish [1] project (a Signal messenger for Sailfish OS) maintains an independent Signal client library written in Rust [2]. It works quite well - unless Signal decides to change their protocols or kick non-standard clients.
My impression is that there is a lot more going on than just the facts provided by both sides. Core technologies managed to get Katie Berry to step away from the project[1] and that's extremely significant to me. Her tireless dedication to keeping Pebble alive (and get it open sourced) is how any of this is possible. For her to just up and leave now tells me that Eric and Core are not being as magnanimous and friendly to community as these blogs posts and actions might suggest.
The Winlator-releated ecosystem already works pretty well, there just isn't a good frontend or integration for it yet. That's what is really exciting here.
Gamehub is a proprietary app by a Chinese controller manufacturer with some suspicious behavior and several LGPL violations that unfortunately works much better then the alternatives. Funnily enough their CDN endpoint is called "bigeyes", which when researching a bit was apparently their (failed) effort to bring x86 VR to ARM almost 10 years ago. Some people have "debloated" the app, but it seems very amateur hour to me and the process isn't very transparent (the GitHub repo is just a readme)
There's also GameNative, which seems promising, but is very buggy.
And Winlator itself, which is a mess of tons of tunables and different forks that I really don't have the patience for when PC handhelds exist today and have a much better ecosystem.
I have bad news for you, this website has been appearing near the top of the search results for some time now. I consciously avoid clicking on it every time.
Even better than earlyoom is systemd-oomd[0] or oomd[1].
systemd-oomd and oomd use the kernel's PSI[2] information which makes them more efficient and responsive, while earlyoom is just polling.
earlyoom keeps getting suggested, even though we have PSI now, just because people are used to using it and recommending it from back before the kernel had cgroups v2.
As a totally unrelated but somehow relate recommendation: there is a fantastic builder-game named Timberborn[1], where you can grow your own beaver-empire and even build dams. It's not the most realistic game, the proportion of everything is very off for example, but it's very matching the content of this article and I just wanted to mention it.
I cannot overstate the performance improvement of deploying onto bare metal. We typically see a doubling of performance, as well as extremely predictable baseline performance.
This is down to several things:
- Latency - having your own local network, rather than sharing some larger datacenter network fabric, gives around of order of magnitude reduced latency
- Caches – right-sizing a deployment for the underlying hardware, and so actually allowing a modern CPU to do its job, makes a huge difference
- Disk IO – Dedicated NVMe access is _fast_.
And with it comes a whole bunch of other benefits:
- Auto-scalers becomes less important, partly because you have 10x the hardware for the same price, partly because everything runs 2x the speed anyway, and partly because you have a fixed pool of hardware. This makes the whole system more stable and easier to reason about.
- No more sweating the S3 costs. Put a 15TB NVMe drive in each server and run your own MinIO/Garage cluster (alongside your other workloads). We're doing about 20GiB/s sustained on a 10 node cluster, 50k API calls per second (on S3 that is $20-$250 _per second_ on API calls!).
- You get the same bill every month.
- UPDATE: more benefits - cheap fast storage, run huge Postgresql instances at minimal cost, less engineering time spend working around hardware limitations and cloud vagaries.
And, if chose to invest in the above, it all costs 10x less than AWS.
Pitch: If you don't want to do this yourself, then we'll do it for you for half the price of AWS (and we'll be your DevOps team too):
> Some controllers are originally painted with a rubber-like cover that, unfortunately, degrades with time and becomes a sticky gooey. I usually deal with it with the help of Methanol. It nicely removes it.
I have some products like that and I despise them. Maybe I should try methanol.
What I really like about Caddy is their better syntax. I actually use nginx (via nginx proxy manager) and Traefik but recently I did one project with Caddy and found it very nice. I might get the time to change my selfhosted setup to use Caddy in the future but probably will go with something like pangolin [1] because it provides alternative to cloudflare tunnels too.
Typst has been pretty amazing, and at my organization, we’re very happy with it. We needed to generate over 1.5 million PDFs every night and experimented with various solutions—from Puppeteer for HTML to PDF conversions, to pdflatex and lualatex. Typst has been several orders of magnitude faster and has a lighter resource footprint. Also, templating the PDFs in LaTeX wasn’t a pleasant developer experience, but with Typst templates, it has been quite intuitive.
Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet:
And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your RSS feeds themselves a dedicated page for advocating RSS, in case an interested reader is browsing through the links on your site.
I'd assume Ireland has something like bailiffs in the UK.
Delta tried not paying around £3000 owed to a customer. He got a court order and sent bailiffs who went to the airport, closed the checking and said they were going seize the plane to pay for the debt.
There's a good short documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QSj9odUD_c&t=320s . This link starts at 320 seconds, where the action starts. Start from the beginning if you want the back story.
Spoiler: Delta called the police who explained to them that they were about to pay up or lose the plane. Delta paid up. Actually, the managed used her personal card to pay I'd assume Delta paid her back.
Stripe, Block, and PayPal each solved a massive pain point.
PayPal provided a way to pay people and vendors without giving away your credit card number.
Square made it easy to accept payment in person on a phone, without an extensive upfront underwriting experience and without expensive fixed monthly fees.
Stripe did the same as Square, but for accepting online payments.
Fraud and Risk come in many forms, and these providers, even with their UX innovations, sit on top of those same rails to reduce fraud. Without those rails, buyers can’t trust sellers and sellers can’t trust buyers.
In my opinion, you need to find a way to solve that problem before you can eliminate the fees being captured by these providers.
Surprised no one has mentioned another great and similar resource called Rustlings [0] (yes very punny name). You are given some files with todo statements which you'll need to fix and make the code compile and pass all the tests. It's an interactive way to learn which is what got me through learning Rust a few years ago.
How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..