The hero we need.

Currently, I have a 3 1L Dell node Proxmox cluster with 6 kube nodes on it (3 masters, 3 workers). Lets me do things like migrate services off of a host so I can take it out, do upgrades/maintenance, and put it back without hearing about downtime from the family/friends.

For storage, I’ve got a Synology NAS with NFS setup and then the pods are configured to use that for their storage if they need it (So, Jellyfin, Immich, etc). I do regular backups of the NAS with rsync. So, if that goes down, I can restore or standup a new NAS with NFS and it’ll be back to normal.

If feel like, for me at least, GitOps for containers is peace of mind. I run a small Kubernetes cluster as my home lab, and all the configs are in git. If need be, I know (because i tested it) if something happens to the cluster and I lose it all, I can spin up a new cluster and apply the configs from git and be back up and running. Because I do deployments directly from git, I know that everything in git is up to date and versioned so i can roll back.

I previously ran a set of docker containers with compose and then swarm, and I always worried something wouldn’t be recoverable. Adding GitOps here reduced my “What If?” Quotient tremendously.

At this point, I feel like its gone from “these companies are disgusting kissing up to the orange one” to “if they don’t go, they’re risking being on the receiving end of a massive company ending lawsuit/cancel war from the right and his Orangeness.”

Both are disappointing and I’d rather go elsewhere, but the second is far more dystopian and probably more reflective of the current state of things.

Pretty sure that was exactly the desired use of the tool. Definitely not misused.

The only thing I condemn the French inquiry on is that it should have already happened.

Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I’m talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.

I worry that quickly this will follow this path:

• Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
• Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
• Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
• The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
• They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.

Do young children even hold phones near their heads anymore? I rarely see a kid less than their early teens doing anything but FaceTime or games. And after that point, video chats, texting, and doom scrolling.

Even my 15yo daughter never holds the phone against her head.

While I 100% agree with the fact that even modern things can be fixed with some knowhow and troubleshooting (and spare capacitors or the like), there’s a few things at play: `

• people generally don’t have this skill set
• electronics tend to be made cheaper, this means they may fail faster but also means they can be replaced cheaper
• it costs real money for tech support that can fix said issues, often many times more money than the thing costs to replace `

As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff. Even in the retro sphere, the math starts to side towards fix because of the rarity, but it’s not always clear.

China’s government is absolutely bankrolling the AI efforts there, just as the US government is openly bankrolling efforts here in the US. It would be dumb for them not to. The Cold War of AI is upon us.

I’m not sure western AI companies will go bankrupt due to China’s models winning, though. There are plenty of security focused “we can’t use foreign AI” things that would keep them afloat, especially as not everyone needs the absolute most cutting edge AI for their stuff and many US and EU companies are self hosting tuned models for their customers needed.

There’s, of course, the fact that most of it at the moment is a giant bubble that will eventually pop as the next big thing takes its place in importance for world dominance. Will AI continue to find a place in the tech stack? Definitely. New models, tweaks for niche use cases and huge benefits for specialized industries, etc. Will newer tech and processes usurp it over the long run, absolutely. That’s just the way Tech has always worked.

What do you use for your music server if I might ask?

Sometimes I’ve found a site that gets partially blocked and causes a fuss. There’s an option to allowlist domain(s).

Also, some sites try to use ad domains to serve legit traffic, and some use legit domains to serve ads, so it’s not perfect, but it works pretty darn well overall.

PiHole is DNS based ad blocking and local DNS for everything on your network. So, even things that can’t run their own adblocker.

The number of tabs I have open from sites I’ve clicked on, started reading, said “eh, I’ll get back to this later” and never have, says no.