movedx

I’m moving away from this level of automation in my home. At the most, I’m thinking of a smart panel that can turn on/off/dim simple, non-smart LED bulbs throughout the main living area, and that’s it.

Right now I have expensive (at the time) GU10 LIFX bulbs you can no longer get. They’re not operating on and off at the wall, because my wifi settings changed and I couldn’t be arsed having to reconfigure 14 bulbs by manually resetting them, unscrewing them, and then slowly and painfully register g them on the wifi. I’ve probably created a lot of my own pain here because I could have used a dedicated SSID for that infra that never changes… oh well.

Also, in the time the smart bulbs have become idiot bulbs, I’ve never needed to really dim them, change their colour, or do anything smart.

I sort of feel like the idea is a good one but really it’s overthinking a really simple idea: turning a light on.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m under thinking this? Would love some thoughts.

If we wanted to replicate the 90s, 00s, and even the 2010s era gaming experience - mostly single player, no micro-transactions, and so on - how do we do that today? Is there way to discover games that aren't trying to extract as much money from you as possible?

That’s never how it’s been described to me. That’s always been known to me as FI/RE or just being rich. FUM is simply the ability to walk away from a job and be very picky about where you work.

FUM is simply the ability to talk away from an employer and seek another one in your own sweet time.

You’re free to live your life in fear if you wish.

You’re describing insurance. And you’re assuming I said you STOP working, when I did not say or imply that.

Just a thought I’d like to share: the finish line to “Fuck you money” (FUM) isn’t even remotely close to the $60m mark. It’s not even beyond $100,000. Once you have no debts nor a mortgage, and you have $100k in savings, you have FUM, because suddenly you need $25k a year to live well.

I say this as a member of this community, who are (generally speaking) relatively well paid folk in IT.

If you have a partner in life then you’re even better off again.

I don’t believe it’s actually that hard to reach FUM if you’ve got your fair share of luck, discipline, a partner, and the stable environment. For those who don’t have those things, I respect your position and wish you the best of luck — I’m sorry life is harder for you.

Edit: I’m aware you need insurance too, for health, life/death, accidental, etc. Again, you need a stable environment to make this work and be easier to achieve — the USA is not a safe nor stable environment.

OK I’ll bite: should I be trying out these old game systems? I keep seeing retro game systems getting new releases and more and it’s very cool.

Are there emulators for all of these systems?

I’ve yet to find a problem that two servers and a load balancer can’t resolve — see the above scales I’ve worked at. All simple setups.

That's a fair remark. I think the biggest scale I've operated at was maybe a few million customers, consumer and business, for Flight Centre, which is a travel agent that serves pretty much the entire of Australia and overseas too. A few big banks too. None of them used K8s at the time and operated fine. Might have drank the kool aide by now, though.

The diagram on the front page immediately makes me question why all of this is so complex given the end goal is to run a process.

I don't believe a lot of this is required.

OS level security? So, "apt update && apt upgrade", then? I mean, what else are you doing, writing patches for the kernel? Checking every line of code that runs? Are you aware of how effective SELinux and systemd containers are? Just a simple firewall at the OS level? Maybe even just using Tailscale (or the open source Headscale) to introduce zero trust access capabilities.

There's a Terraform provider for Proxmox, which is an excellent hypervisor. Making a template takes less than an hour with configuration.

You do need an Ops person for sure, but an entire _team_?

> On premise in my opinion needs a dedicated team managing hardware and leverage solutions to provide that as VM's/Containers/etc to teams.

You're assuming that "On premise" equates to "inside our building, in racks we've installed, using power and networking we have to manage." You're correct if that's the case for your business, but my argument is based around the idea that you can use _managed_ hosting providers of physical hardware that'll be either next door to you, in the same city, or close to your users (i.e, you're a business in Germany but your customer base is in London, so you host the servers using a London based provider.)

The idea that you have to manage hardware is greatly diminished when you consider the availability of managed providers that are dirt cheap.

Good summary.

I think this all boils down to a knee-jerk reaction culture that doesn't think about the second or third degree consequences and/pr beyond the next 2-3 years.

> carbon dioxide in the air

Because CDs just appear out of thin air and involve absolutely zero CO emissions during their production; during the extraction of their base materials; during the logistics of the final product; the sale of the product; and the CO produced by the consumer travelling to the shop and back again, multiplied by 10,000,000 consumers per year… none of that counts because of wishy thinking and space-star-ology.

Precisely. Operating systems aren’t hard. They’re so easy and well established it’s crazy not to use them directly, and even though I’m not the world’s biggest Docker fan, Compose is kind of awesome to be honest. Deploying software and maintaining and OS is simple in this day and age.

It's wild to me how hardcoded some of these people are. I think a lot of the younger generation on here might not have experienced the "bare metal days", so they don't know how far you can push the hardware and how much you can squeeze out of it.

Right, so they can't just pull the rug from under you for any reason they like, then. "Other important customer obligations" is the important and vague part, here.

I've had the same experience with them and OVH. I've yet to try the other players in the market like Scaleway.

> for good cause

Did you miss this part?

The biggest issue I see here is the misguided assumption that Cloud is just automatically and unilaterally better than on-premise or professionally managed, hosted hardware. This isn't true in most cases.

There are so many providers, and therefore examples, of physical tin being accessible in under a minute with cost:hardware ratios that blow Cloud out if the sky (pun! ha!) OVH have a server for USD $95/month (with no commitments) that can be brought up and made available 120 _seconds_ that has six 3.8GHz cores, 32GB of RAM, 2x960GB NVMe SSDs, and 1Gbit/s of UNMETERED, guaranteed bandwidth... that's absolutely insane, and that's fully managed from the hardware down, so arguments like, "bUT yoU haVe to MAintAin hardWARE!" are just not true _at all_.

I'm interested to see how this affects 3D artists in game development studios. Will those studios use these tools and keep their artists, allowing them to push out more and more content, faster, and easier, or just keep a bunch of artists around, drop the other 80% of them, and use the tools to _replace_ those artists?

Now I know you must be trolling. Very good.

I cannot believe the amount of people missing the point entirely, and actually stating that datacenter(s) and the global Internet backbones are worse for the environment than the literal MILLIONS of physical plastic discs that reach landfills every year since inception.

Incredible.

It’s not possible with an MP3, neither. How many MP3s end up on landfills compared to CDs and cassettes?

Those DCs and those cables are serving PBs of traffic from music to movies to emails to gaming and way way way way more. Your CD provides access too one form of data in one format and eventually ends up on a landfill.

Are you really this blind?

Go look at the number of CDs and cassettes that ended up on landfills.

Now show me the number of MP3s that ended up on landfills.

And how do MP3s and streaming services NOT do that? Putting aide the fact they also don’t require a physical plastic product to be produced and shipped and then eventually end up on a land fill.

I grew up with cassettes, CDs, and MiniDisc (and floppy discs and using a file splitter to spread large files over multiple disks... risky business!) I never want to go back to that because the impact on the environment is just too high. All that plastic which, eventually, will end up on a landfill.

As much as I hate the fact a publisher can pull music from Apple Music in an instant, it's rare and the benefit is instant streaming with little impact on the environment. No impact if I've already got the track downloaded.

Actually I’m on your side there. I have three servers in the garage on a 250mbit private fibre link… that I never use. I want to get my backside in gear and get the ProxMox cluster running a bit of web infrastructure and then forward to it on the Mikrotik that terminates the fibre.

The only reason I recommended DO is it’s just simple and not too expensive. But your point is fair.