noaheverett

In this case about the Bible being true about the Ark

This is where the "verified somehow" kicks in, I don't have the answer for our intellectual minds :)

Good movie, torn between that one and The Last Crusade on which is my favorite though

For those who don't believe in the Bible or Christianity: If the Ark was found (and verified somehow), would it change your mind?

The Ark itself fascinates me 1) as a Christian and 2) well, look at my name :)

Stéphane was very helpful to me on the Linux Containers forum[1] when I was just getting started with LXD. We now use it in production for Ark[2] and run each of our apps in separate LXD instances across our physical nodes. It's stable and it just works.

So I am sad to hear this as it's a great loss to the LXD/LXC community, but I do hope the best for Stéphane and hope he lands somewhere he enjoys!

Thank you Stéphane for what you did for LXD/LXC and for helping me with my dumb newbie questions some years ago :)

[1] https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org

[2] https://ark.fm

In our case each node's ZFS store operates independently, it's not shared. We spin up "VMs" (LXC based) on each node and they talk to each via our private network. Hope that helps!

Sweet, I appreciate the link!

Running in production for about 3 years with Ubuntu 20.04 / zfs 0.8.3. ZFS is being used as the datastore for a cluster of LXD/LXC instances over multiple physical hosts. I have the OS setup on its own dedicated drive and ZFS striped/cloned over 4 NVMe drives.

No gotchas / issues, works well, easy to setup.

I am looking forward to the Direct IO speed improvements for NVMe drives with https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/10018

edit: one thing I forgot to mention is, when creating your pool make sure to import your drives by ID (zpool import -d /dev/disk/by-id/ <poolname>) instead of name in case name assignments change somehow [1]

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/1732532/zfs-disk-drive-lette...

I do appreciate the response and feedback. You are right, the network effect is the hardest challenge to a social platform. A way to bootstrap is to treat Glue as a "blog" or a personal website where one can post content in a stand-alone manner, while hosting it under their own domain so it feels like a personal website. I haven't really done any marketing to this effect, but I probably should.

Regarding distributed protocols: I am interested/watching those, especially the domain based handles, to see if there is a way to integrate as Glue already supports custom domains. Short answer: Yes, I'm watching to see if there are ways that fit Glue's use-case to tap into those protocols.

Glue is one app in an ecosystem of apps I'm working on under Ark (https://ark.fm): Pingly: email / calendar / team chat, Glue: social networking / blogging and a third in progress. I haven't really said what Ark is going to be as what connects all these apps is still in works and honestly is evolving as I go :)

Thank you again for your comment, cheers

Been working on one since last year https://glue.im/noah

Crystalist?

See https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rubyist

Currently building a back-end API with Kemal, highly recommend. Also has easy to use websocket events built-in.

Can speak to the DB side of things: Redis in front of an RDBMS scaled well for me at https://glue.im/noah

Timlines/activity are built from the RDBMS and served from Redis as a cache. New posts are added to the cache directly as well so only needs to rebuild if you lose the entire cache which only happens if we need to restart the server. Also not storing full posts in Redis, just IDs, pulling via primary key from DB is very fast.

That same setup was used for a previous app that had a few million user base (don’t remember the concurrent user numbers though) and it ran well with a clear path to scale it up.

More thoughts: build a mobile friendly web app first, you’re gonna need some sort of back-end to run the iOS app anyways and tweaking a web app UI is much quicker than resubmitting iOS builds to the App Store.

They’re all good to try IMO, another is https://kemalcr.com which is akin to Sinatra if you just want to get an HTTP server with routes setup quickly.

Crystal is the future™

At least that’s what my hope/gut tells me.

We use it in production for our products at https://ark.fm and are actively working to move all of our Rails apps over to Crystal which ironically this framework looks great and may be a good choice for us. (Thank you to the author!)

Our email service runs an image proxy (to hide your IP from email trackers) with probably about 30-50 lines of code in Crystal that's been in production for multiple years and it just works.

Current project (in the cloud hosting space) that will heavily use Crystal for backend management and WASM which was recently introduced into Crystal and is a game changer for our use-case.

Also wrote a command-line tool with it and it feels like I'm cheating at how easy it is to do so.

Coming from the Ruby/Rails world where you have to cap deploy/bundle etc to push to a production server and hoping nothing breaks on dependancies makes Crystal's single binary deploy a breath of fresh air...not to mention the performance. We run our own hardware so being able to (eventually once we've moved over fully to Crystal) run the same workloads on LESS hardware with electric prices spiking is financially attractive.

As you can tell I'm a fan boy. I'm betting heavily on Crystal and going all in with our stack.

Did I mention it is fast?

Can confirm this too, second down from top right is the mute button (in the south-east US at least)

I haven’t used PG in production so I’m probably biased, naive or both, so I know this isn’t a direct response to your question, but…

MySQL has been great for every project I’ve used it in and haven’t had any issues. Largest app we used it in was Twitpic which handled high query traffic and along with the built-in replication, it was easy to use. We had replication lag on spinning disks (this was 2009) but switching to SSDs fixed it. Backups with xtrabackup from Percona is a key piece though for taking incremental or full DB backups.

I think back-in-the-day, PG didn’t have replication built-in and that always kept me using MySQL, but I’ve honestly never understood the bad rap MySQL got in years previous as I’ve never run into any of the described issues and it has been rock solid for me in apps of all sizes.

I too wish there were more "fun" blogs out there, however I do see a good amount of dev's who keep a fun/techy blog. There have been a handful of services over the last 2 decades that made it quick and easy to spin up a blog (geocities, blogger, medium etc) but Tumblr had the cool factor (plus the social network behind it) and really nailed the posting experience I think — Tumblr was the best chance at a Twitter competitor back in the 2009'ish era IMO.

My own project Glue[1] is taking a stab at this segment so I have vested interest in this space. Trying to marry all the various content types into a single UI experience has been a fun challenge (short text, audio, quotes, code snippets, blogs).

[1] https://glue.im/noah

Yes! I have two Rails apps (5.x and 6.x) to upgrade to 7. I'm curious which one will be easier. My hunch is the 5.x app since it didn't rely on Webpacker/Node either.

We will see...

A Github issue for OpenZFS I was following for a year was recently closed via stale bot. I just assumed the feature was dead, however on Twitter (yesterday) they announced the feature's author was giving a talk about implementing it, so I guess it's back on!

I personally wish issues weren't auto-closed as it can give the wrong (i.e. feature is dead) impression, however I know popular OSS maintainers get a TON of issue requests and are doing a work of love.

So, thank you OSS maintainers, you the real MVP.

P.S. For those interested, the issue[1] is NVMe performance for OpenZFS[2]

[1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/8381

[2] https://twitter.com/OpenZFS/status/1452762896769953795

If they're hitting the outbound SMTP servers, there's no way (at least that I know of) to protect the IP/servers via obfuscation with a service like Cloudflare etc. Email deliverability relies heavily on the source IP of the sending SMTP for reputation and is going to be viewable in the headers of an email. Also changing IPs isn't a small task unless you're sitting on a load of good reputation IPs that are pre-warmed up. I think a scrubbing service would be the only way to help or of course, having enough resources to deal with it directly (bandwidth, cpu, etc).

Disclaimer: I run Pingly [1] an email hosting service, but ironically our signups are turned off at the moment due to a botnet that hits us with fake accounts to send spam that I'm working to mitigate completely.

[1] https://pingly.com

I understand both sides, if you have an audience on Twitter and want to quickly throw out a thread, it works for quick feedback, but at the expense of readability. If the thread is just a few Tweets long it isn't too bad, but beyond that it's hard to read.

Shameless plug: I launched Glue this year which succinctly put is like Twitter and Medium had a baby [1]. Glue has your standard microblogging features, but you can "expand" into a full blog post if you want [2]. I specifically wanted to tackle the melding of a microblogging timeline, long form writing (blogs) and the ability to use your own domain if you wish.

[1] https://glue.im/noah

[2] https://glue.im/noah/the-story-of-twitpic

I imagine Imgur now is many times bigger than we were. If I remember correctly around 2009/2010 our Amazon rep said Twitpic accounted for about 1% of data stored in S3 at that time and I think our cost was around $100k/month. We eventually got that down to $60k'ish when they gave us "special" pricing and later on we put bare-metal caching servers in front of it to store/serve hot images which further decreased it.

Disclaimer: Hopefully I'm remembering correctly, it's been a while!

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a while. Yes, funny story, Twitter at that time was threatening to cut off our API access due to us trying to trademark "Twitpic". We had been in the process of trying to trademark our name for many years prior. Our initial application hit tons of hurdles with other Twit* marks (my fault for filing late). Fast forward about 4 years after we'd finally worked through all the issues which required us to file a whole new trademark application and this one ran afoul (pun intended) of Twitter's legal. I assume that in 2009'ish when we originally filed, Twitter either didn't care then or we weren't big enough to be a threat, but I guess that changed in 2014.

Long story long, I basically ended up giving Twitpic to Twitter (I wanted the photos to live on). We were already feeling the squeeze from their own native image feature plus some other compounding events like Google Adsense banning us out-of-the-blue with no recourse that really affected our margins [Hey Google, you still owe us $100k+ ;)].

It was one of the best, most educating times of my life. Just thankful I had that opportunity to run Twitpic for those years, God blessed me.

The End.

P.S. I'm still tinkering https://ark.fm

You're absolutely right! Have to append "lang" to those searches as well to filter out crystal reports or stuff on Etsy :)

I like the shorter URL, however googling for “Go” lang stuff has been hit or miss and would need to use “golang” for better results. I wanna say same thing for StackOverflow too but can’t remember…I switched to Crystal so not much Go searching now.

Reminds me that I bought gopher.io years ago for a project that never came to be. Figured it would be suited for something Go related…hey Google it’s for sale ;)

Hear hear! I deleted my Facebook 2007'ish and never joined Instagram, Twitter is only traditional social media site I use, so I can attest to those checking out (or never joining). Even with Twitter, I have to make an effort to not "doom" scroll before bed.

Circles looks cool as decentralized and E2E are fascinating to me. Glue doesn't have a whole lot in common with Mastadon, but similar microblogging features I believe.

Hit me up sometime, would like to hear more about your project. - noah@ark.fm

I think we're at a shifting point where people would be willing to pay for social media vs seeing ads and/or having their data being sold. I recently launched Glue[1] in my hope to have a social network that respects user privacy, offers an ad-free option and selfishly scratches the itch for features I wanted.

I ran my previous startup (Twitpic) completely on ads and it wasn't an enjoyable experience from the business side. It also does not (usually) align with the user's best interest. Ad business models requires attention to feed it, which in turn requires social media companies to build features to get as many eye balls for as long as they can on their app.

I also don't think paid only is the answer either for most cases. Some are ok with seeing ads in exchange to not have to pay to use. I'm curious to see if there is a balance that can be struck with services offering both options.

Brave's new search engine[2] is another example saying they will offer a paid option in the future. I used their beta and it's solid. I'd be willing to pay for it to be free of Google and help sustain it.

[1] https://glue.im/glue/glue-a-social-network-that-respects-you...

[2] https://brave.com/brave-search/

You really did put a lot of work into this, great job.