subhobroto

> This is VERY powerful

No argument there. The Toyota 5S-FE non-interference engine is a near indestructible 4 cylinder engine that's well documented, popular and you can purchase parts for pennies. It has powered 10 models of Camrys and Lexus and battle proven. You can expect any mechanic who has been a professional mechanic for the last 3 years know exactly what to do when it starts acting up. 1 out of 4 cars on the road have this engine or a close clone of it.

It's not what any reasonable person would use for a weedwhacker, lawnmower, pool pump or an air compressor.

> found myself rolling out Yoink

- using Tailscale SSH is brilliant

- using caddy-docker-proxy for ingress is brilliant

What do you use for:

- service discovery

- secret store (EDIT: Crap you use Infisical. No shade, I just have this horrible foreboding it will end up like Hashicorp. I use Conjur Secretless Broker but am tracking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903690)

- backing up and restoring state like in a DB

PS: Have you been having issues with Hetzner the last few weeks?

> The main challenge is to find a flow to signal to kloak what to rewrite and how to inject kloaked secrets to the workload

Would it be realistic or reasonable to detect a header like `X-kloak-ENABLED` or specific endpoints in the case of HTTP?

Similar for wire protocols like PostgreSQL or gRPC?

Our would a usermode proxy be easier but not preferred due to overhead?

Please let me know how I can help. Can I write or review the initial forum post for you or anything that can help both of us?

- What's the best way to discuss this specific topic with you? As an https://github.com/spinningfactory/kloak/issues or something else?

- My specific usecase is to not need Conjur Secretless Broker (https://github.com/cyberark/secretless-broker) - my understanding of eBPF is entirely superficial but from a 30k ft view, it looks like this can not only replace it but would be a far efficient solution (Conjur would be a user-space proxy while kloak would be at lower levels of abstraction)?

This is fantastic! I need this. however, for my self-hosted home projects that are containerized but where I don't use Kubernetes, is there a way for me to use a version of Kloak that does the same eBPF magic on docker-compose or LXC/QEMU (Incus) stacks?

It's perfectly fine for you to say non-Kubernetes isn't either your focus or on your 90 day roadmap :)

First, let's agree we will never invoke Godwin's Law. I think we need to establish atleast some common ground at this point. Here are my proposals:

- At the end of the day, a business is an activity that allows a person(s) helping another person(s). Even in a strictly amoral environment, voluntary trade is a positive-sum game where both A and B gain positive utility: A provides a positive utility to B by giving up something A had but B didnt (B has more than before) and B compensates A for it by giving up something B had but A didnt (A has more than before).

- Due to the profit incentive, there will be scammers, grifters and similar people who are not interested in the "helping" part but rather the "profit" part

- A more powerful person can dominate a weaker person

- Societies, of which organizations/companies are part have hierarchies of people

- A person "higher" up the hierarchy has control and influence over a person lower down that hierarchy

- A significant motivating factor for a person starting a business is independence (be at or towards the top of their local hierarchy) and ownership (be at the root of their local hierarchy)

- The person paying the money out of free will has control and influence over the person accepting the money out of free will in exchange for the help

- Regulation is the forced injection of a very large organization asserting themselves into the premier position of the hierarchy (For example: If regulation bans a specific chemical solvent, the supply chain must either shut down, find an alternative, or go "to the black market"/"go underground" where the regulatory authority cannot inject themselves)

- Regulation is hard to change and it's entirely a legal construct

- Regulation is rarely deprecated (For example: there are regulations in place that were written for an era where people would start their cars by hand although its been decades since anyone has actually done that)

- Normal people don't understand legal constructs any better than they can understand multivariate calculus or multithreaded, concurrent code

- Competition is great for customers. Anything that increase competition should be encouraged.

- We must treat customers as adults who are not challenged nor disabled. To keep our discussion manageable, we will ignore those scenarios where customers are not adults or otherwise challenged and disabled

- There are economies in scale but barring regulation or hostile takeovers, scale can only be achieved by willing, cooperating parties (For example: Say there are 3 phone companies in the US: A, T and V. If either one of them wanted to have majority stake in the "one" merged company, short of the other two conceding willingly, that "one" merged company will never exist)

- Inefficiencies can hide better at larger companies

- Larger companies are risk averse although surprisingly they are in the best position to absorb risks - aka Innovator's Dilemma (For example: Google invented transformers but management decided against it because they were afraid of hallucinations affecting search result quality. 3 engineers at OpenAI read the transformer paper and the rest is history. Google is still playing catch up!)

- A significant motivating factor for a person starting a business is independence and ownership that allows them permissionless innovation

- Innovation is an overall gain for humanity which is why society rewards innovation and penalizes rent seeking.

- People can use knowledge to do both evil and good

- Humanity optimizes for the good of people over time

If you disagree with any of the above, let me know which, ideally with supporting arguments.

Now back to our discussion:

> I say that 'Big HVAC' will in the future outcompete all the small shops; that it hasn't happened yet says nothing

It seems like you prefer rejecting evidence that doesn't support your hypothesis. My recommendation is you do the exact opposite. I'm engaging with you precisely because your take is absolutely counter to mine and I a know for a fact, because I have done this before, that my understanding will be much improved at the end of our conversation. It will provide me even more clarity than I have.

> Yes, regulation can heighten the barrier of entry (but also lower, although less common)

and why do you think it's less common for regulation to reduce the barrier of entry?

> You're naming companies in industries that have become even more consolidated than when those companies were the behemoths

So your argument is:

- Sears: Retail is now even more consolidated

- Blockbuster: Entertainment is now even more consolidated

- IBM: Software or Hardware is now even more consolidated

> They are behaving rationally and in their self-interest

You're conflating the rationality and self-interest of an entrepreneur with that of an employee.

Moral and company alignment aside, a researcher in LLMs might not care much whether they go work for Google or OpenAI or Anthropic. They might not even care whether they go work for Alibaba or Bytedance. OTOH, sama is definitely not going to work for Google or Anthropic and it's absolutely in his rational self-interest to behave that way.

There are even more inconsistencies in your writeup but I think this is a good checkpoint for me to allow you to reflect.

I also suggest we continue this over email (details in profile). Thank You for continuing to engage, I appreciate your POV.

You and I are debating: do free markets naturally inevitably trend toward permanent monopolies, or does free-market competition constantly disrupt incumbents?

The reason why Silicon Valley is the hotbed of such innovations, large booming businesses is regulators haven't yet got their hands into software.

In comparison, more regulated industries like BioTech, Education, Finance, Oil, Gas, Infrastructure is a joke.

The Biden administration had started the ball rolling on shackling up AI and LLMs: regulating, enforcing, mandating bottlenecks. It would have been kneecapping ourselves - essentially placing on ourselves the very sanctions we now place on China! The U.S. wouldn't need China to invade Taiwan to bring down our economy, we would willingly do it to ourselves! The push to regulate AI through mandatory reporting thresholds and compliance bottlenecks for large compute runs is the exact type of barrier-to-entry that kneecaps open-source disruption and entrenches the current giants. Hopefully these illinformed suicidal tendencies are on pause, for now.

I CANNOT for the life of me, understand why we would think, placing any limit on our creativity and productivity is a smart decision but I digress.

> do you think in a fully free market, without any governement intervention, those mom and pop shops would not be bought up or merge?

Is there a regulation right now that stops BigHVAC from acquiring your local, community 1 to 5 person HVAC company?

We don't have to engage in hypotheticals. I already asked you "Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?" and I don't have a response yet.

> The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage

Mathematically, probabilistically, a software engineer will make way more risk adjusted money working as an employee at the MAG7 than starting their own startup, yet, every month, we have software engineers joining and creating startups.

A similar mindset makes your HVAC tech start their own or continue to run their own even though mathematically, probabilistically, economies of scale would give them an undisputed advantage - but that, consolidation isn't free. An even remotely skilled operator understands that and what that entails.

The moment a big, consolidated HVAC company raises prices or provides terrible service, a smart technician can buy a van, print some flyers, and steal their customers. Free markets allow the mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. Infact, Gavin Newsom has managed to distort the HVAC market in California by making it really onerous to operate refrigerants that does make it pretty hard for mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. This is why you will notice a lot of PE picking off HVAC companies in California!

By your logic, the world would have stopped at Sears, Blockbuster, and IBM. Yet, the first two aren't even a thing in 2026 and I don't want to comment on the IBM of 2026.

There are even more examples than these that obliterates the tired "consolidation is an inevitable endpoint" argument. A reasonable person would immediately acknowledge that size does not guarantee survival in a market where innovation is permitted and the entry fee is low.

The "feudalism" that you apparently abhor is actually caused by government intervention. When governments heavily regulate industries (like education, healthcare, finance, infrastructure), they make compliance so expensive that only massive, consolidated corporations can afford the lawyers and lobbyists to survive. Regulation protects the consolidated giants from the mom-and-pop startups!

I must deal with reality though - your sentences suggest companies always consolidate and the only way is to counter that with regulation. You really believe in this and this does hold true in heavily regulated industries but then you need to ask why does the same not hold true for industries with low barriers to entry and permissionless innovation?

Here's a thought experiment: Before the AI boom, the MAG7 rivaled the GDP of entire nations and dominated global market caps. They certainly don't need AI and LLMs to stay happy - infact Google, who invented transformers, is now rivaled by OpenAI and a swarm of startups founded by the very engineers who left Big Tech to disrupt it. This isn't the only time this has happened in tech!

So why are they now rushing to outcompete each other, over multi billions of dollars, to the extent they are self-sacrificing staff to freeup capital to invest into compute?

> evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product

This certainly isn't true of small businesses and the local mom-and-pop shops in your area.

For free markets to work, small businesses need the ability to thrive and starting one should be exceptionally easy.

What has unfortunately happened in a lot of developed countries, is that in order to regulate the very large companies you're upset about, governments have made it nearly impossible to start small businesses to act as competition. That makes it even easier for companies to consolidate and evolve into a monopoly, strong-arming everyone - the exact opposite effect of what those regulations were hoping to fix.

Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?

> The price for all models by all companies will continue to go up, and quickly.

This might entirely be true but I'm hoping that's because the frontier models are just actually more expensive to run as well.

Said another way, I would hope, the price of GPT-5.5 falls significantly in a year when GPT-5.8 is out.

Someone else on this post commented:

> For API usage, GPT-5.5 is 2x the price of GPT-5.4, ~4x the price of GPT-5.1, and ~10x the price of Kimi-2.6.

Having used Kimi-2.6, it can go on for hours spewing nonsense. I personally am happy to pay 10x the price of something that doesn't help me, for something else that does, in even half the time.

A lot of people already did. All their children and descendants now are staunch capitalists because they saw first hand the horrors of communism.

I am from India and have friends who are immigrants from Russia, China and Cuba. We don't take lightly to being lectured about communism. We didn't move to the U.S., the bastion of capitalism, because communism had worked well for our grandfathers and parents and continues to do wonders for its society.

> Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?

You're describing a standoff at best and a horrible parasitic relationship at worst.

In the worst case, the supplier starves the customer of any profit motive and the customer just stops and the supplier then has no business to run.

This has happened a few times in the past and is by 2026, well understood as a way to bankruptcy.

That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.

Competing with customers is a way to lose business fast.

For example:

- AWS has everything they need to shit out products left, right and center. AWS can beat most of their partners and even customers who are wiring together all their various products tomorrow if they wanted. They don't because killing an entire vertical isn't of any benefit to them yet. Eventually they will when AWS is no longer growing and cannot build or scale any product no matter how hard they think or try. Competing with their customers is their very last option.

- OpenAI/Anthropic/Google isn't going to start competing against the large software body shops. Even if all that every employee at TCS does is hit Claude up, Anthropic isn't going to be the next TCS - it's competing with their customers.

> What is the advantage to their companies to release them?

It's a distribution strategy. It costs something to serve the models - let's say $5/1M tokens.

If Qwen required $5 from anyone who was curious so you could even begin to test it out, a lot of people just wouldn't.

Now Qwen could offer a "free" tier, but it's infinitely cheaper to provide the weights and let people run it themselves including opening up the ability for anyone else on the planet to test it against other (open weight) models.

The costs to build the open weight models are sunk, but the costs to serve them, get them tested are not.

It's also precisely why the .NET SDK is free or the ESP32 SDK is free - they sell more Microsoft or ESP32 products.

> Anyone not using in house models is signing up to find out.

What are they finding out exactly? That Claude Max for $200/mo is heavily subsidized and it will soon cost $10k/mo?

> What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)?

This can be trivially answered by a thought experiment. Let's pick a market where labor is plentiful - fast food.

Now what happens to McDonald's where they rent perfect robots from NoosphrFoodBotsInc? NoosphrFoodBotsInc bots build the perfect burger everytime meeting McDonald's standards. It actually exceeds those standards for McDonald AddictedCustomerPlus tier customers.

As the sole owner of NoosphrFoodBotsInc (you need 0 human employees to run your company, all your employees are bots), what are your choices?

> The problem is that large swathes of the population are outside of that and you're making their lives miserable by punishing ICE car ownership

I think that's the plan - force adoption and double down on the misery so that people forcefully invest into building infrastructure that otherwise wouldn't have.

In other words, you're synthesizing demand. It would be extremely interesting to see how it works out! In my limited experience, these synthetic initiatives explode in costs because it lets grifters, scammers and arbitragers defraud the synthetic demand side (due to the lack of a real free market system which is naturally self calibrating and managing).

One thing that I wonder about - unlike in the U.S. where gas is cheap, my understanding is that it's around $10/gal around most of the E.U. right now? If so, what's stopping people from running towards EVs naturally?

- Is it just the lack of charging infrastructure?

- Is it because most people in the E.U. live in dense areas where it's hard to setup charging infrastructure?

- Is it because most people in the E.U. live in dense areas where public transportation is cheap on a unit "per head" basis making local governments hesitate to invest in charging infrastructure directly?

- Is it that over-regulation in the E.U. make it extremely difficult to build charging infrastructure in the first place?

From a U.S. perspective, I would imagine that most of the U.S. (especially rural and suburban US) would switch to EVs overnight if Chinese EVs were allowed to flood the market. A lot of cities in the U.S. are accommodating literally golf carts on their streets so a $10k brand new Chinese EV that you could plugin is likely to sell like hotcakes.

I would really appreciate a response because I'm sure you know that Anthropic has at least two lower priced tiers before the $200/m one, so I assume the $200/m tier is necessary because you use it heavily?

Now given that the $200/m Tier is the most heavily (I believe at 20x?) subsidized tier, How or what are you using instead that achieves comparable good enough performance for a fraction of the price? I've heard GLM 5.1 from z.ai but it's not comparable to Opus, not even close - really interested!

> I think last mile is an interesting problem but OP seems to be intending to build full transit logistics infrastructure built on casual labor, which seems unlikely to pan out.

I think we are unloading a lot of expectations on the OP. Maybe this was just an interesting thought experiment to them - "how would I solve the cold start?"

> Maybe FedEx/whoever is closing the gap when they can’t get everything onto real delivery trucks and this is more cost effective than buying more trucks and hiring more drivers?

Ah fascinating! This could explain why I see this behavior across multiple retailers. My initial hypothesis of "the retailer wants to see me happy" is now supplemented by "UPS/FedEx wants to see their retailer customer (not I) happy".

Free markets are fascinating and Thank You for offering this new perspective.

I will start off by saying, yes, the OP is really light on location and painpoints to have a real concrete conversation. I wish there was more detail about the environment and the hypothesis being tested.

Then I will say your first sentence is absolutely correct as well!

I just start to dislike the rest not because you're wrong, but, because:

> Because to be completely honest, no business would ever sign up for this, and no reasonable individuals will sign up to carry anonymous packages through customs. The people that would deal with this for whatever $25 you can pay them are exactly the people you should never trust to carry your customers' packages in the first place.

You don't know that! Where's the OP located? How is their culture? Is it high trust? Are they known to pull off shenanigans?

If your assumptions hold, you're absolutely correct, but as I wrote in another comment on this post - AirBnB grew exactly because the initial ecosystem was high trust because it was founded on gratitude. People like myself really appreciated that there was a place to sleep for 1/10th the price of a hotel and never wanted it to stop.

If the OP is in a country where the customs is corrupt, holds packages hostage unless you pay an arbitrary bribe, they could very well have a business where the ecosystem are a self selecting network of high trust individuals.

> I'm kinda going to guess that you fell into the trap of building something without validating the need for it first.

While this is likely, there's evidence that a lot of ultra successful companies started by the founders building something without validating the need for it at all, just like there's ample evidence of companies imploding because they did the same!

While Quibi failed horribly, Justin Kan willed Justin.tv into existence.

I don't want to beat a deadhorse about Dropbox, especially the infamous comment but I don't believe Drew did any market study about the feasibility of Dropbox - atleast the folklore is that he coded it up on a bus trip. He did follow that up with a simple 4-minute demo video showing the product kinda working but I argue that's not what you implied with "building something without validating the need for it first".

I predict that in this age of GenAI, the surface area is going to explode: so many new products will get created and new billionaires be minted that "building something without validating the need for it first" will only be left for people who want to be extraordinarily frugal, cautious and meticulous.

As engineers we don't give enough credit to simple randomness.

Luck and timing should not be underestimated. Sometimes that's the only differentiation.

> Would you agree to do this job? And if not, would you trust your package with someone who would?

You're absolutely right BUT I do want to point out a situation where the answer is "Yes" because the model is entirely different.

Last mile delivery is expensive because it does't enjoy the economies of scale.

I'm increasingly seeing increasing number of random personal vehicles drop off my retail packages that were shipped via UPS/FedEx to a central hub. I don't understand why these retailers even do this - these items are like $1-$10 and part of a much larger order that arrive in a staggered fashion. I would imagine people pay more than the item in just gas so it's likely a customer satisfaction thing.

I imagine either the retailer or UPS/FedEx indemnifies these people if and when things go wrong so these people have the backing of a multibillion dollar logistics company. Perhaps the OP could look into this portion of delivery? The OP is really light on location and painpoints to ave a real concrete conversation.

Gratitude doesn't scale: plot the stock price of Airbnb vs. user growth over time to verify.

You might be assuming an iterated game, but it's likely your initial market will be mostly an One-Shot Prisoner's Dilemma. Proper modelling will allow you to mathematically calculate your blind spots and test what it would cost to address them.

> Sending stuff "with someone who's traveling" is super common, it just happens with zero oversight right now

I think you're letting the excitement of starting a new company cloud your judgement here. I worry you're not valuing the "sphere of trust" of that someone properly.

If you and I were friends and I wanted you to carry a brand new unopened iPhone to my family in India because you were visiting, I don't think you would even open it and inspect it. I certainly wouldn't risk our friendship over a phone and even if I could put you in such a position, you would likely anticipate it and refuse.

That cannot be said between two absolute strangers who are engaged in this single transaction, never to meet again.

> Trust infrastructure solves it over time: ID verification, package limits, photo documentation, escrow paymnts

Not really.

Airbnb looses hundreds of millions of dollars a year, worldwide in theft, burglary, damage, murder and fraud. Airbnb does a fantastic job of scrubbing that information and making people sign NDAs as part of settlements.

The initial (2008 era) Airbnb market was full of people who appreciated they were getting an extremely affordable product and ensured the system would continue to function well.

I was an early Airbnb user and back in 2009 I used to carry in some supplies when I checked in, make and have breakfast with the host (it used to be actual owners living in their homes back then), vacuum the room and make the bed I used to be in before I checked out.

Unlike today, when some Airbnbs can exceed the cost of a hotel in that area after including all expenses, the price difference between a hotel and an Airbnb was absolutely insane (a week at an Airbnb would cost what a night at a hotel would in that area. Plus, the Airbnb came with free - often covered - parking, laundry, kitchen and full speed wifi).

These hosts would move heaven and earth for me. I knew I wouldn't need to worry about having a place with my previous hosts as long as I gave them adequate notice of my visit.

Since 2024, I don't use Airbnb anymore - those hosts are gone because their localities have banned Airbnb. Most of them have sold their homes and moved because income from Airbnb allowed them to live in those homes in the first place.

Hotels now are actually cheaper, there's atleast a few people onsite that I can talk to if I need something (my last 2 Airbnbs were literally fully remote and managed by a professional company that really didn't want to communicate, even by chat, at all as if every message cost them a loss of $100 from the booking) and in some cases the Airbnb cleaning fee exceeded the cost of the room itself!

Trust has turned from a Feature to an Expense at Airbnb and its new costs reflect that shift. Trust Infrastructure is now Airbnb's largest tax, a fundamental shift from being their greatest asset - the resulting horrible unit economics reflect the stock price performance.

A lot of fantastic answers here: I second the "YOU need to be one side of the marketplace first" but two questions that I haven't seen appear yet are:

- What draws YOU to build a P2P crowdshipping marketplace? Is it just a hypothesis you have or did you suffer an issue that you can't find any existing company offer?

- Is there absolutely no existing company offering the product you need - why don't you call their sales team and ask them what it would take to build it for you?

I've seen founders find a profitable business that they hated running themselves (horrible founder-market fit) and I've seen founders learn why existing businesses weren't solving that problem (horrible unit economics).

Instead if treating yourself as an engineer excited to build a software stack and show off their skills, consider treating yourself as an investor figuring out the TOP 3 things that could get in your way of getting a positive ROI on your investment.

> Great design is original thought. AI is wholly incapable of that

This is entirely accurate, however I fear there's a lack of perspective:

If you're in the middle of the desert and need to sit down, that random rock looks and feels great because there's nothing even close, around!

One issue that a lot of experts fail to recognize is that "great" is relative: It's not apparent to the experts because they are only pulled in when their expertise is needed. Most of the time when experts are pulled in, requirements are clear, you have traction, scale and now you need to optimize.

Once you're spoiled for choices, you have lots of options and then that random rock doesn't look appealing at all: now you're considering other factors like budget - IKEA vs Adirondack.

What AI is making a huge difference are places where "great" isnt that valuable:

- people in the desert: Someone wants to track what words their toddler is saying or their groceries or how much kitty litter they should buy soon and Claude will spit something out reasonable even if it makes the skin of experts crawl.

- commodity and bean counters: in cut throat industries like power or insurance, it's all commodity services competing on price. Most people arent going to pay a premium for a better looking, more intuitive insurance app. It just needs to not suck and fall over. Or you're making a knockoff of an existing, well understood product

The if is doing a lot of heavy lifing there but with that out of the way you do make a strong case about "local first" apps. Nothing beats the simplicity of a simple `cp` but there are other tradeoffs to be made there.

That's why I was encouraging people to make backups and restores of their DB because personally, it has made me appreciate why different designs exist and when to use them vs just slapping a DB connection to an RDS instance and calling it a day.

Thank You for that link!

> not object storage

Happy to email you, if that's better, but is this because of unsustainable competition in the space or the tremendous volatility in consumption that object storage customers bring to the table?

I ask because in this current market, I would imagine investing in storage infrastructure is painful, but then I wonder, you are still in the storage infrastructure space anyways, so it likely has to do with the user behavior or user expectations or both.

I'll do one better.

I suggest every developer learn how to replicate, backup and restore the very database they are excited about, from scratch at least once. I propose this will teach them what takes to build a production ready system and gain some appreciation for other ways of managing state.

I just want you to ensure you're not confusing B2 with the product being mentioned here. This is a custom Backblaze product which only works via their apps and I don't believe is available as a storage backend for backups through something like rclone.

I never tried this particular Backblaze product because I don't trust a opaque blob touching my most valuable data nor do I trust unlimited plans that dont mention what the limits are, atleast in fine print.

> Killing people that way is physically difficult, and it's relatively easy to just tackle you

I won't argue this as this sounds entirely hypothetical but let me ask you this: if you saw someone stabbing people, would you volunteer to tackle them or would you choose to delegate?

One, a knife never runs out of bullets and never needs to reload. Second, a knife doesn't make a sound. I'm unsure of what training you have but a knife is absolutely the tool of choice up close even if you had a gun on you. One can fatally stab dozens of people in a concert without even being noticed or detected.

I can't make those assertions about a gun.

The point is, a gun in the U.S. has been a weapon of choice but in other countries where a gun is very hard to get, stabbings are equally dangerous and widespread. I have been reading about fatal stabbings in the U.K for a decade now.

It's almost as if evil people will use whichever tool they have at their disposal to hurt people and we are just making it more difficult for good people to defend themselves against the evil.

> Successful mass murders with a knife are fairly rare

I mention 5 myself below but there are more. What I find surprising is how the term "mass murder" seems to be applied almost exclusively when a gun is used, but rarely a knife.

If you look for "mass murder due to stabbing", the media almost never frames it with that terminology, whereas they would immediately use it if a firearm was involved for the exact same number of victims.

When people hear "mass murder", they likely think of hundreds of people dying instantaneously to a volley of bullets, but that's a distortion of what "mass murder" actually looks like in the U.S:

By standard definitions, a mass killing involves 4 or more fatalities. While "mass murders" using a gun get wall-to-wall media coverage, mass murders with a knife rarely make it past local news. If you think these devastating knife attacks are just a myth, here are a few recent ones you can look up right now:

- February 24, 2026: A 32-year-old man fatally stabbed four people at a residence in the Purdy/Gig Harbor area. Responding deputies shot and killed the suspect at the scene.

- July 19, 2024: A grandmother, a mother, and two children (ages 4 and 5) were fatally stabbed in their Bensonhurst apartment. A 24-year-old family member was arrested.

- March 27, 2024: A 22-year-old man went on a "frenzied" spree, killing four people and injuring seven others. The attack involved a knife, an aluminum bat and a vehicle.

- March 10, 2024: In a domestic murder-suicide, a father fatally stabbed his wife and three children (ages 10, 12, and 17) before killing himself. It was the deadliest mass killing in Hawaii since 1999.

- December 3, 2023: A 38-year-old man used a kitchen knife to kill four relatives, two children and two adults, and injured three others (including two police officers) before being shot by police.

I don't think a lot of people know you also support Borg 1.x (if you don't absolutely correct me!)

It would be incredible if you started to look into S3 compatible object stores, unless you have made a business decision not to support it.

Thank You for providing an affordable option for self hosters.

> Emailed them, they promptly added 100 GB storage for a day so that I could recover the situation

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Hope your backup situation's sorted out?

Do you recall if you used a link like this to sign up?

https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html?code=experts

If you don't, a good heuristic would be to see how much you pay per GB - if it's less than a cent, you probably did. The ones that come with support are typically a shade above per a cent per GB

In my circles at least, people aren't using Microsoft products on their own. At home they either use Macs or Linux.

We grew up compiling Linux kernels when Microsoft was busy spreading FUD about how dangerous it would be to unleash open source and use open source. That using Linux on something critical like servers would lead to absolute chaos because the kernel wasn't written by someone who knew how to move Mt. Fuji.

I imagine Backblaze will soon realize why good PR firms are so expensive.

To some it might feel nice the be vindicated. To know that people who didnt follow industry standard 3, 2, 1 backup rule have lost all the data they thought Backblaze would protect for them.

The thing to empathize here is those who purchased these retail Backblaze plans fell into two buckets:

1. The technically savvy who were following the industry standard 3, 2, 1 backup rule, arbitraging the "unlimited" plan, waiting for the game to be over.

2. The technically unsavvy who believed in the "unlimited" plan

My bet is that 2 is screwed and that's majority of the users of this specific Backblaze plan.

This is likely to have rippling effects on Backblaze including their unrelated, object store plans. When there are choices available, people don't appreciate being ripped off and right now, there are a lot of choices in object stores.