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I came here to say just that. Nats solves a lot of those challenges, like different ways to query and preserve messages, hierarchical data, decent authn/authz options for multi-tenancy, much lighter and easier to set up, etc. It has more of a messaging and k/v store feel than the log Kafka is, so while there's some overlap, I don't think they fit the exact same use cases. Nats is fast, but I haven't seen any benchmarks for specifically the bulk write-once append log situation Kafka is usually used for.

Still, if a hypothetical new Kafka would incorporate some of Nats' features, that would be a good thing.

The problem is that you don't know who's listening. You don't want all possible interested parties to hammer the database. Hence the events in between. Arguably, I'd not use Kafka to store actual data, just to notify in-flight.

I think the fear for those of us who love coding, stability and security, that we are going to be confronted with apples that are rotten on the inside and our work, our love, is going to turn (even more so) into pain. The challenge in computing is that the powers that decide have little overview over the actual quality and longevity of any endeavour.

I work as a consultant assessing other people's code and it's hard not to lose my religion, sort of speak.

I don't know what a Hermès is or connotates, but I think the complaint is as much about the artificial and seemingly arbitrary restrictions as opposed to purely the price.

You can try to create a Veblen good out of a digital artifact and play the all or nothing game, but it's proven very hard to restrict something which can be copied at no cost and with no limitations.

When you buy expensive clothes, it would be silly for the seller to try and license them to be only worn on Mondays, or at dress-code events, or based on your taxable income. People are not going to take your "license" seriously, even if you'd have some legal grounds and might well win a legal argument.

I have a great deal of admiration for artists and designers, and I know that creating a multiple-variant typeface with great applicability that's either historically correct or truly innovative is an art form.

This reminds me of Napster-era debates about artists' rights versus distribution.

Consider the source. I assume companies will learn the hard way not to fake human interaction and be forced to mention when responses are auto-generated (a better word than "AI" really). All that effort for so many to build rapport and trust and all pissed away by trying to save a buck and having an ambitious bot trying to go solo.

Not sure watt you guys are on about. Not to be too negative here or polarise the debate, but I remember the electrifying experience as a child to source local products instead of relying on imports from faraday countries. I guess technology has lost some of its radiance and has just become a mains to an end, to feed the addiction.

Tax the 99% seems pretty accurate.

Opposing views are a primary tool in building deeper understanding of any topic – as long as those views have some honest meat on the bone. It's worrisome to notice true neutrality is so rare these days both on the internet and in funding.

I've always admired people that get out before the shit gets anywhere near the fan instead of staying glued to their seat in quiet despair and apathy, grasping at something that feels like security and stability. If you're really honest, you can feel energy, enthusiasm, interest, ideas floating around, even hope and life force in some projects and companies. All too often that dies at some point, leaving only zombies behind (most of us).

There is of course the trend of influencers, quiet quitting, gig economy and people going to work for themselves. That assumes that there is enough capital floating around for everybody to survive on their own... If you can't land a decent job in an established company, maybe you should think twice about being able to float above the waterline when you go at it by yourself.

I used this extensively at the time Docker was up and coming. It worked well, much faster than Docker volumes, but required a lot of scripting and clean-up. What Docker got right, apart from distribution, is better separation of host system and whatever mess you are creating. You do not want to make a mistake bootstrapping an OS or forgetting to `chroot` to the right volume.

I like the premise of something like Dagger, being an Actions CI that can run locally and uses Docker. I don't know if there's an up-and-coming "safe" open-source alternative that does not have that threat of a VC time bomb hanging over it.

Docker and to some extent, however unwieldy, Kubernetes at least allow you to run anywhere, anytime without locking you into a third party.

A "pipeline language" that can run anywhere, even locally, sets up dependency services and initial data, runs tests and avoids YAML overload would be a much needed addition to software engineering.

I'm just getting a blank page on Firefox and a few of these errors in the inspector output:

  Uncaught SecurityError: Security error when calling GetDirectory

It does work on Chromium. And it looks nice. I wish it had keyboard navigation though, which it doesn't seem to have yet, so I can quickly correct a previous entry.

Be careful what you call AI, you might just get what you wish for...

I agree with the sentiment, that the metrics of independence and self-reliance aren't the same as for economic success. On the other hand, "not taking off" also means that not enough people know or care for solutions that require some effort. I take that statement to mean that self-hosting or open-source "free" solutions have not managed to in any way stop companies like Meta to amass most of the planet into their walled ecosystem and to fight the network effect.

I'm a long time trail runner. I joined a group last year. I sort of had to join Whatsapp and Instagram to stay up to date. I take "taking off" here as in not having to join Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or any other surveillance cesspool to be able to communicate with the people I need to to be able to live my daily life.

From that viewpoint, the indieweb is failing to be enough of an alternative for regular people to consider it a default go-to for daily usage. And I wish it was.

That is your perspective. Not that of the site owner, or the internet at large, victim to any abuse somebody unkind can unleash.

Security is a bit like traffic. If you're alone in the world, you do you. But you are not alone, you have a responsibility to others, be it passers by, fellow travellers or those loved ones depending on you making it back alive.

This. And alerts are often just a fluke anyway. Sure many of us can step up and pull an all-nighter if it saves some company and you make some minor sacrifice to do something heroic. Being woken up several times at night for no reason but some metric that is a bit off is pretty soul crushing, and then come the knock-on effects in professional and personal life that you're always tired and demotivated during the day.

There is this thing called balance. The middle road. Yin Yang. Entities keeping each other in check.

Maybe we're beyond native software for things like Office suites already. I can see the benefit for always-online multi-user applications that combine text editing with project planning, wiki-like functionality, documentation base and whatnot. Few write office documents to just have them sit on the local hard drive.

The few times I need to use LibreOffice, it's just to export as PDF and send somewhere. That doesn't seem to be the workflow of the future.

I have worked on open-source software that was government/university funded. It's not uncommon in Europe. And yes, typical death-by-committee issues exist, but there is something to be said for a piece of software that holds people's data and is not outright owned by one government, corporation or random group of cats.

I don't know about the US, but I can see some crucial user data software suites moving to an open-source model where nobody has absolute power over or ownership of the data.

How to get such a multi-player project organised efficiently without burning through a load of money and time is another matter...

Funny how someone can invent a word such as Jirafied and most of us know exactly what that means.

When universities, libraries, government and open-source community could unite and, perhaps most crucially, find a benevolent dictator for life that could shepherd the herd of cats with all noses in one direction instead of getting bogged down in academic or governmental committee mud, we might have Nice Things that are not in the hands of any one party but owned by all (i.e. the tax payer, and volunteers).

Those projects could truly be owned by the public and not solely corporations or government. Clearly data is the big thing, and I don't want to have to trust a government or corporation with access to all of it.

In reality, having been part of some of these projects, they often get bogged down by getting all parties and funding organised, in other words, death by committee.

Lies, to many, are better than being alone in a dark and cold universe. Please tell me my worst fears and psychological hang-ups are not true.

Isn't OVH a budget hoster, especially compared to AWS? Are you compensating that somewhat on the engineering and high-availability side?

I work for a consultancy company that helps other companies set up cloud infrastructure and secure it. We have a lot of customers on a lot of different platforms, from all-in on AWS, Azure and GCP to smaller local cloud providers, and it's interesting to see the market evolve.

It's true that using some of the smaller cloud providers can save you about half, but you might need an experienced engineer to come up with solutions and an extra machine here and there to ensure availability, so the one-on-one cost is not that clear-cut. Lots of smaller companies go all in on e.g. AWS, but then their eggs are locked into one expensive basket, especially if you build your product on AWS-specific services that can't be moved easily elsewhere.

> iPads are just unserious computing devices for real work.

But are they? Because of the hardware, or because of the restricted operating system?

Most of my work is connecting to other things. With modern devices, it's not as much the hardware, as it is the restricted operating system and closed ecosystem that would limit me. That, and maybe my eyesight...

Going from mid-90s assembly to full stack dev/sec/ops, getting back to just a simple Borland editor with C or assembly code sounds like a lovely dream.

Your brain works a certain way, but you're forced to evolve into the nightmare half-done complex stacks we run these days, and it's just not the same job any more.

Hopefully it's a prog record with songs of at least 20 minutes.

People are massively choosing sides, colours, flags, identities. It's not about left or right. It's about personal opinions and identity, and one side having the power to violently disagree with you, to the point of no recourse. It does not matter if it's a left or right boot that stomps you in the face.

I see the same thing in my parents, where actions become scary when "the other side" does them. It's a myopic arms race to the bottom of rational understanding.

Still looking back with nostalgia to the themes.org heyday of creativity...

There are a lot creative people, but making a theme work for all programs and people in all situations and edge cases likely requires a gigantic effort that seems best tackled by a corporate team with paid people giving one or two variants persistent attention and a pile of bug reports and fixing. You simply can't maintain a bunch of code or design that you are not using yourself daily, with problems you don't experience and can't reproduce.

Maybe, very maybe, it can be done by somebody with an extreme level of dedication: https://www.nordtheme.com/ports

I wasted an insane amount doing desktop customisation in the late 90's and early 2000's, time I haven't had for a long time. Luckily most default themes are pretty decent these days and sufficiently neutral to work for most situations.

Isn't TikTok more like the Instagram of video? I seem to remember early Youtube had a lot of digitised content, like private videos and TV show ripped fragments. With TikTok I see more of a Twitter/Instagram vlog and opinion platform. Youtube's success these days is, somewhat surprisingly, long-form content, often even exceeding an hour.

I'm too old to see just how popular TikTok is and where they could take that with the (supposedly petty young) demographic they have.

In the end it all boils down to higher-level logic compiling down to machine code that has to run. A language's culture and philosophical choices are tied to the language itself as much as syntax or compiler, so maybe the largest difference between languages like Java and Go is really the whole developer attitude and aesthetic choices.