Zos_Kia

This is completely separate. It’s something they ask when you apply for a job with them.

This is actually standard gdpr / data protection verbiage. It means the company cannot use your data for its own purposes, only to provide you services you agreed upon. Selling your data to a third party, or sending you marketing emails you didn’t subscribe to, isn’t “providing you with services or products” so it is explicitly forbidden.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Yes I am aware that an open source project needs developers.

Actually I have ! When I started this setup all I had was a bunch of reclaimed screens and the specs were all over the place.

My config is close to 15 years old and I’ve never had any issue with it. What are those horrific things you speak of? How do they affect me? I have no intention to migrate away unless I’m forced by circumstance.

I feel GUIs complicate everything. You need graphics drivers and a display server and a compositor and a window manager etc… it’s a pain and in the end you still have to open a console to type in commands for your actual self hosting. Not worth the effort in my opinion, and it’s better to bite the bullet and get used to the terminal and ssh early.

I recommend using something like tmux or screen, so you still have basic comforts like tabs and multi task. Once you get used to it you can configure it and add themes and plugins if you like. A modern tmux setup really feels like a desktop except everything is faster and it barely consumes any resources.

In my experience I’ve mostly seen it used for a local equivalent of S3 to plop in your dev environment. It’s pretty good if your prod depends on S3 and you don’t want to deal with the cost and latency of using actual S3 buckets during development.

I see, that’s interesting. I do a lot of transcoding but offline so i don’t have usage for such a cache. I’ve tested various storage solutions but on my setup, transcoding is always CPU-bound, even on old ass HDDs the bottleneck is never I/O.

Yeah i specifically don’t do any AI workloads on my server, that would be stupid slow with my old ass hardware. But my buddy (who’s a bit impulsive with money) bought two Spark GX10s and we’re likely to get some fun out of them :)

VMs mostly

oh yeah i see how that can be hungry

What are you hosting on Minecraft that isn’t using >=4 gigs?

Just a vanilla server i play on with my son, it’s got 2G and i haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. Chunk gen is slow-ish but i suppose that’s CPU-bound.

BTW i exagerated in my initial comment, i looked at the machine and it’s sitting just under 8G of used RAM.

Also ZFS

Jesus christ 😅 no idea if you’re jesting

Serious question, what does RAM help with in the context of self hosting? I recently bought 32G for my server, and it’s DDR3 ecc so it’s so cheap I could have afforded 64 but I just kept wondering what will I use it for? I rarely go north of 6G usage and that’s with half a dozen services, a Minecraft server etc… I just don’t know what kind of services are RAM hungry.

Oh man believe me I’m all for it. I totally understand having an approach of engineering that is not bankable or tailored for Californian degen culture.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your stance. Just saying it will become an aesthetic niche just like there’s some people who still track music on magnetic tape when it would be exponentially faster to use cubase.

I don’t have your specific axe to grind against AI but my personal angle is to only use old hardware and make software that runs on it.

Not everything has to be superlative, and self imposed constraints are great for quality of life.

Exactly. And a commit is a commit. Unless it’s 10Kloc in one go you can just read what’s in it and decide for yourself.

At my previous job we used to jokingly (?) tell our engineering manager “no commits, no opinions” well I think it’s kinda like that.

And that’s great for you but I still think you’ll be in a minority. Which is not necessarily bad of course.

Open Source devs mostly come from the industry and the penetration of agentic coding in the industry has been massive over the last six months. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything of this scale.

I think disclosure is good and should be tackled as soon as possible because being transparent in your communication is just good practice in general.

However I feel like this will soon be rendered useless as all projects will move to agentic (or otherwise ai-assisted) coding.

Maybe there’ll be a movement of hand coded FOSS but realistically they’ll have a hard time. Resources are already tight for most projects, and rejecting productivity in favor of aesthetics is a rich guy’s strategy.

This whole debacle is showing that people fundamentally misunderstand how code works. They are trying to declare code good or code bad because of some silly heuristics like ai/not-ai, as if it wasn’t literal lines of text which you can read before you form an opinion and make a fool of yourself.

Companies that have had their whole data on Google/MS servers for 20 years certainly don’t care for privacy the way you and I do. But they are certainly realizing that US providers are not the way to go. Baby steps I guess.

Oh yes. Because Merz builds data centers, and Der Leyen is known for making IT decisions at EU companies. They also happen to be the queens of private investors.