If safer is a realistic outcome, perhaps things would further evolve. Ride share cars today are dual-use vehicles that typically carry driver + no passenger or driver + one passenger with the capacity for 3-5. If future autonomous ride share cars turn out to be dedicated to ride share, maybe most would end up being 3-wheel with just one or two seats. Shrinking the size of a substantial potion of cars on urban roads could be beneficial to road safety, power/carbon intensity, road capacity/density (which could also lead to more equitable road use for bikes and pedestrians).

Pretty sure he is a meaningful sponsor of PHP.

edit: https://thephp.foundation/ https://opencollective.com/automattic

Re reverse proxies, not exactly. Tried reading vanilla nginx configs and trying to understand nginx proxy manager, couldn’t grasp either. Also gave haproxy a shot.

rpm-ostree

I guess I don’t exactly understand the value of rebasing the core system. Small atomic core with snapshot-based rollbacks, with containerized beyond core stuff seems to get you 99% of the way there, no?

Atomic automatic updates with snapshot creation? Maybe consider opensuse microOS if you are going headless…didn’t quite understand from your description. I have a VPS running microOS that has been doing its automatic updates/reboot thing for a year+ now without a single issue. Opensuse’s rolling stuff works very well, and you get native btrfs and snapper integration out of the box.

Easy to use reverse proxy - I really like Caddy. Reading/writing the config for that clicks better for me than others.

I like the novelty of using filesystem tools for backups, but can’t shake the feeling that tools like restic and borg are more widely deployed and battle tested.

I like that ipfire is still going strong when many Linux router projects seem to be dying out.

This is not about quality and costs

It is about quality and cost for the majority of purchasers that worry about meeting a budget. Virtually anybody making purchase decisions on some sort of surveillance system will grapple with that issue. My point is that we all tend to want the best performance for the least cost, and breaking that habit for the less tangible purposes of domestic security or human rights somewhere else is why we will continue to see these articles about Hikvision/Dahua cameras getting deployed at times and in places they probably shouldn’t.

Dahua and Hikvision are deployed everywhere because they are high quality and low cost. It poses an interesting dilemma (extending beyond cameras) for the U.S. and allies trying to break dependence on vendors under partial ownership and alleged control of the government in China. Should we subsidize domestic vendors to tilt the scale? Simply banning the high quality low cost option doesn’t seem to accomplish much.

Fair, I presume you are correct in how it will be applied. That said, given that Reddit has only ever burned cash, there has to be some connection to gravity…I think?

Probably a good thing, imo. Better than selling data for AI farming and blitzing the site with ads. Hopefully it isn’t the start of the entirety of Reddit going behind a subscription wall. Curating private digital communities is a good option.

Great article. One thing that stood out to me was Texas having the highest state limit for noise level at 85 decibels. That seems insane to me.

It is incredible looking back to 2005 and realizing that the world has 1.5 billion MORE people today and the number of internet users grew by ~5.5 billion. Doesn’t really explain Google’s changes - still remarkable how different the internet was that Google built its search platform around.

Random thoughts…

Odd to talk about timing without referencing the election year.

Protecting the solar industry with tariffs in 2012 was probably too late. The US and Europe panel industries were decimated and effectively ceded the market to China.

China bankrupted the only US supplier of rare earth metals in the early 2010s (Molycorp).

There is reporting from April that Chinese EV are piling up in European ports and not being moved to dealers.

I always find responses like this funny. You know how old you are, but (mostly) nobody reading the comment does. You could be anywhere from 11 to 50!

There isn’t off the shelf software to run things like Reddit, and the work to make that happen is pretty staggering. That isn’t to say there isn’t frivolous spending there - I have no idea.

Lemmy has been developed since 2019 and the software crumbled when network-wide users spiked into the ~75,000-ish monthly range when some vocal Reddit users sought greener pastures over the app/api issue last year. A lot of talented new developers contributed scalability fixes that were obvious to them (but not obvious to the main devs), and we now have the largest Lemmy server handling ~10,000 monthly users without crashing. The work that has gone into making Lemmy, an open-source Reddit alternative written in Rust (vroom vroom) handle the waning spike of Reddit users fleeing, was substantial. Look through the lemmy github issues discussions page and merged closed contributions/discussions for that journey. Those people were largely contributing time and expertise for nothing in return. Imagine paying a market rate to all of the people who contributed substantial time into the betterment of Lemmy. By the way, Reddit was open source: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Takeaways so far: this is a hard problem, even today with faster software and hardware - and Lemmy needed a diverse set of contributors to get its largest server stable at 10k monthly and ~50k across the network.

Reddit had 46,000,000 monthly active users in 2012, ~7 years after launch. Reddit has 330,000,000 monthly active users today. My guess is that Reddit employs a lot of smart software engineers that are needed to contribute solutions that allow the site to serve an ever-growing user count without major outages with new features rolled in. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Reddit users will never pay a thing to Reddit and it isn’t a good platform to deliver advertising through.

My point: It is easy to gloss over the staggering amount of work, talent, and skill that goes into supporting a site that operates at this scale. Reddit is around the 10th largest site in the US (8th if you exclude search engines) and 12th globally excluding search engines.

Worth mentioning that most modern clients support omemo at this stage.

Which xmpp clients have you used? Conversations and its forks seem far from janky. Movim is nice, Dino is looking good, Kaidan is looking pretty good. Prose could be interesting.

My perspective…in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we’re looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that’s a staggering change in energy delivery…largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.

I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car’s lifespan or the battery pack’s lifespan in that car. So…joe six-pack’s rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.

Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state’s mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.

I don’t see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.

I like what Cheogram is doing, between the client and the funding model.

Let’s say my interests are self-hosting and tennis, and I make public MUCs for self-hosting and tennis - great, but now what? How are users discovering the community. What is a chatroom without users? The community or traffic need to happen before the chat.

Prosody and openfire have easy deploy converse options I’ve used in the past. My point was more that creating a chatroom doesn’t create a community. I am curious to see how Libervia’s xmpp/activity pub bridge matures. All of the built-ins plus potential to federate across activitypub makes an interesting technology underpinning for a community.

The lists of public xmpp group chats I’ve found are all centered around xmpp software - clients and servers. If I ever find myself in the position of launching or running a large community (unlikely), I’d try to offer an xmpp-powered chat. It seems like the decision today is Discord -> Matrix -> IRC - xmpp isn’t even in the running. But maybe users have to be a little more vocal.