I used to run a site that compares prices[0]. Not only is the ecosystem pull to the cloud strong, but many developers today look at bare metal as downright daunting.
Not sure where that fear comes from. Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones.
> Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones.
Big +1 to this. For what I thought was a modest sized project it feels like an np-hard problem coordinating with gcloud account reps to figure out what regions have both enough hyperdisk capacity and compute capacity. A far cry from being able to just "download more ram" with ease.
The cloud ain't magic folks, it's just someone else's servers.
(All that said... still way easier than if I needed to procure our own hardware and colocate it. The project is complete. Just delayed more than I expected.)
> The cloud ain't magic folks, it's just someone else's servers.
The cloud is where the entire responsibility for those servers lives elsewhere.
If you're going to run a VM, sure. But when you're running a managed db with some managed compute, the cost for that might be high in comparison. But you just offloaded the whole infra management responsibility. That's their value add
But any serious deployment of "cloud" infrastructure still needs management, you're just forcing the people doing it to use the small number of knobs the cloud provider makes available rather than giving them full access to the software itself.
not sure what you mean by a serious deployment, but a lot of companies will be perfectly fine with, some compute, object storage and a managed rdbms.
Will that be more expensive than running it yourself? Absolutely. Does it allow teams to function and deliver independently, yes. As an org, you can prioritize cost or something else.
Kubero seems nice for more kubernetes oriented tasks.
But I feel like if someone is having a single piece of hardware as the OP did. Kubernetes might not be of as much help and Coolify/Dokploy are so much simpler in that regards.
I suppose kubernetes with the right operators installed and the right node labels applied could almost work as a self service control plane. But then VMs have to run in kubevirt. There is crossplane but that needs another IaaS to do its thing.
It’s funny, bc AWS did not start this tour of business. What they did do is make it possible to pay by the hour. The ephemeral spare compute is what they started.
Yet almost nobody understood the ephemeral part.
You might even be better off running a macmini at home fiber, especially for backend processing
The fragmentation and friction! Comparing prices usually requires 10 open browser tabs and a spreadsheet, which is what keeps people locked into their default cloud. I built a tool to solve this called BlueDot (ie, Earth, where all the clouds are)[0]. It’s a TUI that aggregates 58,000+ server configurations across 6 clouds (including Hetzner). It lets you view side-by-side price comparisons and deploy instantly from the terminal. It makes grabbing a cheap Hetzner box just as easy as spinning up something on AWS/GCP.
I use serververify which is created by jbiloh from the lowendtalk forum which uses yabs (yet-another-benchmark-script) to give details about lot more things than usually meets the eye.
That being said, I have found getdeploying.com to be a decent starting point as well if you aren't too well versed within the Lowend providers who are quite diverse and that comes at both costs and profits.
Btw legendary https://vpspricetracker.com (which was one of the first websites that I personally had opened to find vps prices when I was starting out or was curious) is also created by jbiloh.
So these few websites + casually scrolling LET is enough for me to nowadays find the winner with infinitely more customizability but I understand the point of TUI but actually the whole hosting industry has always revolved around websites even from the start. So they are less interested in making TUI's for such projects generally speaking atleast that's my opinion
I find the decay of human connections an interesting problem to solve. I used to have an app that encouraged meeting in person by utilizing friends inviting other friends[0]. This solved many app-problems like correct matching and safety.
Didn't catch on, though. Setting up events turned out to be too prohibitive. If this interests anyone feel free to contact me at contact [at] eventful [dot] is
Yes, that's it. It came about after writing a small TUI for a friend to back up their Vimeo library. They liked the simplicity and speed but not having to use the shell. Didn't want to install Ghostty either.
My brother has built a game using python on the CLI and I've been trying to find a way to package it. Your project seems very promising for my use case.
Project mentions Windows compiles but isn't tested. Do you have a gut check on what issues there might be?
I think it may actually work. It's just that I only have a VM to test it on, and it does not support OpenGL. I got it to compile and run, but it crashed on that VM limitation.
Feel free to open issues in the repo, I'll find a way to get a Windows machine if there's interest.
You can also email me at `trolley [at] wands [dot] is`
I read somewhere, but can't remember where, that a major reason those APUs aren't as efficient as the Apple ones is a conscious decision to share the architecture with Epyc and therefore accept worse efficiency at lower wattage as a tradeoff.
In this review, Hardware Canucks tested [1] the M4 Pro (3nm 2nd gen) and the 395+ (4nm) at 50w and found the performance being somewhat comparable. The differences can be explained away by 3nm vs 4nm.
How the heck is a 3.6x faster single thread M4 Pro 'comparable'? Which by the way you can buy in a $600 prebuilt not $2500 if you can even find this unobtanium chip.
It seems like a comparison of the battery life under light loads (accounting for the vast majority of the difference) multiplied by some unspecified single thread performance benchmark? But under light loads laptop battery life is dominated by things like the screen rather than the CPU, and on top of that the Macbook has a larger battery.
Meanwhile under the heavy loads that actually tax the processor the M4 somehow has worse battery life even with the larger battery and a nominally lower TDP.
Is the infamous efficiency not the processor at all and they're just winning on the basis of choosing more efficient displays and wireless chips?
They are ok but yeah they do not have anything like the memory bandwidth of an m3 ultra. But they also cost a lot less. I’m primarily looking to replace my older desktop but just have to make sure i can run an external gpu like the A6000 that i can borrow from work without having to spend a week fiddling with settings or parameters
I moved to Gleam with all of my projects and am not going back. The language is fantastic but really the most impactful are the coding paradigms that it enables, especially the actor model and especially on the front end (The Elm Architecture)
https://nestful.app used to be TS + Vue but it's almost entirely Gleam now, with Lustre used for state management and only the views being Vue templates. Those will also be migrated away for a fully Lustre solution.
> I don't want my products looking anything like other websites.
if your product is a personal page or art/game, sure, understandable. Otherwise for apps it is beneficial to have consistent UI. It was the case for decades on desktops, it is true to a certain degree on mobile phones, and it makes users' lives easier.
I remember fighting this one well over a decade ago when management was telling us engineers that our web, Android and iOS should all look, feel and behave the same; it took some time to convince them that what you need is not consistency across platforms but consistency _within_ platforms.
Nobody on iOS cares what/how your app looks/works on Android, they care that the UX meets the expectations they have of that OS because they're switching between apps on that platform all day every day, people actually moving Android<-->iOS are few and far between, I mean literal decade(s) time-frames that people aren't switching.
I have Windows, Linux with various desktops, iPhone, Android, and of course web browsers, and I think the apps look and behave pretty much the same across all devises. Maybe because almost all apps are web apps in a native shell. UI components it seems was a matter of performance rather then usability and developer experience!? Or it's just scripting madness gone framework insane.
Yes and they behave differently which is what I expect - they are different tools and they should behave consistently on a platform.
They should be tuned for the platform.
I can't use gestures on a PC or Mac but I can on a iPad or Android.
Similarly I can control a PC or mac from a proper keybord and mouse but the usual use for iPad/Android is via a single finger.
Well, your customers do. Having to relearn an entire new set of UI patterns for each site/application is exhausting for regular people. Don't make your users think.
I miss the Windows 98 days where almost all apps used the same generic UI and the visuals drifted into the background like noise and I just saw buttons and checkboxes.
That’s the worst part of webapps is that they have their own look’n’feel. I don’t want your branding and colours. I want the functionality and get out of my way. I want my own colours and fonts.
While I agree to some extent about branding and colours, things were hardly a panacea with a lot of buttons and checkboxes as the infamous "Bulk Rename Utility" showed how things could get out of control (probably nice for the author and those that used it from the start but waay too cluttered for anyone without exp).
First and foremost an UI shouldn't confuse or even worse mislead the user, now button as hammer for everything chaoses of old or branding idiocy of today both are guilty of those crimes.
The art of UI's has progressed, sadly some fresh designers are dogmatic as they are mostly exposed to "beautiful" B2C products rather that internal products and often miss the effectiveness factor of tools.
> things were hardly a panacea with a lot of buttons and checkboxes as the infamous "Bulk Rename Utility" showed how things could get out of control
Layout and usability are independent of widget design. I'll take the widgets shown in the "Bulk Rename Facility" over the any of the flat UI "material" nonsense where it's not clear what is clickable and you cannot by process of elimination explore the UI.
That said, usability definitely has been improved over the years. So no, not everything was better then, but the widgets were.
I've never heard of, or seen the tool, and I'm not particularly steeped in legacy software.
So I immediately got why this could be an example of "out of control UI/UX"... but immediately my eye was drawn to the bolded headings at the top of each section, and then the numbers next to them.
And so pretty much immediately after that it was clear how this worked: select the files I want to rename, checkboxes to select the transformations I want, and press the big Rename button when I'm ready.
Their redesign feels worse. Hiding the details of each transformation feels well intentioned, but it'd get very annoying having to open and close sections: never getting a full picture of the pipeline I'm putting together.
It also hides features I wouldn't expect to exist, like the Js renaming and translation.
I think if we hadn't let UI become implicit marketing and kept it highly HCI-driven we could have had the best of both worlds. But I guess the software industry decided we need new product releases to look different enough to warrant collecting more money, so we're deep down the current path.
Or MacOS from the same period which was even better, or desktop software in general. Even now desktops are a lot more consistent.
People often complain about lack of consistency between Linux desktop apps (e.g. Gtk vs Qt), but the differences are usually compared to the differences between web apps.
I was talking just about the look of it, and not the interactivity. UX's familiarity bar is much higher than than the UI one.
Edit: And even for UX -- I am confident in saying we did not reach max usability yet. Some people (me included) are willing to take the risk of (some) unfamiliarity for potential innovation
Many moons ago I tried out a service [0] that did this with pocket articles (although I used to send to pocket vis RSS). It was pretty good! It didn't last long though.
I suspect maybe it's easier now to nail the layout if ai can read content before it goes to print.
AI is indeed a crucial part in solving the two most difficult challenges -- typesetting and curation, although we'll probably do things that don't scale for a little while before fully automating.
I sort of love this, but immediately wonder about curation.
My feeds are pretty unpredictable - sometimes I have 40 new articles in a day, sometimes just a few. The cheapness of digital consumption and interface makes it viable for me to skim titles and read, defer, or dismiss at my judgement. I don't want the entire feed printed out - not viable.
But if some SaaS is curating my feeds for me, I fear it'll turn into another algorithmized something optimizing for what exactly? At least the first-pass filter is explicitly set by me - feeds I subscribe to.
Curious to hear your thoughts on it, and wishing you luck.
Yeah- I get about 300 new items each day in my feed... of which on average about 1% of those are worth reading the full article. There is a lot of duplication as well- many sites will cover a new gadget announcement, but only need to read one to get the full scoop. Printing this would be overwhelming- and many of those sites are summaries of "source documents" (papers, release notes, etc) that I want to jump to.
I am sure people use RSS in many different ways though, it just doesn't seem useful to me.
I've had this same idea! Of course, it remains an idea never taken out of the garage. Are you delivering broadsheet, or formatting a printable file for users to print at home?
I have had this idea pitched to me many times over the years, with requests to build a simple prototype practically forced into my dev queue .. but I always resist it.
The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.
Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.
Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.
(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
Typesetting is a challenge so broadsheet vs tabloid is undetermined, but whatever it will be it will be delivered to the door. The newspaper paper is a crucial part, I believe.
I’ve thought of this (worked in book sales so the espresso printers were around for print on demand books.
Recently I’ve been living in a cottage town and thought of this idea again… rather than be reading on phones or tablets people could read printed books with their favourite articles or blogs. But I think the actual distribution system would be the killer, unless it’s at a big resort the transportation will kill the idea.
Not yet, but we'll need beta testers. If you're interested and in a large metro area please reach out to ofek [at] nestful [dot] app mentioning said metro.
Even being aware that such a thing as "RSS" exists nowadays, implies a pretty high level of technical sophistication. Why would such users go out of their way to use up print stock, wait for it to be delivered, incur the energy/fuel costs of such delivery, etc. instead of reading it on their screen?
Not sure where that fear comes from. Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones.
[0]: https://baremetalsavings.com/
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