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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Yeah I’ve wrestled with that too - I justify it to myself that they are so much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft but they are certainly not a small operation.

    I also appreciate their participation in WinterCG and the dream of having interoperable runtime environments for serverless platforms. While I don’t think it’s quite there yet, I think it’s a force for good to have a medium-sized player trying to push the interoperability that Amazon obviously isn’t big on.






  • Round here it’s all government run. The city runs power, water, sewer, phone, internet, trash/recycle/compost.

    We’ve got the second fastest internet in the country (and it’s free for low income people), our power gets an American Public Power Diamond rating for reliability, we’re (mostly) on track for being 100% renewable power by 2030, the city captures and liquifies the methane from the sewage treatment process and uses it to run the garbage trucks (that say “Powered by You” on them) and our rates for all of that are cheaper than commercial providers.

    Amazingly we still run into people who live here, know all that and still believe that the government is incapable of running anything well… it’s kind of startling.

    Still, that makes a bit more sense for why you have a generator and that then pretty much requires you have a UPS - so i get it.


  • Yeah that seems kinda crazy to me too. I’ve lived in my current house for 8 years and the only time the power has gone out was when a vehicle crashed into one of the distribution boxes by the road. Our power and internet come from the same provider so it was a double whammy for several hours.

    But I suppose it depends where you are - i worked at a place that had two independent power feeds from two different cities, massive UPSs to run the datacenter for 10 minutes and then two redundant diesel generators with several months of fuel on site. I still saw that go down twice in my time there.


  • Sure - but you’ve got to start somewhere. There are a lot of people who aren’t experienced sys admins who are buying raspberry pis or arduinos and they are probably really good candidates for self-hosting some of their services. I was surprised to find my neighbor (who’s a PM with a physical security system company) trying to do something with chatGPT, at first I was a little dismissive because i figured she was just typing prompts into the website, but in reality she was having issues with the python bindings and getting her virtual environments straight. If you can get to that point, you can surely self host stuff.

    I run git locally for some of my projects and that was trivial to set up - I think anyone who’s used github would have comparable skills to self host gogs or gitea.

    Certainly it’s somewhat expensive, but people spend a lot of cloud hosted services too. I’m sure in my house we’re dropping over $100/month on dropbox, chatgpt, google, adobe and probably a half-dozen smaller ones.



  • As a resident of Longmont CO who’s had municipal fiber for 5 or 6 years it’s been nothing but a win for the city. Conveniently Centurytel and Comcast both offer gigabit (or faster) speeds, but they didn’t do that before they were forced to compete.

    Hard to say if the number of tech people buying homes here is a result of that or a result of the increase in prices in Boulder, but I’m sure it’s helped bring people here (and further drive up prices). Plus it meant during covid that the city was able to give free fiber to low income kids who needed to switch to remote school.

    Plus it’s had a 60% take rate, which is way higher than the original projections. That did certainly increase the capital costs of the rollout but it’s meaning the bond payback is ahead of schedule. I’m just trying to find a good excuse for why I need 10G service.


  • But the cool thing about open standards is that there’s a clear pathway to creating an everything app. Especially if decentralized ids gain some traction, then we could have an app that combines mastodon and pixelfed but presents the different posts in a sensible way.

    I can’t really wrap my head around what such an app could look like, but it’s much more feasible to build one than it would be with closed services. I’m hopeful that freedom to experiment without lockin will lead to some really neat ideas