OhSoHumble

For me, it was easier to just continue to use Ansible for machine reproducibility. I really like the thought behind Nix but I felt like I needed to elbows deep in it 24/7 to really grok it. And if I stopped looking at Nix for 6 months, then that knowledge just disappeared. I migrated away from NixOS for my homelab because I would come back to flakes I had written and not understand how anything worked and couldn't be bothered to relearn. I know that Ansible and Nix can sometimes be apple and oranges but I know that I can come back to a playbook and understand what it does even if I haven't touched Ansible for years.

It's not like consumers aren't spoiled for choice of VPNs.

And Etsy. Basically any ecommerce site.

It looks like it's a base and then they calculate cost of living rather than base your salary on the local cost of labor.

That's pretty decent. DuckDuckGo I think just gives a flat value to everyone.

...I was not at all confused about what it was when I looked at it.

When I saw "safe home for your photos" I assumed it was a platform for uploading photos via an app or on the web. "Cross platform" is even a sub-heading. Do you use iCloud or Google Photos?

Sometimes I see this complaint for products here and I am just... confounded. Are people unable to use context clues to infer meaning? I really don't mean to be rude here. It feels like there is some grander disconnect like if someone younger looked at a floppy disk and didn't know that it was a save icon.

Well, the monetization would be that you would have to have a subscription to use it over a long term - similar to AllTrails. Checklisting/packing/gear tracking was one dimension. The other dimensions would be curated backpacking routes and AI analysis of whether or not you were prepared for your trip.

The idea would be that you would scan all of your gear in and then create a map (or select one) and then Gemini would tell you whether or not you were prepared for that trip - does your sleeping bag insulate well enough, do you have the right shoes, etc. You could even do neat tricks like calculate expected route completing time based on assumed weight. I was also planning a "ask a human" feature that would snapshot all that data and post it to an internal forum.

Ultimately though, outdoor people hate AI (understandably). Selling it as "AI powered" is a no-go.

And I genuinely do not understand how to distribute software. Getting people to use your software is extremely hard unless it is very polished and has no bugs. The feature set was too similar to AllTrails so people will expect AllTrails quality. And something that I'm struggling with for all software that I make is I don't know how to get beta testers to get a better feedback loop. Going "hey my software isn't perfect but can you try it out and let me know what you think" is genuinely met with disdain for bothering the person, apathy, blank stares, or whatever. Doesn't really matter if it's offered for free or not - or even if the person expressed a desire for a solution. A person can say "wow that is a great idea I would love to try that" and I would follow up with them with practically no success.

At the end of the day I think I just want to give up and go back to big tech and optimize ad distribution pipelines to deliver weight loss ads to children or whatever tech is up to these days.

Where do you sign up?

This is such a problem for any federated platform; there really isn't an obvious front door. And I'm sure there is some principled theology behind why this shouldn't be the case but ultimately I think there should be a front door somewhere - even if the front door leads you to the most blandest instance around.

I vibe coded a battery monitor for my wireless mouse. It doesn't have Linux support and I wanted to know when to charge it.

I built an AllTrails equivalent (iOS app and all). It allows me to scan my backpacking gear to load it into a library (with metadata attached), build a weight profile for my trip, has offline maps, and more. I wanted to make something that was more suited to long backpacking trips and will eventually add itinerary planning. I was originally planning on trying to monetize it but I don't know how to sell software and honestly the QA process is so time consuming (hike, fix bugs, hike more, fix those bugs) that I just gave up. I plan on redeploying it to my homelab since I previously ran it on Hetzner.

All of that is intentional. There isn't enough money to be made connecting people. Revenue streams are driven by ads attached to media interaction. Connecting people is low engagement. We, as consumers, have rewarded this revenue model by proving that it works. If you don't want to contribute to it then don't use these large platforms.

I use Linux and MacOS. I did just remove Windows because I didn't want to migrate to W11.

Honestly, MacOS is great. I don't really understand the hate for it... and Apple hardware is genuinely a cut above the rest. I actually think it's really a pity that Apple is so big that it's able to vertically integrate so many areas of laptop development that OEMs struggle to compete.

It's a really cool project and clearly you put a lot of effort behind it. I like that it's self-hosted and may try it out on my homelab. Thanks for making it!

Something that I was hoping was that LLMs would make software development easy enough so that I could upskill in areas that determine entrepreneurial success. But I find that the quality of code from LLMs is low enough that I have to spend a lot of time doing QA (or manual coding).

But also you could write the god damn best software out there but if you can't convince people to open the web page or download the app then it goes nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.

Yeah.

"The market" lays you off - or heavily reduces your salary.

It actually really hurt when I pulled up the page. It's why I'm trying to bootstrap my own software company off of my savings.

I'm aiming for 85k (or there abouts) after a few years of earning nothing. But I can't help but feel like a failure because distribution and convincing people to use my software is extremely difficult. I don't want to go back to the tech industry but at the same time I don't know if I have it in me to go "yeah, I'm still working on my <insert dream here> but I have 0 - 10 users" for the next few years.

It's hard to maintain open source software that needs infrastructure. Everyone is a volunteer and it's not like the Mandriva project has the resources to fully vet people as well as have a high quality RBAC and access control system. This guy sounds like maintained a large project, offered to help, and Mandriva saw the Trojan horse as a way to alleviate a lot of their problems.

And it didn't sound like he was able to "nuke everything" - it sounds like he had access to their repository infrastructure (which is reasonable given he was volunteering to host it) and then lashed out.

If anything, I think it's a bigger organizational red flag that they agreed to privately host their source code on some random git forge and not a larger, more communal one. I mean, even if they didn't want to use GitHub (did this even cost money for them) then there are other providers to choose from.

It just sounds like the Mandriva maintainers are trusting and good folk who may be overworked running an open source project and that led to a bad apple entering the bunch. It's hard for me to be mad in that kind of situation.

It's not huge showstoppers. It's just a lot of little annoying things and last mile configurations. For example, I have to launch KCD2 with a Steam Deck related launch option for it to pick up my controller. It took a bunch of googling to figure that out.

I have an Audeze Maxwell headset whose dongle was left in Xbox mode (which Windows was happy with) and so I spent 30 minutes debugging why it wasn't working in Linux until I flipped it to PC mode - which crashed PulseAudio so I had to restart it.

Dota2 has a native Linux client... but it suffers from microstuttering and that's just killing me. FPS is high as I have a 4080 but, man, the stutters are killing me.

Battlebit initially launched in a resolution so low that I had to guess through game menus to get it to my monitors native resolutions. It's just... small and annoying things.

I don't really mind, personally. I grew up using Linux. I don't mind doing these configurations and it's worth it to have a dev environment on my desktop computer. It's just that Linux isn't really "Microsoft competitor" ready when it comes to gaming. Valve has put in a bunch of hard work though. Huge kudos to Valve for getting Linux as far as its come. I hope the Steam Machine takes off and we see more hardware and game developer support.

This is super cool. More options is always good. Something that is confusing about the docs though... is there a desktop application? The screenshot implies there is but I couldn't find the docs to download THAT.

Yeah, but you're also on Hacker News. You are an outlier. I recently wiped Windows off of my gaming PC and installed CachyOS and, honestly, Linux just isn't ready yet. I'm also an outlier because I'm an SRE whose first distro was Slackware and I'm returning to the fold because Linux gaming has gotten much, much better... but it is still pretty inferior to playing games on Windows.

Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music

Something I'm trying to do right now is to build something and avoid using LLMs to write any code. I still use it to consult. I'm writing a Dota2 tournament match aggregator in Elixir that takes tournament streams and chronologically orders them in a format that makes it easier to watch them sequentially since I find YouTube hard to use for ingesting series of videos.

I'm building it because... I like programming. I like making things. I find that LLMs are making me intellectually lazy and making things with them feels unfulfilling. I want to build. It's human to want to build.

Oh yeah, no shade against the language itself. I had fun learning it and using it for some toy development years ago - and the TEA still exists in multiple library implementations. Just wild to see the creator of the language emerge from the fog like that.

Oh my God, I had no idea this project was still alive. I don't mean to throw any shade but I had assumed that the lid was on this turkey.

Yeah, I apologize for how restrictive "want" is - I'm not sure what the appropriate word is in this context. It's more that content engagement is what drives web traffic regardless of whether or not users express desire for human connection. The social part of social media doesn't drive website expansion - content does. We love it. Yum, yum, yum.

I think if you sit a lot of people down and ask them "would you rather have cat videos or the potential to meet new friends (or maintain connections with old ones)" and people will say the want the latter but reward platforms that give them the former.

Old Facebook was maybe closer to the ideal of connecting people but Meta realized that it just doesn't drive ad revenue or engagement so they refactored it to better suit ad delivery streams and put more effort into Instagram (because it's better suited for that type of revenue model).

I actually strongly disagree with this. This is how many social media sites have failed.

I don't know if alternative social media can ever scale as large as Reddit. Tildes.net and Lemmy both have similar activity to Hacker News and I'd consider them both "successful."

The truth is that Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc are not websites used to drive connections between human beings; they're media machines meant to create ad distribution channels. And that's what users want.

When someone uses Instagram, they don't want to see their friends vacation photos - they want to see Cardi Bs latest post. Meta attaches ads to that interaction and that's how they drive revenue.

When someone uses Reddit, they aren't seeing what their neighbor has to say - they're consuming a long flowing rage bait story or a web comic. Sure, there are smaller, niche communities but that isn't the bulk of the site traffic.

And, honestly, content is addictive. I'm personally not on Reddit to make friends or deepen my connection with other humans. I'm there to scroll through memes and cat pictures.

I think that smaller social media sites fail because they don't emphasize media generation and distribution. That reframing still presents difficult problems to solve but I feel like that simple perspective pivot helps with growth. Like, if you wanted to take the "OG" Reddit approach to bootstrapping a social media site you could just programatically generate massive amounts of fake content. Rage bait stories, product placement, etc. Just firehose as much media to drive engagement until you get actual human beings to take part.

That is is growth is what you want. It's arguable whether hyperscaled social media platforms actually make society better or individuals happier.

This is kind of how I feel about any business. Any new initiative requires an IMMENSE amount of capital. If not to build the product, then to buy the exposure.

It's just hard launching a project in general - especially a B2C app. Someone could write the best software imaginable and never get a single user.

I've actually been turning it over in my head recently about whether or not it's possible to launch a software business without venture capital because without large amounts of ad expenditure or "growth hacking" I'm not sure how you would even go about getting a software business off the ground.

Cursor is a good enough product to be purchased for 60 billion. It launching unsuccessfully 8 times kind of shows how hard it is to pitch an idea to consumers.

Gitea has artifact support?! We are truly blessed.

Mmm, this is for an Etsy-lite website ( https://plukio.com ) though honestly I've used Gitea for YEARS - even back when it was Gogs.

I personally just self-host. The project that I'm working on right now uses Gitea internally with an action runner.

I use Digital Ocean and run a Nomad cluster on top of that. Gitea and its action runner builds container images and then pushes nomad job definitions to the cluster. I have zero downtime deployment and rolling deploys. Dagger.io is in there somewhere to make local CI mirror what happens in the action runner.

Setting up Gitea was honestly just an afternoon of work. The sqlite database is backed up to Cloudflare R2 and the code is mirrored. It's unlikely that my project will take off to the point that I'll need to upgrade Gitea to something else, but it's extremely easy to setup, maintain, and build CI/CD on top of.

I don't know if this falls under good ethical behavior but the one time I needed to mass scrape sites was to build an affordable housing directory for the Bay Area. Whether or not a unit of housing was under rent control was only available through private entities or apartment hosting sites and it was scattered and hard to find.

In my opinion, a directory of subsidized housing should have been provided by local governments and not through a plethora of real estate websites.

I tried out NixOS a few years ago but recently transitioned back to Rocky Linux and Ansible. I know that Nix is treasured by some but it always came across as an esoteric tool for functional programming idealists. I found the community to be split between people who were genuinely helpful and people who were just... not.

I found Nix just really hard to work with. The documentation was just so poor and every aspect of Nix just seemed to be divorced from pragmatism.

An example of this, years ago, was that I wanted to do something VERY simple: codify the creation of a directory in NixOS. It took me 6 HOURS to find the relevant code for doing that. I couldn't even get an answer out of the Discord server.

I don't know if I'll ever pick it up again. The learning curve was incredibly steep and it's just not on job descriptions and I've never worked in a shop that has used it. I tried it out as a curiosity, found that it was hair pullingly frustrating to use, and moved on.