kapone

Make self hosting fun - true. Using FreeBSD... - Seriously?

Got it. It's gonna take me some time to reply to this, because I wanna get my facts right, and on mobile right now.

I know, and yet...we were draining the SPR for some odd reason. Why's that?

Whether it is or isn't is not the point. A national energy policy has to work for its people first. If it's not working it needs to be changed.

And I guess the two countries (combined) that have almost 3B people don't believe in climate change either? Because if they did...

Electricity prices are up everywhere. We're still way lower than many many places. There's many parts of the US (take a wild guess where all the data centers are going...) where electric rates are <$.10/kwh.

Now compare that to...

Yes, solar and wind projects are being canceled, and yes, there may be an element of ideology involved, but the reality also is that the math aint working.

If the math worked, Europe's energy prices wouldn't be where they are now, given the commitment they've made to renewables. I'd much rather see a national focus on nuclear, which is as clean as any other form of energy, and to a degree that is happening now.

What about it? What’s wrong with it?

Oil prices are down, we now produce more oil than anybody else, and enjoy low energy prices domestically.

Where’s the problem?

Touché.

We shall see.

Can you name some examples? I have a reply in my head, but I wanna make sure I’m precise.

Buy weapons from us?? That’s your barometer?

And they are not “our” treaty commitments. Treaties by definition involve more than one party.

But out of curiosity, what commitments are talking here? Talking in abstracts is meaningless.

Everything, always hurts “someone”. There is no universal good.

The totality is what matters, not you, not me.

Yeah, because he was guarding them against the current administration abusing the Justice Department to go after them

Ha ha. They (democrats overall) need to look inwards for that.

Same reason he pardoned Fauci and others. Fauci screwed up our country so bad, it aint even funny. The fact that he needed a PRE-EMPTIVE (i.e. he wasn't even accused of anything at the time) pardon says it all. And the fact that Biden gave it to him, says everything there is to say about Biden.

And from what we've seen, he was right to do so. Not even close.

Although, they've been angling to declare his pardons void so they can go after whoever they wish. They should.

- Look at what Biden did to the southern border. And look at it now. - Look at almost any "democrat" run major city. Any. Then look at the crime rates and cost of living. - And the recent farce that was this "No Kings" crap...

Trump isn't perfect. Far from it. He's got major flaws, both in character and execution. However, name any major policy initiative that he's undertaken that is bad for the "country". As a whole.

WTF is this even supposed to mean?

H1Bs use Microsoft products more than others? Or they do it because they have to…or what??

Please explain yourself.

It fills a niche. What’s else does?

Yes, it’s not great, but so what?

“Selfless” - what world are you living in??

Money rules. There’s no ifs and buts about it.

If it doesn’t have a reasonable rate of return, nobody gives a shit.

So, now you want the likes of the Wikipedia foundation to become a rent seeking landlord??

Country bonds?? Have you looked at what they pay?

You’re not seeing investment into these kinds of “essential global infrastructure “ projects, because there are NO such things.

We can’t even agree on what “global” means.

That's a very naive view.

WHAT should the Wikimedia foundation invest in, that's viable for a thousand years?

That requires a Wall St/hedge fund and/or Buffett mindset.

The Wikimedia foundation is none of those, and they're not big enough to make even a ripple in the investment landscape.

Wrong. We don’t need to build refining capacity. We just need to remind China that who’s the big dog, which we seem to be doing.

They’ll fall in line quickly enough.

So, we’ll pay more and still get them. You think China is the only one that can game the system?

Who’s got the money?

While I mostly agree with you...

The US Dollar has never been 100% backed by any metal.

This is not accurate but the devil is always in the details. What exactly does "backed by" mean? If we mean pre Bretton Woods (1971), then, for all intents and purposes it WAS backed by Gold, not just a promise. The federal reserve could not conjure up fiat dollars on theirs (or anybody else's) whims and fancies.

Pre-1971 US dollars could be freely traded/swapped for gold at any bank at the then rate of 1oz of Gold = $35. This was written in stone.

Of course, then Nixon did what he did in 1971, and as they say the rest is history.

p.s. The Bretton Woods Agreement/system/whatever you wanna call it, came into being in the aftermath of WWII, in 1944. This was [1] essentially an agreement that those 44 countries will use the US dollar (and by correlation, the USD<->gold peg) as long as the (US) powers that be didn't fuck it up.

p.s.2 - A lot of people don't realize that these accords were what established the IMF, and the beginning the World Bank, BIS etc.

So, what happened in 1971 and what did Nixon do?

"On August 15, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon announced his New Economic Policy, a program “to create a new prosperity without war.” Known colloquially as the “Nixon shock,” the initiative marked the beginning of the end for the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates established at the end of World War II." - per US Office of the Historian.

So, yes, things can change due to government actions, and yes Bitcoin and its peers could be rendered worthless in a heartbeat, if the power that be want it.

What really backs the US dollar is the US military Agreed. But as always there's a time factor. This was true around that time, but not so much today in 2025. While the European military assets are not worth talking about, China and Russia both have continued developing those assets and do present an equalizer today. Are they equal to/better/worse than the US military is somewhat of a moot point. They exist. That in itself is the point.

[1] - The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial relations among 44 countries, including the United States, Canada, Western European countries, and Australia,[1] after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement until the Jamaica Accords in 1976. - As per Wikipedia.

This is the most naive take on...well, currencies, gold and their relationship, that I've seen in a very long time.

Imagine it was 1970. You had dollars and you had gold and they were inexorably tied to each other. Gold was ~$35/oz at the time and you swap dollars for gold easily. You could keep your "money" in dollars or gold. If you chose dollars at the time...you made very bad decision (1972...Nixon...the US went off the gold standard...and all that).

There's no DXY to measure from that time, but who gives a shit. Let's measure in terms of "Purchasing Power". In the early 70s, the average wage in the US was ~$9800 and the average house price was ~$17,000. So, at the time you could take your "dollars" and buy the median house for $17K or so. So, roughly twice the median wage.

Fast forward a few decades...

In 2022 the average wage in the US was ~$54,000 and the average house price was ~$375,000. So....roughly 6.5 times the average wage.

Notice a problem yet?

Now, let's take gold.

Price in 1970 - $35/oz Price in 2022 - ~$2,000/oz. Price in 2025 - ~$4,000/oz

So, gold has gone up ~57x, from 1970 to 2022 and ~114x from 1970 to 2025.

If your wages had climbed in-line since 1970, the average wage in 2025 would be $1.2M, but of course it didn't. Why? It's the dollar stupid, not gold.

If you took every spare dollar you had in 1970 and bought gold...vs keeping dollars in the bank...

That's the dollar's "worth", not a fucking index against other fiat currencies.

The damage is indeed done. If they wanted to do it the right way, they should have offered Synology branded HDDs (from whatever upstream vendor) AT COST to their customers.

See the problem there...?

Your experience with SFPs does not translate to hard drives. Hard drives are very, very, very standardized. SFPs are not. Yes, all SFPs have a standard hardware interface, but the optics coding varies wildly.

Remember all those switch vendors (especially the money grubbing ones like HP, Dell...)? Their switches won't work with optics that are not coded for THEIR hardware, even though...an SFP is an SFP... I mean look at fs.com and the gazillion choices they offer for optics coding.

HDDs on the other hand are vendor agnostic. They HAVE to work in "anything" as long as the hardware interfaces (i.e. SATA/SAS/NVME etc) are matched.

Calling a spade a spade is a good thing. Synology got greedy, tried to fuck over their customers and the customers told them "Go fuck yourself, you aint that unique".

If you cannot even describe your “platform” without proper grammar…especially one that’s supposed to be about “writing”…

:shrug:

After quite a few years of being an employee (and the whole CV driven crap), I’m now in entrepreneur mode, stealth for now (that’s relatively easy, because I’m bootstrapping and funding this with my own money, no investors), and I made an executive decision to (forcibly) think many times, before adopting any “cloudy” thing.

Hardware…is cheap, and bare metal performance outweighs anything cloudy by multiples of magnitudes. If I have to invest money into something, I’d rather invest that in bare metal tooling, than paying for a managed service, that’s just a wrapper around tooling. E.g RDS, EC2, Fargate… or their equivalents across other CSPs.

I can run a Postgres cluster on bare metal, that will obliterate anything cloudy, and cost less than a 3rd if not less. Is it easy? No. But that’s where the investment comes in. A few good Infra resources can do magic, and yes, I hope to be large enough that these labor costs will be way less than a cloud bill.

Well, as anecdotal data, have you folks noticed ads lately pushing Gemini/Claude/xx on both legacy media and online? If AI (and these products) is sooo great, why do these companies have to advertise to sell their wares?

And Google and Microsoft are hellbent on pushing AI into everything. Even if users don't want it. Nope, we're gonna throw the kitchen sink at you and see if it sticks.

In the non-tech world, nobody gives a shit about AI. People and businesses go about their daily lives without thinking about things like "Hmmm...maybe I could have prompted that LLM a different way..."

I'm failing to see the point of this article? I mean, people have been building dual GPU workstations for a long long time.

What's so special about this one?

Two words. Passive flows.

Where do you think your 401K money is going...right into the S&P 500...and who gets the lion's share of allocation out of that? The Mag7 et al.

If you chart the last 25 years, Gold (yes, that one...the useless metal) has outperformed the S&P (and it's making new highs even today). What does that say about hard assets vs these companies?

These kinds of phrases are...eerily similar to the phrases heard right before...the .com bust. If you were old enough at the time, that's exactly what the mindset was back then.

The classic story of the shoeshine boy giving out stock tips...and all that.

We all know how that turned out.

- Learning how to solder - Learning how to use a multimeter - Learning to build basic circuits on breadboxes - learning about solar panels, mppt, battery management system, and different variations of li-on batteries - learning about LoRa band / meshtastic / how to build my own antenna

And yet...somehow...humans have been able to learn and do these things (and do them well) for ages, with no LLMs around (or the stupid amount of capital being burned at the LLM stake).

And I want to hit the next person with a broom or something, likely over and over again, who says LLMs = AI.

/facepalm.