Your approach won’t work if you’re behind carrier grade NAT or you can’t open ports. My landlord provides my internet so I use tailscale (with headscale on my long distance vps) to connect everything and it works great. It uses LAN when I’m home, and NAT punches when I’m elsewhere.

Probably legal (for the buying company) but customers should sue the original company and get paid out of the money used to buy it.

Ditto. I use unique passwords for services I care about / someone could exfiltrate sensitive data, and a cheap reused password for services I don’t care about and could easily regain access to with a password reset email.

Entirely depends on who’s publishing the image. Many projects publish their own images, in which case you’re running their code regardless.

Yes but there are ways to protect against that. For instance you can configure Tailscale clients to only trust nodes that have been signed by trusted nodes, or something like that.

Work computer. I’d wipe it with Linux if I could.

How do you get systemd to work properly? Maybe because I tried to follow MS’s “use your own distro” instructions instead of using something prepackaged?

I think it really strongly depends on what you’re programming - I know in some instances Julia’s performance can be nearly identical to languages like Rust. I suspect in my case it related to Julia being a garbage collected language, as my algorithm involved creating very large dynamic structures in memory before serializing them, clearing the memory, and building another one. Since Rust has no garbage collector it knew exactly when and what to drop from memory. In my case I had roughly a 10x(!!) speed-up. Funny enough an even earlier version of that algorithm was programmed in Java, and Julia was roughly 10x faster that it, so Julia isn’t the worst of the pack.

So at my previous employer I developed using Julia a custom ML model which ran, but the performance just wasn’t good enough for what I needed despite trying to aggressively optimize. I ended up rewriting in Rust (and calling through R) which ended up being like 10x faster. At my current job I program a mixture of Rust and Python.

If Julia were more peformant then it could potentially be an alternative to Python/R users having to learn Rust - but if you’re looking for top performance, some of your codebase is already written in R/Python, and you’re already willing to learn another language, then learning something like Rust naturally seems the better choice over Julia.

The one thing I did like about Julia - it took barely anytime at all to build a working prototype.

I too use Kagi but it’s worth noting that Kagi gets most of its results by paying and using other search engines including Google and Bing, so it’s not 100% independent or immune from say Bing’s outage. Still the best option by far though.

I started self-hosting a bit prior to when Docker took off, and getting multiple services running was much harder. Service A wants a certain version of PHP installed with certain plugins while Service B wants a different version. You’d follow a tutorial for installing Service C and desperately hope that it wouldn’t somehow break Service A or B. You installed Service D for a bit despite all the installation pain and now want to uninstall it - I hope you tracked exactly what config changes you made throughout the system so you can undo it.

Docker fixed all of this by making each service independent through containers which made self-hosting 10x easier. I’d also add that I love how easy it is to transfer my setup to a new server - I keep all of my container volumes in a specific directory and my docker-compose files in another and that’s all I need to backup / transfer. Without Docker you’d have to specifically handle each & every configuration file and database location, and if you later upgrade to a newer version of the OS or a different distro you’d have to handle possible conflicts between your versions and what the distro expects.

I suggest checking out their discount brands Kimsufi and SoYouStart. I pay like C$12/month for a dedicated server with a few cores, 8GB of RAM, and 2TB of hard drive space.

Yeah they make the same point in their subscribers-only podcast. They did say that they earn enough to be sustainable, so it sounds like they aren’t having to dip into their savings anymore. I hope they get more than that though as everyone deserves to thrive.

Yes there will always be demand for coders, but will there be enough demand for the current (increasing) supply? Right now the global number of software developers is growing by about a million per year (total is only 28.7 million) - this means that (very roughly) to keep salaries stable we also need demand for new software to be growing by about 3.5% per year. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but a decade from now you’ll need 1.4 jobs for every job now to keep up with the supply.

In the past we had new dynamics to get end-users to spend more and more time using computers and hence software (desktop PCs, video games, internet, mobile phones, social media, etc.). At this point there’s so little time left in a consumer’s day that tech can grow into that I worry that any further advancements will have to cannibalize from another area; I.e. we’ve reached peak demand for software.

Yeah it stops converting numbers too. At my job we have a lot of ids that start with 0, and it was super annoying to have ‘000123’ turn into ‘123’, now it keeps it as text.

I’m not sure what version got this, but there’s a setting now where you can disable auto-conversion and it’s amazing.

https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-excel-disable-setting-auto-conversion-data-into-dates

FYI I’ve had a really good experience with using Headscale for a true open-source Tailscale experience. It helps that the Tailscale clients work with it too and that Tailscale (very unofficially) help support it.

Thanks and I do indeed use Cloudflare DNS. Glad to know that it’s not some bad IP reputation thing.

Is anyone else having trouble reading the link (and can someone send me the original URL?). I just get stuck in an infinite captcha loop where I verify I’m not a robot, the page refreshes, and then it asks me again.

I think you should take baby-steps and focus first on just getting something running for you to use. Maybe first experiment with configuring an application you’d like in a virtual machine before you spend money on hardware too.