They diverted the funding for AI? AI is already a way for rich crooks to steal and make money off public information, if not an outright hype that grifters employ to attract funding for their devious pursuits. None of this is AI’s fault. But politicians should understand the type of people they are funding, instead of ignorantly falling for buzzwords.

I can understand why it excites you. But I’m old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I’m perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.

Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that’s designed to do exactly this.

I don’t know what’s happening at github, but even the tree page rendering is annoyingly slow now. I wish they stopped ruining a working product by bloating it up with unnecessary ‘features’.

The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user’s query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.

I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.

I agree with this part.

GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization.

Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, “Yeah, no! I don’t want to learn that many tools”.

Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools.

The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.

Github is more than just git. We need decentralized solutions for associated services and persistently online repos.

Unfortunately, this is about as easy as it gets. Practically though, it isn’t going to matter. It sounds like run0 will be a drop-in replacement for sudo. We will know for sure in about 3 days (at the rate at which they assimilate features).

Sudo also blocks almost all environment variables, with the option to set or copy them on demand. I assume that run0 will have similar facilities to propagate variables on demand.

PS: This is my technical understanding. Personally, I don’t like systemd eating up all the other utilities.

My sincere belief is that the difficulty in self hosting is due to the lack of priority, investment and development, due to the perverse incentives of the SaaS model. I don’t think it’s a technical problem that cannot be resolved with sufficient work. There are PoCs that prove that it can be made as simple as desktops and mobile phones.

That page pitches Nomad as a direct and better competitor to K8s. Both are considered as container orchestration platforms, though nomad can orchestrate other types of jobs as well.

When it comes to scalability, the anecdotes I’ve heard says that Nomad is better. Even the page you provided says the same. (I did try Nomad. But didn’t scale it enough to test this).

The only real issue that I faced with Nomad in comparison to K8s is running certain infrastructure loads like CNI and CSI plugins (like longhorn and mayastor). They don’t just talk to K8s through the standard interfaces (which Nomad also has), they often integrate deep into K8s using operators and CRDs. Nomad doesn’t have the provisions to support such nonstandard deep integrations.

I have to disagree with both those assertions.

If a software is easy to self host, then there is no need to make it harder to deploy as SaaS. The latter will be irrelevant for most people.

And the problem of self hosting isn’t a circular problem as you project it to be. There are architectural changes that can make it positively easier to self host without exposing the sysadmin to needless complexity. The example I quoted before - sandstorm - was a step in this direction. Deploying and administering applications on sandstorm would have been as easy as deploying one on desktop (including cross app integrations). The change needed was to modify the app to work with the sandstorm platform. Unfortunately, the platform didn’t gain the momentum needed to ensure that all available apps would be ported. But it shows that the concept is viable.

In what sense? It’s a competitor by design.

The fundamental problem I see here is the cloud. We were supposed to have easy self hosted applications and data on cheap always-online hardware. Instead, companies promoted cloud services with the intention of rent seeking through subscriptions.

If you look at the software that went from open source to source available, you’ll notice that almost all of them are cloud applications. Why? The companies that created them were hoping to make money through the same subscription model. But then, big cloud players like AWS just outcompeted them using their own software.

Would this have happened if the FOSS ecosystem neglected the cloud hype and gravitated towards self hosting? Perhaps. But not as badly. We still haven’t seen enough progress towards self hosting. It’s still very hard for regular folks. Genuine efforts like sandstorm didn’t find enough momentum. I hope this changes at least now.

I’m not as optimistic. Some people will complain and move to alternative platforms. But the vast majority won’t care and continue using the abusive platform, forcing the rest to use it sometimes. The best example for this is Reddit and Lemmy.

Personally I’m impressed it took them so long to start driving it to the ground

You mean their copyright washing of FOSS projects using copilot wasn’t enough of a warning?

Yes. Contrary to what some Americans think, the rest of the world isn’t ruled by the US and their often ridiculous laws don’t apply. For instance in this case, neither the code nor the community discussions have anything to do directly with Nintendo. In addition, emulators and reverse engineering are perfectly legal in many places. There are plenty of jurisdictions where such frivolous and preemptive copyright strikes won’t even be tolerated.

Do you think the entire world is under US laws? Besides, with FOSS services, you get the option to backup and migrate the data. Do you get that with Discord?

My statement was rhetorical.

I don’t think anyone can sue them, unless the terms ‘open source’ and ‘free software’ are trademarked. I doubt that they are. Any party can be sued for violation of licensing terms. But these definitions aren’t licenses by themselves either.

Google cares - if they can get a cut of the profits. They allow even scammy malware while blocking FOSS applications. Even recently, they blocked a FOSS chat app.