I'm not holding my breath about this actually happening; but for the problem the author experimented with self-hosting to get away from(quote just below) something more in line with the cultural and regulatory functions that libraries serve than actual datacenter operations seems like it would be more valuable.

"I started my self-hosting journey to escape our growing cultural acceptance that buying and owning are two different things. I wanted to take back control over my digital life."

Libraries are great; but fairly specifically because they aren't trying to be better bookstores. They're great because they are committed to the accessibility of information and crazy notions that would never fly if it weren't for how long they've been in place like "it's legal, actually, to loan a copy of a copyrighted work; first sale off, asshole!".

There are some cases where self-hosting has specific benefits on boring "Cloud or on-prem IT system cost and risk assessment" ops nerd stuff metrics; but the not-really-secret is that a lot of the benefits are based on you playing a totally different game:

Your Jellyfin or other media streaming server, say, isn't better because Netflix's CDN people are bad at their jobs or trying to command some usurious rate for their bit-shoveling services(it obviously doesn't hurt that same-building means that 1GbE or recent-ish wifi are basically free so you can basically ignore all the hard parts of CDNing; though your small scale means that the amount of redundancy you need to ensure storage availability and integrity as a percentage of overall storeage will kind of suck): it's better because you aren't playing the "you can stream, with ads, to devices we authorize from whatever catalog we currently offer and can change at any time" game. You are playing the "It's DVD so of course I can back it up to the NAS and watch it whenever I want on whatever I want" game(or...perhaps not all...of your disk rips are actually from your disks, and then you are playing an even more favorable game.)

Self-hosted is probably the best place to do that; since, both in terms of legal rationalization(standards for issuing warrants are often pretty shoddy, and evidence from raids conducted without warrants isn't always excluded as rigorously as it ought to be; but in theory the 4th amendment is still on the books if they need to grab a server from your basement; while in 'the cloud' either the provide ToS includes their option to cooperate whenever or you can just pull 'Third-party doctrine") and in terms of practical impact(cops shoving their way in or a tactical team with a ram are a...high touch...operation, even if justified; while just sending a polite request to the guy/department at AWS whose job it is to field polite requests for the contents of whatever S3 bucket just involves a silent copy in the background that you never even need to know about and no risk of your toddler getting flashbanged while cameras roll); but the fundamental problem is that you basically need to exist in a legal grey area to get non-awful media access terms; and do a bunch of fiddly server hassle or use one of the relatively hardcore, if-you-lose-your-keys-we-can't-help-you-really end-to-end encrypted providers to maintain the level of privacy in your digital papers and effects that you get by default if the server is onsite.

At least as long as you avoid some of the features that are much more clearly about vendor-specific implementations and reduced portability the 'cloud' guys are pretty competent at what they do if you just want a VM or some blob storage, or a key value store or database or something; and for those relatively 'basic' services essentially all the cloud guys have something very, very, similar; and your more classic, not necessarily as ruthlessly polished but probably hungrier, VPS providers are also an option; so it's not clear that you necessarily need a public option to save you at the "I need a computer or some REST API endpoints on the internet" level; It's more the "DVDs, and to a much more limited extent Blu-rays, were basically the last digital format that didn't de-facto destroy first sale" and "at least for consumer services; if it's in the cloud it is probably surveilled" problems where you'd need cultural and regulatory backup.

It's not like Amazon is being an asshole about Kindle file downloads because S3 buckets are now usuriously expensive(especially when they still allow more or less as many downlownloads to 'blessed' clients as you have the patience for); they just stopped that because they can and presumably doing so either made negotiating with publishers easier or the competitive position of their hardware vs. 3rd party ebook readers better. That's a problem; but it's not an infrastructure problem.

It seems like major conceptual confusion to be discussing whether self or public hosting is better when you started the adventure in response to Amazon turning the screws on Kindle users.

They didn't do that because AWS blob downloads suddenly got way more expensive; they did that because they have effectively total control over what permission changes happen in response to giving them money; and considerable though imperfect control over the behavior of client applications(especially on smartphones; where default-deny cryptographic enforcement and attestation are significantly more common). Same thing with the ever-shifting 'exclusives' and ad loads of the various streaming services: those don't suck because Netflix is bad at CDN; they suck because the rightsholders can turn, and wish to, turn the screws with a lot more granularity than they could back when the limited ability of DVDs to phone home more or less forced them to suck it up and resent first sale quietly.

Especially if you stay away from some of the vendor-specific abstractions and upsells private sector 'cloud' pricing is pretty aggressive and a number of very useful types of service are even reasonably portable between them. The issue is that, at the 'consumer' level, actually being a cloud service customer; rather than being a subscriber or buyer of licensed-not-sold-sucker digital things, is at least as atypical as self-hosting; and it's typically the service rather than the infrastructure layer where the screwjob comes in.

This isn't to say that 'the cloud' is always the better option; hyperscaler margins comes from somewhere and that somewhere is not always operational efficiencies; but the user experience difference between running a chunky NAS and paying for some S3 buckets or whatever is vastly smaller than the difference between either of those options and a service where you need to plead with Amazon for them to bless your client with a text file or satisfy Widevine L1 to get high resolution video streams.

I've also heard that AI is pivoting to video; the metrics prove it, you can trust us.

Perhaps I'm just a bad judge of public opinion; but I'd think that identifying yourself as 'the spam party' would be something you would avoid at all costs.

The electorate will forgive you a pointless quagmire war, a few hundred thousand surplus infectious disease deaths, or similar minor matters; but surely loathing of spam is not merely bipartisan but essentially universal. I'd assume that even 'direct marketing' scumbags don't enjoy sampling their colleagues' product involuntarily.

It feels a trifle incongruous to watch the AI bros fretting about how their oh-so-good-with-unstructured-inputs-and-definitely-not-brittle pets with chat with one another in on the glorious posthuman internet; while simultaneously running scrapers distinguishable from DDoS gangs only by their deeper pockets against the rest of the internet.

It's almost as jarring as seeing Cisco trying to act like they are in the same zip code as the cutting edge.

I, for one, totally distrust The Man enough to roll the dice on tech Rasputin's "it's, like, secure; but nobody qualified has checked" option.

Aside from various occasions when Edge just seems to grab defaults(particularly from PDFs); there's the "second chance out of box experience" that is specifically designed to periodically assist you in repenting of whatever bad-customer choices you may have made during the OOBE; and (at least from mid-2023 or so, possibly earlier) Office will default to opening links in Edge rather than default browser in order to, more seamless or something. There are also a lot of places in the Windows UI(like links in the 'settings' application that invoke edge straight into a bing search regardless of default browser and default search engine.

I have no idea what if any lines exist for legal purposes; but they are not shy about pushing edge good and hard with both OS and Office mechanisms; including on systems where the user has already installed something else and set it as default.

Paypal claims "decreases the cost of transactions by up to 90% when compared to credit card processing" ("Comparison of Pay with Crypto transaction rate and direct credit card processing fees for international sales including currency conversion fees by leading payment processor")

Given the relatively high costs of doing 'crypto' transactions(I think I've seen some of the ones that are most aggressive about trying to be actually usable to transact rather than just hoard claiming to be roughly on par with conventional transaction costs, more computationally expensive but less conventional org overhead; most significantly worse); does the alleged 90% savings just mean that they are counting cost of the transaction from when they receive the coins, not the gas fees that got them there; or picking a particularly grievously overpriced provider of credit card linked currency exchange?

That's precisely the encouraging part. If only the first hit is free there's the hope that simply not paying will make them go away and stop hitting you.

It's always great news that some 'feature' isn't going to be free; because that means it isn't being fast tracked toward obnoxious mandatory default.

I'd be a bit curious what the distribution of 'middle and top level' titles looks like. It's not like venture capital is 100% a confidence game; but there definitely seems to be an element of prestige involved(both in terms of obtaining capital to VC with and in terms of being a name that gets shouted from the press releases if it is involved in a funding round). That seems like the sort of environment where there would be an incentive for basically everyone who puts their name directly only a deal to be classified as at least midlevel to senior; because titles are cheap and having your funding round handled by "junior loser for rookie numbers" just doesn't look as good.

You probably can't get away with an employee directory that is nothing but 'senior master of the universe'; but to the degree that prestige matters there would be an incentive to have a sharp jump between the people who don't put their names directly on deals who can be classified as various flavors of analyst and the people who do, where you might as well just have them jump immediately to being classified as midlevel with a specific area focus or senior.

You know that someone has a couple of screws loose when they are treating "sufficiently wealthy that working hard is optional" as some kind of disaster.

Isn't that the whole point of being wealthy? Sure, if your hobby is making line go up you do you; but for most people money is a means to an end, not an end in itself, so if you've already got the money why would you keep grinding away when you could be pursuing your ends instead?

What seems so strikingly pathetic is just how ordinary the attack is; but it sailed right through because "AI" hype seems to do some mixture of attracting drooling idiots and convincing people who ought to know better that if they don't abandon everything in the race for minimum viable product someone else will get to securitize the omnibrain forever.

Random guy just sent a pull request to Amazon's project and they were "OK, seems cool" and added it. That's how an idiot child would think a supply chain attack would work; except it turns out that it actually does.

And then, of course, they scrubbed it without a changelog or a CVE; because the memory hole is a totally viable communications strategy.

Does "The bias is in favor of clean athletes: that you can be clean and win' actually follow in any way from the discussion of various bike, itinerary, and diet optimizations that would presumably also be helpful to people shot full of veterinary hormones or whatever; or is this just Tygart saying what his job requires?

I'm definitely not a cycling strategist; but the various optimizations described sound like they are either neutral(like lower drag frames), or potentially even more helpful if you can find a way to sneak a few drugs in(like tighter diet control and better route planning that would potentially reward the ability to make quick metabolic adjustments under specific circumstances); none of those changes sound like they are skewed in favor of baseline users specifically.

Sharepoint is where documents go to die; so ransomware is more of a euthenasia policy than a real attack.