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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Depends on what you need:

    • As cheap as possible, but actually want a VM: OCI free tier will be way bigger than you will probably need
    • Happy paying money but still want to learn about Linux things: I’ve had good experiences with Scaleway
    • I just want something I can set up and not think about: don’t use a VPS. Architect your site as a pure-static site, stick it in an S3 bucket. You’ll probably be within the free tier unless you do absolutely bonkers traffic, and once it’s running you can leave it alone for literal years without worrying about patches or upgrades







  • For anything that is related to my backup scheme, it’s printed out hard copy, put in an envelope in a fire safe in my house. I can tell you from experience there is nothing more stressful than “oh fuck I need my backups but the key to unlock the backups is in the backups fuck fuck fuck”.

    And for future reference, anyone thinking about breaking into my house to get access to my backups just DM me, I’m sure we can come to an arrangement that’s less hassle for both of us


  • I was in the same place as you a few years ago - I liked swarm, and was a bit intimidated by kubernetes - so I’d encourage you to take a stab at kubernetes. Everything you like about swam kubernetes does better, and tools like k3s make it super simple to get set up. There _is& a learning curve, but I’d say it’s worth it. Swarm is more or less a dead end tech at this point, and there are a lot more resources about kubernetes out there.


  • They are, but I think the question was more “does the increased speed of an SSD make a practical difference in user experience for immich specifically”

    I suspect that the biggest difference would be running the Postgres DB on an SSD where the fast random access is going to make queries significantly faster (unless you have enough ram that Postgres can keep the entire DB in memory where it makes less of a difference).

    Putting the actual image storage on SSD might improve latency slightly, but your hard drive is probably already faster than your internet connection so unless you’ve got lots of concurrent users or other things accessing the hard drive a bunch it’ll probably be fast enough.

    These are all Reckons without data to back it up, so maybe do some testing





  • There is one standard way to cast fireball - it works, it’s cheap, it very rarely backfires, it’s in all the textbooks, everyone knows how it behaves - but sometimes you sit down in a tavern next to another wizard and you just know before they even open their mouth that they are going to spend the next twenty five minutes telling you about how they learnt this alternative way to cast it and it’s taken a bit of practice but they can just about cast it as fast as they could before and how it’s so much more ergonomic or whatever


  • Debugging spells is just as much a dark art as spell crafting itself. When I was a young apprentice we didn’t have as sophisticated tools as you do now; you had to make sure you noted down your intermediate runes correctly and use those symbols to divine some meaning from the ashes of your failed spell. One time I mixed up my notes with the symbols of a different spell and when I sprinkled the ashes on the stack I was stuck speaking in tounges for a week.

    These days of course you can summon a lesser demon to freeze your spell and ask it about the state, but the demons can be tricky and it’s easy for novices to make a mistake and allow the demon to run amok - makes a real mess of the lab.



  • Because accountants mostly.

    For large businesses, you essentially have two ways to spend money:

    • OPEX: “operational expenditure” - this is money that you send on an ongoing basis, things like rent, wages, the 3rd party cleaning company, cloud services etc. The expectation is that when you use OPEX, the money disappears off the books and you don’t get a tangible thing back in return. Most departments will have an OPEX budget to spend for the year.
    • CAPEX: “capital expenditure” - buying physical stuff, things like buildings, stock, machinery and servers. When you buy a physical thing, it gets listed as an asset on the company accounts, usually being “worth” whatever you paid for it. The problem is that things tend to lose value over time (with the exception of property), so when you buy a thing the accountants will want to know a depreciation rate - how much value it will lose per year. For computer equipment, this is typically ~20%, being “worthless” in 5 years. Departments typically don’t have a big CAPEX budget, and big purchases typically need to be approved by the company board.

    This leaves companies in a slightly odd spot where from an accounting standpoint, it might look better on the books to spend $3 million/year on cloud stuff than $10 million every 5 years on servers