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·3 mins
  • Bored of self-hosting:
    • A random post on Mastodon (which is a Twitter-style social network that’s becoming popular these days) reminded me of something I had thought of in the past: what happens if/when I get bored of self-hosting my services on my home server? Part of me thinks it’s a question of when, not if.
    • A lot of people I see interested in this sort of thing are sysadmins: so, their self-hosting hobby helps them become better at their day job. That’s not the case for me.
      • I don’t discount the amount of fun I have while tinkering with this stuff.
      • However, I need to draw a line somewhere: Ansible, Terraform, Home Assistant, self-hosting complex stuff like Matrix or Mastodon or, god forbid, an email server etc. - this will take things too far.
      • My day job of software development would be better served by better pursuits.
    • Coming back: I don’t know when I’ll get bored of self-hosting. Maybe I never will. But what I should do, to be better prepared for either outcome, is this: keep things simple and increase complexity very slowly. Out of everything I self-host, Nextcloud is the most critical, so I should keep proper backups of the data we’ve stored in it.
  • Focus areas:
    • Entertainment:
      • Consuming audiobooks in the background.
      • Movies.
    • CI book, actively.
    • A bit of distributed systems would be good.
    • Obvious ones:
      • Work.
      • Workouts.
  • Blowout, the final chapters:
    • Russia:
      • The US-imposed sanctions really hurt especially because the biggest oil and natural gas Russian companies were big only because they were state-backed, didn’t have sufficient technical expertise and their reliance on American giants for technical expertise was shunted by the sanctions.
      • So, Putin used online forums (such as Facebook and Twitter) to sow misinformation and chaos within US. This way, the Russian way of things wouldn’t look bad when compared to the US. Apparently, a lot of FB groups and TW accounts are controlled by Russia’s propaganda machine.
    • Oklahoma:
      • The state did muster 75% votes in 2 houses to increase tax on the industry. This didn’t lead to an exodus of companies as they said it would and the state got enough money in the bank to improve education etc.
      • They also added regulation and oversight on fracking done by natural gas companies. That decreased earthquake rate.
      • Overall, the author claims democracy prevailed in the end.
    • Trump and Russia: The author gave a lot of quick examples of collusion between the two. Russia was trying to hard to have the sanctions removed but, again, democracy prevailed and both parties, surprisingly, voted to keep sanctions in place.
    • Towards the end, the author claims that transparency (for e.g., forcing companies to publicly disclose the amount of bribes money they spend in foreign countries and how), regulation and making the big companies pay their keep is the only way to save democracy.
      • The reason for governments to step in is that the big companies are like lions - it’s in their nature to eat other animals - so, it’s silly to expect them to self-govern and need external oversight.