Up to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era.<p>2020s, people are going offline to have fun.<p>Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad.<p>Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.
> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ...<p>Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc.<p>To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc.<p>A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job).<p>And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive).<p>For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my <i>unbound</i> DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night.<p>You never go full cloud.
As it appears to be hugged to death, archive link: <a href="https://archive.ph/qsdc3" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/qsdc3</a>
Sometimes you fuck the cloud, sometimes the cloud fucks you
Flared by the cloud.. sic
or <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260414220159/https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260414220159/https://ascii.tex...</a>
the irony
The idea of offshoring computing is good. However, the cloud developed as a centralized computing platform instead of a distributed one. This has created power dynamics that harm customers. The same happened with social media, and has happened to other industries. I think it would be better for customers if there were many small cloud providers and they could easily switch between them. But even migrating from one cloud provider to another is a huge endeavor these days.
The title is an erroneous translation of the Japanese original; it is actually: テキストファイル好きで奇妙な帽子をかぶった男が、天気とセックスをするという計画を発表する。
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539</a>
Thanks, Macroexpanded, and some others too...<p><i>Fuck the Cloud (2009)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539</a> - Dec 2015 (219 comments)<p><i>Fuck the cloud (2009)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984083">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984083</a> - Sept 2011 (2 comments)<p><i>Fuck the Cloud</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441885">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441885</a> - Jan 2009 (23 comments)
Resource Limit Is Reached - Hug of death
The sequel to Kiss the sky<p>Anyway, I love how well GDPR demonstrated this:<p>> Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid.
I think very soon we will read “Fuck AI”.
Counter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years.<p>I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated.<p>Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, <i>CLOUD</i> services.<p>Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do.
I have all my music from 2009, shuffled from drive to drive. It out-survived my subscriptions to on-demand music streaming services (I do Pandora for discovery but don’t like the feeling of building an Amazon streaming “library” that will actually vanish when I stop paying).<p>I think the drive that held my old home directory might have died, though.
All of mine. 20+ years of documents, photos, emails, the email address, instant-messaging logs, etc. A downloaded zip of every comment I ever made on Reddit.<p>The main exception would be Google Photos stuff that I haven't organized and downloaded yet.<p>I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address longer than if I had used Gmail, given its attrition rate of bannings without support.<p>> on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured.<p>Hold up, is this OR or XOR?<p>Having a validated copy <i>under my own control</i> is the important part.<p>After that, it doesn't matter whether it's "archival media" or whether an <i>additional</i> copy exists off-site in case of catastrophe.