johntash

I think what he's probably thinking of is more like using a virtualenv for python. Or bundler for ruby.

There are quite a few docker registries you can self-host. A lot of them also have a pull-through cache.

Artifactory and Nexus are the two I've used for work. Harbor is also popular.

I can't think of the name right now, but there are some cool projects doing a p2p/distributed type of cache on the nodes directly too.

Tbh I haven't looked at Tigris at all. I still have my attic server deployed (just disabled/not in use) so I might give it a shot just to compare pricing. I do remember a decent portion of the cost being storage-related, so it's a good idea.

I'll have to look at autosuspend again too. I remember having autostop configured, but not autosuspend. I could see that helping with start times a lot for some stuff. It's not supported on GPU machines though, right? I thought I read that but don't see it in the docs at a quick glance.

> It's kind of hard to make the thing stay alive with health checks, unless you're meaning external ones?

Sorry, I did mean external healthchecks. Something like zabbix/uptimekuma. For something public facing, I'd want a health check just to make sure it's alive. With any type of serverless/functions, I'd probably want to reduce the healthcheck frequency to avoid the machine constantly running if it is normally low-traffic.

> We are suboptimal for things that make more sense as a bunch of containers on one host.

I think my ideal offering would be something where I could install a fly.io management/control plane on my own hardware for a small monthly fee and use that until it runs out of resources. I imagine it's a pretty niche case for enterprise unless you can get a bunch of customers with on-prem hardware, but homelabbers would probably be happy.

You can kind of get there with home assistant. I'm not sure if it can use tools yet, but you can expose stuff you'd ask about like the weather/etc.

You seem like you're familiar with vast. Have you used their autoscaler/serverless offering before? I haven't tried it yet, but it wasn't immediately obvious if I could have something like ollama running and scaled to zero instances when not in use.

If you don't mind, what size models are you running and do you know around what you were paying?

fly.io was the first provider I tried any gpu offerings at, I probably should give it another shot now that I've used a few others.

Hmm, having a machine for every process is part of it but I actually like that kind of isolation. Storage and bandwidth also add up fast.

For example, I could get a digitalocean vm with 2gb ram, 1vcpu, 50gb storage, 2tb bandwidth for $12/mo.

For the same specs at fly.io, it'd be ~$22/mo not including any bandwidth. It could be less if it scales to zero/auto stops.

I recently tried experimenting with two different projects at fly. One was an attic server to cache packages for NixOS. Only used by me and my own vms. Even with auto scaling to zero, I think it was still around $15-20/mo.

The other was a fly gpu machine with Ollama on it. The cold start time + downloading a model each time was kind of painful, so I opted for just adding a 100gb volume. I don't actually remember what I was paying for that, but probably another 20/mo? I used it heavily for a few days to play around and then not so much later. I do remember doing the math and thinking it wouldn't be sustainable if I wanted to use it for stuff like home-assistant voice assistant or going through pdfs/etc with paperless.

On their own, neither of these are super expensive. But if I want to run multiple home services, the cost is just going to skyrocket with every new app I run. If I can rent a decent dedicated server for $100-$200/mo, then I at least don't have to worry about the cost increasing on me if a machine never scales to zero due to a healthcheck I forgot about or something like that.

Sorry if it's a bit rambly, happy to answer questions!

I have a decent sized homelab in my basement that I use for most stuff, and then a couple cheap-ish dedicated servers for public-facing things. Nothing has GPUs though, so I don't have a good solution for llm/ai projects yet.

I used to use cheap vms/vps from lowendtalk deals, but usually they're on over-subscribed hosts and can't do anything heavy.

Actual host recommendations: I like Racknerd and Hivelocity currently. OVH too, but I've read a lot of horror stories so I guess ymmv.

What kind of issues did you have with streaming? I also set up ollama on fly.io, and had no issues getting streaming to work.

For the LLM itself, I just used a custom startup script that downloaded the model once ollama was up. It's the same thing I'd do on a local cluster though. I'm not sure how fly could make it better unless they offered direct integration with ollama or some other inference server?

I really liked playing around with fly gpus, but it's just too expensive for hobby-use. Same goes for the rest of fly.io honestly. The DX is great and I wish I could move all of my homelab stuff and public websites to it, but it'd be way too expensive :(

> It seems with the git command line the way to do it is to switch to main then pull then switch back to my feature branch then rebase.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, you can do `git fetch origin` to fetch the latest branches from origin. And then `git rebase origin/main` to rebase the current branch against origin/main. origin/main doesn't have to be the same as local `main` so you don't need to switch branches at all.

> ... For a Yubikey to act as a poor man's HSM you have to store the PIN in plaintext on the disk. ...

I haven't read the article fully yet, but it's not a bad idea to store the Root CA on the yubikey, and then generate a separate intermediate CA that is not stored on the yubikey. This way, all your day-to-day certs are issued using the intermediate and you only need to touch the root ca if you need to re-issue/revoke/etc the intermediate.

This is what I do as well. I use acme.sh on one linux server to generate a cert with a few SANs on it, then copy that cert to things like opnsense/truenas/etc either using ssh or their api if there is one.

> Your local folder structure must mirror exactly the structure in our central repo

Do you use a monorepo at work, or do you have like a repo for a 'local dev environment' or something like that?

Did you move from cf to someone else, or are you still using them?

Very cool, any chance of either open-sourcing it or allowing the browser part to be self-hosted? i.e. to act on websites hosted in a local lan/vpn?

Also, did you evaluate https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use by any chance and have any comments about it? I'm assuming it was too AI-heavy based on what you said about claude/etc?

Plaid/Yodlee/SimpleFIN etc are slowly getting better about not having to store credentials or do scraping. It depends more on the bank. A lot of banks don't support things like oauth, but a few do support giving 3rd party apps read-only access or at least have an oauth2 flow to approve access instead of giving them your user/password.

Agreed in general though, I don't like having to give a budgeting app potential access to transfer all of my money away (even if they promise they won't)

Is Simplifi basically just the new version of Mint? I hadn't seen it before you mentioned it

I think I have the opposite mindset. I prefer putting everything on credit cards because then I don't have to keep a receipt or remember exactly what I spent where if I go to multiple places in one day. Plus bills/online subscriptions/etc that aren't cash-friendly.

I'd like something like Privacy that creates temporary credit card numbers, but is also anonymous from the provider side. Sort of like buying a new visa gift card to use every month.

But I also like getting points to use while traveling

I know you haven't been using it for long, but are you (or your wife) liking this setup? I don't like having to pay for SimpleFIN, but I'm thinking about doing it too.

You can specify the interface address to listen on, like "127.0.0.1:8080:8080" or "192.168.1.100:8080:8080". I have a lot of containers exposed like this but bind specifically to a vpn ip on the host so that they don't get exposed externally by default.

I haven't tried Hoarder yet, but Linkding has a linkding-injector extension that does this. It's pretty useful.

What are the alternatives for diagrams? Would an ascii diagram be better? I'm not sure if screen readers would ignore all of the random characters or not.

I'm assuming just a text description would be better, but I don't know what other options are available.

We have a few workflows at work that use the confluence api to publish pages with dynamic content. It's not super convenient, but was easy enough to set up.

We're not using diagram-as-code though. Most of our diagrams are embedded into the confluence page or copied from somewhere else.

Do you know how excalidraw compares to draw.io? I've used draw.io in the past, but see excalidraw mentioned quite a bit too. I'm not good enough at using draw.io to be against switching for future projects.

Not just company time, but company resources and the company's github org.

But yeah, I'd assume they have no ownership themselves unless they signed something explicit?

It seems like a really cool idea.

Is this (or will it be) part of the oss version of chroma? And would it work with the embedded version of chroma? From the article, it looks like it might require more server-side components now vs chromadb today

Can you explain your n8n workflow a little bit if you don't mind? txtrepo looks interesting. I had thought about somehow combining Aider with n8n/nodered to automate a few small things, but haven't looked too much into it yet.

Thanks! I don't remember the exact steps, but I remember it being a PITA to sign up for plaid. I managed to get a dev account before realizing you can't use most banks without going through a more thorough verification/approval process. To do that, you have to (I think) have a paid account.

SimpleFIN looks pretty.. simple, at least from a glance. When I get time, I'll actually give it a shot.

Do you have any experience with plaid to compare it to simplefin by any chance? I started a similar project with plaid before, but haven't really gone back to it since dev accounts became a lot more limited.