snerbles

Personally I use eBay and find the most barebones system I can, then populate the CPU+RAM with components salvaged from e-wasted servers. There are risks with this, as I've had to return more than one badly-bent workstation that was packed poorly.

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So the Dell Precision T7920 runs dual Intel Scalable (Skylake) and has oodles of DIMM slots (24!), but you'll need to use a PCIe adapter to run an NVMe drive. FlexBays give you hot-swappable SATA, SAS too but only if you're lucky enough to find a system with an HBA (or add one yourself). But if you manage to salvage 24x 64GB DDR4 DIMMs, you'll have a system with a terabyte-and-a-half of ECC RAM - just expect to deal with a very long initial POST and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks. The power supply is proprietary, but can be swapped from the outside.

The T7820 is the single-CPU version, and has only 6 DIMM slots. But it is more amenable to gaming (one NUMA domain), and I have gifted a couple to friends.

If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable - but expect to rename the UEFI image to boot Linux from NVMe, and it's much less power efficient if you don't pick an E5 v4 revision CPU. I used a fully-loaded T7910 as a BYOD workstation at a previous job, worked great as a test environment.

Lenovo ThinkStation P920 Tower has fewer DIMM slots (16) than the T7920, but has on-motherboard m.2 NVMe connectors and three full 5.25" bays. I loaded one with Linux Mint for my mother's business, she runs the last non-cloud version QuickBooks in a beefy network-isolated Windows VM and it works great for that. Another friend runs one of these with Proxmox as a homelab-in-a-box.

The HP Z6 G4 is also a thing, though I personally haven't played with one yet. I do use a salvaged HP Z440 workstation with a modest 256GB RAM (don't forget the memory cooler!) and a 3090 as my ersatz kitchen table AI server.

I too have a crippling dual CPU workstation hoarding habit. Single thread performance is usually worse than enthusiast consumer desktops, and gaming performance will suffer if the game isn't constrained to a single NUMA domain that also happens to have the GPU being used by that game.

On the other hand, seeing >1TiB RAM in htop always makes my day happier.

The incentive is less about morals and very much about self-preservation.

With online mobs, when the target shows any sort of regret there is blood in the water and the sharks feast. It sometimes turns into a very public form of struggle session for the person under scrutiny. Besides avoiding the faux pas in the first place, one well-tested mitigation is to be absolutely unapologetic and wait for the storm to blow over.

Ah, yes. The "normal people" canard. It's very tiresome. I refer you to a prior comment of mine and the ensuing chain from the usual HN homeschooling merry-go-round a year ago [0].

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>> You can also learn outside of school, too.

> As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.

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>> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.

> It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.

> Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42249295

It was the predominant notion when I was a homeschooled kid 30 years ago, and for most of them there is no argument or evidence that will convince them otherwise.

State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.

> Not only that, but it has been a poorly communicated and documented ride as many in this comment section can attest.

The guides are written for cryptographic infrastructure nerds and not regular normal users that have a habit of forgetting their own passwords after six months. Not to mention the fact that the Element UI tends to churn a lot.

I didn't even know that they deprecated creating new passphrases, and that's what I was telling my users to do!

Anecdata around SV: I've seen an uptick in urban night drivers with only their DRLs and no tail lights.

Often projects need a history of stable checkpoints, and source control is one way to provide that.

At a prior job, employees wearing the logo started getting a lot of unexpected targeted attention outside the office. This ranged from lots of questions from randos about future products, to desperate passers-by handing off resumes on the sidewalk and begging for jobs, to even stalking and targeted theft. OPSEC culture wasn't something practiced there, and it was quite the rude awakening for some.

I do sticker the everloving snot out of my (removable) laptop cover with memes vaguely opposing or otherwise orthogonal to the local culture. No references to my job or place of work. Any interactions have generally been amusing to all parties involved.

Also the Yellow Press drumming up support for the Spanish-American War.

NocoDB is also a self-hosted option. I used it to power a family project that required regular API access, but without the rate limits of Google Sheets.

For now.

Like any other large corporation, Google has selected for compliant employees over all else. It's more akin to a bureaucracy than a startup now.

Teaching gameplay without an overt tutorial is a difficult skill, maybe this dev can pull it off? It's hard to get into the "new player" headspace without feedback from actual playtesters.

It took me about 30 seconds. Which is a shame, this is the kind of game that immediately draws me in.

Got a little nauseous playing it on desktop. Needs an FOV slider and maybe the ability to dampen camera movement.

I felt like I was back in 2005 all over again. Thanks OP, this was magical.

No fun allowed!

At this point I think they very well do understand. Rocky times are ahead, TPTB know they're at risk if things get bad enough for the average denizen and they want to get in as much leverage against future dissidents as possible.

A guide on llama.cpp's grammars (nine hours and not a single mention of "GBNF"? HN is slipping) is here:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/grammars/R...

There's also a grammar validation tool in the default llama.cpp build, which is much easier to reason about for debugging grammars than having them bounce off the server.

> All their competitors are doing a lot more with a lot fewer people.

According to Wikipedia, for FY25:

Intel: 102,000 employees

AMD: 28,000 employees

Nvidia: 36,000 employees

I'm pretty sure the latter two have been growing headcount lately, and even then combined they still have fewer employees than Intel.

Element X shines with large rooms - think joining rooms with 100+ active users and a lot of events to sync. Using multiple clients is not a problem either, I think I have at least 10 active sessions active with my current account. Element largely "just works" for my users with few grumbles, but that is definitely not the case for a lot of others here.

As for my stack, it hasn't changed much since this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34784816

Mattermost always struck me as more of a Slack alternative. Though the line between the two was always a big blur.

> It's not federated though

This is a big one for my server - our community has a handful of active "visitors" from other homeservers and the experience is pretty seamless.

When I onboard users to my Matrix homeserver, I point them to a preconfigured Element-Web URL and the Element mobile apps. I also mention that there are other clients out there - a handful experiment with them, most don't.

One discovery problem is this client had three rebrandings, from Vector to Riot to Element. I've noticed users have had a hard time realizing the Element is a client for Matrix - even when they're actively chatting on Element. Usually they just refer to our chat by the homeserver's name.

So I've hosted a federated Matrix homeserver for almost eight years now, with a few dozen active users. Beyond the 800 pound gorillas of networking effects and the need to be your own infra engineer (mitigated by things like your integrated server/client idea), there are a few key features that I feel keep people on Discord:

- No distinct voice channels with push-to-talk. Yes there's Jitsi, but it's not the same as the TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble style functionality that gamers have used for 20+ years. Solve this, and I think Matrix will see much more adoption for casual voice chat in the same manner as Discord.

- No server-specific display names. I have multiple screen names across multiple games/communities, and Discord accommodates that. Matrix (or at least Element+Synapse) does not.

- No path for server-specific invites. If I attempt to invite someone to myexamplehomeserver.net in the Element UI, they are instead directed to make a matrix.org account and are federated in. It works I guess, but it's shit for homeservers with closed registration that want to invite users to that homeserver. Writing an invite bot has been on my "I'll get around to it" list for a very long time now, and I know other homeserver admins have considered the same thing.

- E2EE is clunky. Yes, it is much better now. Yes, there are concerted efforts to improve this. Yes, it is an extremely hard problem. However, many times I have had users lose access to past messages because they were signed in to only one device and don't remember their keys. I understand the security aspirations, the proles do not and never will.

There are a lot of other little things like custom reactions, but I think the four above would do a lot to foster more Matrix adoption.

> In which case, why fight for it?

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Among other things left unsaid.

For us who remember the 20th Century? Yes, I agree and we can see the causes. For the next generation? It's more that they're wrapped up in centralized closed platforms for their hobbies. Most of them never considered anything else. They were born deep underwater and have no idea why they can't breathe.

We had BBSes, forums and IRC. Now it's Discord.

We had LAN parties. Now it's publisher-controlled match lobbies.

We had RSS feeds. Now it's curated social algos.

We had myriad self-hosted wikis and homespun fansites. Now it's all ad-choked Fandom.

So on and so forth.

Their competitor (and our preferred vendor at the time) was always forthright with us about the capabilities of their lasers.

One specific example was Camp Bucca in 2007, around the time local insurgents managed to successfully inflict casualties with a rocket attack [0]. In an onboarding briefing I recall some officers lamenting the delay in getting Google to "delete" the base from Maps, though I am unsure if there are any public sources that reflect this.

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6737159.stm

> The problem here isn't the crawlers, it's your price-gouging, extortionate hosting plan.

No, it's both.

The crawlers are lazy, apparently have no caching, and there is no immediately obvious way to instruct/force those crawlers to grab pages in a bandwidth-efficient manner. That being said, I would not be surprised if someone here will smugly contradict me with instructions on how to do just that.

In the near term, if I were hosting such a site I'd be looking into slimming down every byte I could manage, using fingerprinting to serve slim pages to the bots and exploring alternative hosting/CDN options.