• 5 Posts
  • 192 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle


  • It depends on many factors including:

    • visits of individual sites
    • requirements of each site (memory, I/O, persistent storage, ephemeral storage, caching, databases, etc.)

    So you’re right that you make an initial guess and go from there.

    Many tools/sites/projects will have minimum system requirements and you can get an idea of minimums using those stats. Some frameworks might even have guidelines available. The one I use most often for example has a configurable memory footprint. So that’s a datapoint I personally use.

    If they’re all the same type of site (example Ghost blogs) using the same setups then it’s often less intense since you can pool resources like DBs and caching layers and go below minimum system requirements (which for many sites include a DB as part of the requirements).

    Some sites might be higher traffic but use fewer resources, others might be the inverse.

    Then there’s also availability. Are these sites for you? Is this for business? What kind of uptime guarantee do you need? How do you want to monitor that uptime and react to needs as they arrive/occur?

    The best way to handle this is in a modern context also depends on how much and what style of ops you want to engage in.

    Auto-scaling on an orchestration platform (something like K8S) or cloud-provider auto-scaling of VMs or something else? Do you want deployments managed as-code via version control? Or will this be more “click Ops”. No judgement here just a thing that will determine which options are best for you. I do strongly recommend on some kind of codified, automated ops workflow - especially if it’s 25 sites, but even with just a handful. The initial investment will pay for itself very quickly when you need to make changes and are relived to have a blueprint of where you are.

    If you want to set it and forget it there are many options but all require some significant initial configuration.

    If you’re ok with maintenance, then start with a small instance and some monitoring and go from there.

    During setup and staging/testing the worst that can happen is your server runs out of resources and you increase its available resources through whatever method your provider offers. This is where as-code workflows really shine - you can rebuild the whole thing with a few edits and push to version control. The inverse is also true - you can start a bit big and scale down.

    Again, finding what works for you is worth some investment (and by works I don’t just mean what runs, but what keeps you sane when things go wrong or need changing).

    Even load testing, which you mentioned, is hard to get right and can be challenging to instrument and implement in a way that matches real-world traffic. It’s worth doing for sites that are struggling under load, but it’s not something I’d necessarily suggest starting with. I could be wrong here but I’ve worked for some software firms with huge user bases and you’d be surprised how little load testing is done out there.

    Either way it sounds like a fun challenge with lots of opportunities for learning new tricks if you’re up for it.

    One thing I recommend avoiding is solutions that induce vendor lock-in - for example use OpenTofu in lieu of something like CloudFormation. If you decide to use something like that in a SaaS platform - try not to rely on the pieces of the puzzle that make it hard (sticky) to switch. Pay for tools that bring you value and save time for sure, but balance that with your ability to change course reasonably quickly if you need to.


  • I think that depends on what you’re doing. I find Claude miles ahead of the pack in practical, but fairly nuanced coding issues - particularly in use as a paired programmer with Strongly Typed FP patterns.

    It’s almost as if it’s better in real-world situations than artificial benchmarks.

    And their new CLI client is pretty decent - it seems to really take advantage of the hybrid CoT/standard auto-switching model advantage Claude now has with this week’s update.

    I don’t use it often anymore but when I reach for a model first for coding - it’s Claude. It’s the most likely to be able to grasp the core architectural patterns in a codebase (like a consistent monadic structure for error handling or consistently well-defined architectural layers).

    I just recently cancelled my one month trial of Gemini - it was pretty useless; easy to get stuck in a dumb loop even with project files as context.

    And GPT-4/o1/o3 seems to really suck at being prescriptive - often providing walls of multiple solutions that all somehow narrowly miss the plot - even with tons of context.

    That said Claude sucks - SUCKS - at statistics - being completely unreliable where GPT-4 is often pretty good and provides code (Python) for verification.


  • I agree. Trump is stupid and easily manipulated. He doesn’t need to be compromised in the way people think. He’s a rich kid with a chip on his shoulder trying to impress Daddy types while stuck in the mindset he’s the most (insert some positive trumpism here) - aka Narcissist.

    Very easily manipulated when you know what makes him tick.

    There’s a line from the Lioness tv series (S01E06) that rings so true about Trump (but also many modern presidents):

    Do you know who’s in this meeting?

    Don’t you?

    I knew who was in the debrief was at Langley.

    Well, it won’t be the President.

    Wouldn’t be the President anyway. You don’t plan bus routes with the bus driver. You just tell him where to drive.



  • Recently switched from VsCodium to neovim - but still use Codium for some specific tasks.

    My setup customization focuses around Telescope, Treesitter, Trouble & Blink.

    But the advice I got was to start with vim keybindings in VSCode. I used those for six weeks until I got the hang of the basics and it had gone from frustrating to somewhat second nature.

    Then I made the move.

    I still use Codium for Terraform work (I have struggled to get the Terraform LS working well in neovim and I don’t use it often enough to warrant the effort) and as a GUI git client - I like the ability to add a single line from multiple files and I haven’t looked up how to do it any other way - I’ve got other stuff to do and it’s not slowing me down.

    But I grew to hate Codium / VS code tabs in larger codebases. I was spending so much time looking for open tabs ( I realise this is a me problem). While neovim has tabs, it’s much more controlled and I typically use them very differently and very sparingly.

    If I need to look up a data structure I just call it up temporarily with Telescope via a find files call or a live grep call (both setup to only use my project directory by default), take a peak, and move on.

    The thing is - security risks are going to exist anywhere you install plugins you haven’t audited the code for. Unless you work in an IDE where there’s a company guaranteeing all plugins - there are always going to be risks.

    I’d argue that VSCode, while a bigger target, has both a large user base and Microsoft’s security team going for it. I don’t see the theme being compromised as much as problem because it got solved and also prompted some serious security review of many marketplace plugins. Not ideal, but not terrible.


  • thatsnothowyoudoittoCanada*tail slap*
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    16 days ago

    Beavers have very yellow, almost orange/brown teeth. Why? Because they have a very high iron content coating to make them tougher, you know because cutting down trees.

    This is an imposter Hollywood beaver.


  • As per my other comment - the algorithm is only part of it.

    A big aspect however is the slickness and ease-of-onboarding for mega-Corp apps. It’s a thing that would relatively easy to begin work on.

    I’ve seen first hand the amount of time and money even growth-stage startups spend on onboarding and have lots of first-hand reports from peers at the big girls - it’s a critical part of success. Make it easy to get started and easy to stay using.

    It’s missing from most fediverse experiences. Pixelfed being a serious contender for an on-boarding rethink.

    “time-to-value” - we want that as low as possible.







  • Personally I believe part of the problem is that corporate capture of our social interactions has effectively meant folks can’t get the word out and (sadly) they don’t realize it? Trying to organize on Facebook? That’s a mistake.

    I’m not saying it’s what happened here but there’s a possibility it’s what’s going on more broadly. And by design.

    Personally I’ve started building a tool (for the fediverse) to help make civil participation free of corporate interest. I’m sick of my town and local municipal services (and volunteer organizations) only posting to Facebook (and I’m not in the US!)

    Existing tools are, in my opinion, not widely used and too clunky to appeal to those who’ve been lulled into using big-tech solutions.






  • Email is notoriously hard to self host. It requires constant care, planning, and interfacing with the big guys when your email can’t get delivered despite jumping through all the hoops (DKIM, DMARC, SPF and more).

    I used to run email services for my small business and former start-up. It was a never-ending pain. IP warming, monitoring, deliverability checks…. blah blah blah.

    Both Google and Microsoft would regularly blacklist massive IP address blocks because of one bad IP address. Days to weeks for resolution in some cases.

    I’m a little salty though ‘cause I just switched to proton away from RackSpace. There are so few good and reliable options that aren’t the big guys and the big guys want it that way.