"Okay, so the reason I initially did this was because I didn’t want to pay Contabo an extra $1.50/mo to have object storage just to be able to spawn VPSes from premade disk images."
I think there's a sweetspot between " I spent 50 hours to save 1.50$/mo" and "every engineer should be spending 250K$/mo in tokens".
Host employees still need to eat, if we can't afford 1.50$/mo, then we aren't really professionals and are just coasting on real infrastructure subsidized by professionals that pay for the pay-as-you-go infrastructure.
It's still possible to go even further to these extremes, there's thousands of developers that just coast by on github pages and vercel subdomains. So at least having a VPS puts you ahead of that mass competitively, but trying to save 1.50$/mo is a harsh place to be. At that point I don't think that the technical skills are the bottleneck, it's more likely that there's some social work that needs to be done, and that obsessing over running doom on curl is not a very productive use of one's time in a critical economic spot.
I write this because I am in that spot, but perhaps I'm reading a bit much into it.
That sounds like something I would've done... When I was a kid, the 5€/month for a VPS was a massive expense, to the point where I occasionally had to download my 10GB rootfs to my mom's windows laptop, terminate the instance and then rebuild it once I had enough money. Eventually I got an old Kindle that was able to run an app called Terminal IDE which had a Linux shell with some basic programs like busybox, gcc. Spartacus Rex, if you're out there, thank you for making my entire career possible.
> it's more likely that there's some social work that needs to be done, and that obsessing over running doom on curl is not a very productive use of one's time in a critical economic spot.
It can be a problem but it can be also just a human following their special interests that give them joy.
For me as a ADHD person engaging with my special interests is a hard requirement to keep my mental health in check and therefore a very good use of my time.
> if we can't afford 1.50$/mo, then we aren't really professionals and are just coasting on real infrastructure subsidized by professionals
This is a strange claim.
Whether someone is getting paid or not to do something is what determines who is a professional, not whether or how much they're paying someone else. (And that's the only thing that matters, unlike the way that "professional" is used as a euphemism in Americans' bizarre discursive repertoire.)
... I think you're reading a bit much into it. It's less that I couldn't afford to pay that, and more that I didn't want to pay that, and iterating on the solution I used to dodge that led me down a giant rabbit hole of learning more about Linux while solving stupider and stupider problems posed for myself.
Well - Linux is kind of like a somewhat generic interface to have actionable, programmable tasks. One could use Windows for this too, but IMO Linux is in general better suited for that task.
The only area I think Windows may be better is the graphical user interface. Now, the windows interface annoys me to no ends, but GNOME annoys me and KDE annoys me too. I have been more using fluxbox or icewm, sometimes when I feel fancy xfce or mate-desktop, but by and large I think my "hardcore desktop days" are over. I want things to be fast and efficient and simple. Most of the work I do I handle via the commandline and a bit of web-browsing and writing code/text in an editor, for the most part (say, 95% of the activities).
> The only area I think Windows may be better is the graphical user interface.
Nah. You're right about Gnome and KDE, but Windows is even worse because you can't exactly escape away from microsoft's insane labyrinth or awful wm. Frankly, not a fan of the Xerox bloodline of desktop interfaces in general. mpx/mux heritage is the one I like. 9wm, cwm or dwm. Closer to Engelbart and just generally all around better.
Isn't every OS an interpreter for machine code with kernel privileges?
This one is an interpreter for CPIO files.
From earlier in the series.
"Okay, so the reason I initially did this was because I didn’t want to pay Contabo an extra $1.50/mo to have object storage just to be able to spawn VPSes from premade disk images."
I think there's a sweetspot between " I spent 50 hours to save 1.50$/mo" and "every engineer should be spending 250K$/mo in tokens".
Host employees still need to eat, if we can't afford 1.50$/mo, then we aren't really professionals and are just coasting on real infrastructure subsidized by professionals that pay for the pay-as-you-go infrastructure.
It's still possible to go even further to these extremes, there's thousands of developers that just coast by on github pages and vercel subdomains. So at least having a VPS puts you ahead of that mass competitively, but trying to save 1.50$/mo is a harsh place to be. At that point I don't think that the technical skills are the bottleneck, it's more likely that there's some social work that needs to be done, and that obsessing over running doom on curl is not a very productive use of one's time in a critical economic spot.
I write this because I am in that spot, but perhaps I'm reading a bit much into it.
That sounds like something I would've done... When I was a kid, the 5€/month for a VPS was a massive expense, to the point where I occasionally had to download my 10GB rootfs to my mom's windows laptop, terminate the instance and then rebuild it once I had enough money. Eventually I got an old Kindle that was able to run an app called Terminal IDE which had a Linux shell with some basic programs like busybox, gcc. Spartacus Rex, if you're out there, thank you for making my entire career possible.
> it's more likely that there's some social work that needs to be done, and that obsessing over running doom on curl is not a very productive use of one's time in a critical economic spot.
It can be a problem but it can be also just a human following their special interests that give them joy.
For me as a ADHD person engaging with my special interests is a hard requirement to keep my mental health in check and therefore a very good use of my time.
> if we can't afford 1.50$/mo, then we aren't really professionals and are just coasting on real infrastructure subsidized by professionals
This is a strange claim.
Whether someone is getting paid or not to do something is what determines who is a professional, not whether or how much they're paying someone else. (And that's the only thing that matters, unlike the way that "professional" is used as a euphemism in Americans' bizarre discursive repertoire.)
I like the term host employee, carrying the LLM parasite as it uses us to embody itself and reproduce into the singularity.
I think they meant employees from the hosting company. But that's a funny interpretation!
... I think you're reading a bit much into it. It's less that I couldn't afford to pay that, and more that I didn't want to pay that, and iterating on the solution I used to dodge that led me down a giant rabbit hole of learning more about Linux while solving stupider and stupider problems posed for myself.
That four part blog was one of the most entertaining things I've read this year, thanks.
Really in the spirit of "hacker" news IMO.
I get the motivation, it's less avoiding the 1.50 per month and more like a challenge to work around it!
Calling cheap hacks unprofessional misses the point, some suprisingly portable tricks only show up when you stop paying for everything on autopilot.
Well - Linux is kind of like a somewhat generic interface to have actionable, programmable tasks. One could use Windows for this too, but IMO Linux is in general better suited for that task.
The only area I think Windows may be better is the graphical user interface. Now, the windows interface annoys me to no ends, but GNOME annoys me and KDE annoys me too. I have been more using fluxbox or icewm, sometimes when I feel fancy xfce or mate-desktop, but by and large I think my "hardcore desktop days" are over. I want things to be fast and efficient and simple. Most of the work I do I handle via the commandline and a bit of web-browsing and writing code/text in an editor, for the most part (say, 95% of the activities).
> The only area I think Windows may be better is the graphical user interface.
Nah. You're right about Gnome and KDE, but Windows is even worse because you can't exactly escape away from microsoft's insane labyrinth or awful wm. Frankly, not a fan of the Xerox bloodline of desktop interfaces in general. mpx/mux heritage is the one I like. 9wm, cwm or dwm. Closer to Engelbart and just generally all around better.