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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I have some static sites that I just rsync to my VPS and serve using Nginx. That’s definitely a good option.

    Agree. And hard to get security wrong cos no database.

    If you want to make it faster by using a CDN and don’t want it to be too hard to set up, you’re going to have to use a CDN service.

    Yes but this can just be a drop-in frontend for the VPS. Point the domain to Cloudflare and tell only Cloudflare where to find the site. This provides IP privacy and also TLS without having to deal with LetsEncrypt. It’s not ideal because… Cloudflare… but at least you’re using standard web tools. To ditch Cloudflare you just unplug them at the domain and you still have a website.

    Perhaps its irrational but I’m bothered by how many people seem to think that Github Pages is the only way to host a static website. I know that’s not your case.


  • This is a bit fuzzy. You seem to recommend a VPS but then suggest a bunch of page-hosting platforms.

    If someone is using a static site generator, then they’re already running a web server, even if it’s on localhost. The friction of moving the webserver to the VPS is basically zero, and that way they’re not worsening the web’s corporate centralization problem.

    I host my sites on a VPS. Better internet connection and uptime, and you can get pretty good VPSes for less than $40/year.

    I preferred this advice.


  • Can recommend Hetzner (German IP). Good value and so far solid.

    Before that I used OVH (French IP) for years but it ended badly. First they locked me out of my account for violating 2FA which I had not asked for or been told about, and would not provide any recourse except sending them a literal signed paper letter, which I had to do twice because the first one they ignored. A nightmare which went on for weeks. And then, cherry on the cake, my VPS literally went up in smoke when their Strasbourg data center burned down! Oops! Looks like your VPS is gone, sorry about that, here’s a voucher for six months free hosting! Months later they discovered a backup but the damage was done. Never again.




  • Earning more than I spent. It’s really not a complex science. In fact this whole question reminds me of the weight-loss debate.

    For context, I’ve been working for a couple of decades, never been highly paid, rarely even worked full time, and it’s been at least 15 years since I had the slightest money issue.

    The critical variable is self-discipline. I know this is not a popular opinion. I also understand that there are societal factors that feed into all this, and that questions of virtue and vice are basically irrelevant. But it’s true nonetheless. We do not live in a society of material scarcity. If you have an income, basically any income, and you can find a way to control your needs, then you will quickly escape survival mode.



  • Admittedly the definition is hard to pin down but clearly the thing exists or the word wouldn’t have taken off so quickly.

    Roughly, it refers to the worldview in which group power dynamics are all-determining, where race is destiny, where the individual takes a back seat, and where the only possibly solution is some form of reverse discrimination - but even that will never work, really, because injustice is destiny.

    It exists, quite few people believe these things, far far more of them hate it, and that’s why the peak woke moment seems to have passed. Mercifully.



  • This should really be more widely known. It’s a case study of mission creep and bureaucratization. The cost of keeping the servers running, and even dev work, is at this point a smallish fraction of what they’re pulling in. The is rest going to various forms of outreach and activism. That’s fine, and the money is probably well spent. But they really should be more honest about why they’re asking for it.



  • Your individualism. Of course I’m aware of the huge downsides, but my understanding is that personal freedom has been a vanishing rare thing in human history. As I see it, some very odd circumstances (puritans and the frontier) generated the USA, which morphed into something even weirder still: a libertarian superpower. Which then, in extremis, saved the rest of us from authoritarianism of both right and left. Probably temporarily. I predict that after it all collapses, and with better hindsight, we’ll appreciate the USA more than we do today.