https://zebmccorkle.u.asymptote.club/

I write about just about anything that piques my interest or I feel needs to be on the internet. It’s also the de facto Asymptote Club blog (the de jure one I guess would just be the mailing list).

Please do not link to this article on Reddit or Hacker News.

Well, good thing we’re not Reddit or HN!

On a more serious note, I wonder why he says that.

I use a Lexmark Model M with AHK set up to map right control to the Windows key. I love the switches, but honestly the reason why I use it instead of something else is because I got it for free from my school. I don’t really have the money for a custom or customizable keyboard, so I stick with what I have.

The author’s tendency toward minimalism is essentially aesthetic. Yes, there could be security benefits in using a smaller codebase, but they might be negated by not using standard tools with lots of eyeballs and many years of development. While I see the aesthetic niceity of a cute, small, minimal system, I don’t see people really needing floppy-disk sized systems these days. People only have so many resources to throw around and minimizing binary size is rarely worth it.

Would anybody be interested in using this for anything? I probably won’t ever work on it, but it might be a nice learning exercise to get a minimal UNIX-like kernel going and a sliver of a userspace.

I also have some ideas that other people could work on in their free time instead of me. I don’t have the timestamp that points to the quote, but “if all you have are ideas, you’re an ideas guy” from Programming is terrible comes to mind.

Don’t forget that performance enhancements, security enhancements, and increased hardware support all add to the size over what was done a long time ago with some UNIX or Linux. There’s cruft and necessary additions that appeared over time. I’m actually curious what a minimalist OS would look like if it had all the necessary or useful stuff. I especially curious if it would still fit on a floppy.

If not security or UNIX, my baseline for projects like this is MenuetOS. The UNIX alternative should try to match up in features, performance, and size.

NXDOMAIN for me.

At least the perpetrator didn’t test their code. This is one of few instances where not testing code leads to the better outcome.

It’s crazy that Amiga-like OSes are still kicking around. I would try this out, but my iMac G4 apparently isn’t supported.

Stylus is using the same theme database without collecting your history:

• Firefox
• Chrome

I’ve gotten quite the response over the past day, and we’ve jumped from 3 members to 9. I’ve decided that once I notice this post is no longer at the top of the Lobsters front page, I’m going to stop the “open signup” here. Thank you everybody for the input, and special thanks to @lindalap:matrix.org for helping (and continuing to help) with the ToS and privacy policy to stay compliant with <insert regulation here>.

I have to say, this is much bigger and better of a reception than I expected. I guess I have something on my hands here then!

Looks like So You Start is just reselling OVH servers. Why not just go straight to OVH?

I like the idea, the problem I have is these services are so critical that losing access would be pretty devastating and I have no idea how long these services will stay running for which is why the only option I can accept is self hosting. I can’t even trust google to host my stuff as they have randomly locked me out of stuff before with no warning or way to contact them.

I think this is a fun idea, and I think your stated goal of a middle ground between “everyone uses GitHub” and “everyone self hosts everything” is worth pursuing.

What could be a killer feature for this though is an API to export all a user’s data in a simple format, say a .tar.gz archive with directories for email, git repos, pastes and CI logs. If you keep your feature set small it should be possible to automate this so users who are interested can just download their archive using cron.

If I could easily integrate this with my own backup regime, I’d consider using it for real work.

The underlying factor that caused the github purchase to be a problem was that github was free. As long as the service is free, then selling out is always a risk.

Why not take the total server costs at the end of the month, divide by the number of users, and charge that as a monthly subscription to keep the lights on? If the system is even marginally profitable, that makes any kind of selling out (via acquisition or selling user data) less attractive.

If the system is costing the administrators money, then they have a high incentive to sell out.

Nice. Disroot at https://disroot.org also offer various services, free of charge, and are definitely worth checking out.

Disroot is a platform providing online services based on principles of freedom, privacy, federation and decentralization.

Sweet. There is a similar community here https://github.com/hashbang/hashbang. They provide free shell accounts and I’m told their infrastructure runs on a combination of VPSes/dedicated servers.

Neat project. Hope it works out for you. One thing that caught my eye:

“and Debian Linux (with non-free disabled) for absolute freedom.”

It reads like it’s mandatory or definitely beneficial. Many people who like open source don’t buy into strict avoidance of non-free stuff. I’d say do a dedicated server that makes that optional. Maybe transition straight to a dedi with Ubuntu. Then, Debian is an option. Non-free is always an option for whatever supports it. One of the things that sinks lots of these efforts is they try to, for ideological purposes, further divide or filter would-be supporters and/or paying customers.

Personally, I think it’s FOSS-lovers doing that are handicapping themselves against competitors who will use proprietary, open source, or FOSS… anything that gives them an advantage in market. Their advantages often lead to bad things like walled gardens, lock-in, and less FOSS. However, folks supporting OSS or FOSS can similarly integrate anything they can that gives us better experience for users or more competitiveness. Their ends will be more utilitarian where financial success leads to more OSS or FOSS than proprietary stuff. Maybe even replacements for non-free they used but mostly what drives adoption and/or revenue. That’s best route to go if you look at it like game theory where we compete with proprietary sector that’s using more stuff (including OSS/FOSS) and taking more customers than the FOSS-only types. The latter can’t conceivably win if they’re turning away money and users. Even many Linux contributions are paid for by revenue from proprietary software.

I say give people options, maximize your revenue/usage potential even if non-profit, encourage things from your ideology, tolerate/support some other things with big payoff, and do what it takes to win even if using non-free.