Comment by underdeserver
6 days ago
You can also make this argument to varying degrees about your internet connection, cloud provider, OS vendor, etc.
6 days ago
You can also make this argument to varying degrees about your internet connection, cloud provider, OS vendor, etc.
I'm not the OP but:
* Not even counting cellular data carriers, I have a choice of at least five ISPs in my area. And if things get really bad, I can go down to my local library to politely encamp myself and use their WiFi.
* I've personally no need for a cloud provider, but I've spent a lot of time working on cloud-agnostic stuff. All the major cloud providers (and many of the minors) provide compute, storage (whether block, object, or relational), and network ingress and egress. As long as you don't deliberately tie yourself to the vendor-specific stuff, you're free to choose among all available providers.
* I run Linux. Enough said.
* You might have a choice of carriers or ISPs, but many don't.
* Hmm, what kind of software do you write that pays your bills?
* And your setup doesn't require any external infrastructure to be kept up to date?
> ...but many don't.
And many do. The US isn't the entire world, you know.
> ...what kind of software do you write that pays your bills?
B2B software that allows anyone to run their workloads with most any cloud provider, and most any on-prem "cloud". The entire point of this software is to abstract out the underlying infrastructure so that businesses can walk away from a particular vendor if that vendor gets too stroppy.
> ...your setup doesn't require any external infrastructure...
It's Gentoo Linux, so it runs largely on donated infra (and infra paid for with donations). But -unlike Windows or OS X users- if I get sick of what the Gentoo steering committee are doing, I can go to another distro (or just fucking roll my own should things get truly dire). That's the point of my comment.
How about your web browser?
Just this week a library got deprecated.
Open source of course.
So what's my response to that deprecating? Maintaining it myself? Nope finding another library.
You always depend on something...
> Maintaining it myself?
You say that like it's an absurd idea, but in fact this is what most companies would do.
1 reply →
This is why I run a set of rackmount servers at home, that have the media and apps that I want to consume. If my ISP bites the dust tomorrow, I've literally got years worth of music, books, tv, movies, etc. Hell, I even have a bunch of models on ollama, and an offline copy of wikipedia running (minus media, obv) via kiwix.
It's not off-grid, but that's the eventual dream/ goal.
Well, you can’t really self-host your internet connection anyway :)
Of course you can. It's called an AS (autonomous system), I think all you need is an IP address range, a physical link to someone willing to peer with you (another AS), some hardware, some paperwork, etc; and bam you're your own ISP.
My company has set this up for one of our customers (I wasn't involved).
> all you need is an IP address range, a physical link to someone willing to peer with you (another AS), some hardware, some paperwork, etc; and bam you're your own ISP.
I'm pretty sure the connotation of "self-host" entails a strictly substantially smaller scope than starting your own ISP.
Finding someone willing to peer with you also defeats the purpose. You are still fundamentally dependent on established ISPs.
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> You can also make this argument to varying degrees about your internet connection, cloud provider, OS vendor, etc.
True, but I think wanting to avoid yet another dependency is a good thing.
... search engine