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Comment by hinkley

18 hours ago

One of the things I hope will come from the Trough of Disillusionment in cloud computing will be families running redundant file servers hosting the family photos instead of doing everything on IG.

Your three tech savvy family members should all have redundant copies of the photos of memaw’s wedding and Uncle Jim when he was 2 and looked exactly like your cousin’s second kid. I don’t need to see those. Your stalker ex boyfriend definitely doesn’t need to see those. It’s none of our goddamned business.

Someone, I think WD? Already made a play at this but I think it fell on deaf ears and will have to be tried again after the hype cycle calms tf down.

19 comments

hinkley

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DrewADesign  17 hours ago

My very vibes-based take is that setting up home servers is the dad jeans of tech hobbies. It's kind of arresting how bewildered many young people are when confronted with anything below the UI layer. I think peak tech savviness happened a bit younger than me: maybe mid-late millennial. After that you start getting into the iPad-from-birth generation for whom tech was rarely a challenge. Tech savviness among young folks feels more like it was in the mid-90s. They're infinity more online-savvy, no doubt, but when it comes to knowing anything about how that works, they're cooked.

I do know some non-developer Gen Z folks that would set up minecraft servers on DO droplets, but I don't know of any that actually made their own and hosted it on their own network.

Aside from more exposure to raw tech, the technology making the internet happen was a lot simpler back then, where servers were actually physical servers,and such. I was able to adopt the complexity progressively as it came into existence which is a lot easier with the base knowledge of how the building blocks worked.

  • BrenBarn  11 hours ago

    This is my impression as well. From what I've seen, many Gen Z people only loosely even think in terms of things like "files". They are used to integrations where everything just lives on some website or in a Google app and the way you locate things is by searching.

    • raddan  3 hours ago

      I am a professor of CS and we found, post-pandemic, that very few students had any exposure to real computers. It was all smartphones and tablets. So the things you mention—not knowing what a file is—really is the state of things. We now explicitly talk about files in our intro programming courses, first as a general idea in CS1, and then we dig into (some of) the representations in CS2.

      Although there has also been a softening of math skills among the weakest students, the best students are still quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills, not analytical skills.

  • hinkley  2 hours ago

    Gamers are the ones building PCs by hand. They have the skills, it’s a matter of motivation.

    • lII1lIlI11ll  1 hour ago

      Building PCs by hand nowadays is quite trivial. You don't need to set bunch of jumpers on the motherboard correctly, manually assign IRQs, etc. The peak "complexity" modern gamers deal with is correctly overclocking their gear without frying it or making the system unstable (which is mostly done in some nice GUI according to a youtube tutorial anyway).

  • AtlasBarfed  14 hours ago

    We still need a lot of plug and Play with home servers.

    In theory, AI should be good at helping building interfaces between cloud backups and home server apps. Because AI should be good at apis.

    In theory

    • hinkley  2 hours ago

      I’d like a turnkey k3s and a 10” rack designed for consumers. Set up to host your Minecraft server, store your media, and be incrementally upgradeable.

ExtraRoulette  3 hours ago

I'm working on it! I have a little NUC that I'm learning Linux (Is that the proper term?) on. I plan to self host a few services for myself and host family photos on it someday.

I'm going through a "Deep, Vast, Trough of Learning" at the moment :>

mikepurvis  17 hours ago

I just set up a little cube server with a Mini-ITX board I had lying around. Overall I'm very happy with it, but right now it's basically just Unraid with the built-in containers running for Deluge, Jellyfin, and the Crafty minecraft server.

I'd love for it to also be a backup of my whole Google Photos account (eg https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync) but honestly I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.

  • cyberax  16 hours ago

    > I can't imagine trying to maintain an app on there that would actually be the first class storage/sync/presentation layer for my family.

    Immich exists. It really is missing only some editing functionality and some nice-to-have features from GPhotos like automatic panoramas. Other than that, it's superior to Google.