My step-up from Pi was to ebay HP 800 G1 minis then G2’s. They are really well made, there’s full repair manuals available, and they are just a pleasure to swap bits in and out. I’ve heard good things about, and expect similar build quality from the 1 liter Lenovos.

I agree that RAM is a likely constraint rather than processor for self-hosting workloads. Particularly in my case as I’m on Proxmox and run all my docker containers in separate LXCs. I run 32GB in the G2’s which was a straightforward upgrade (they take laptop like memory). One some of them I’ve upgraded the SSDs, or if not, I’ve added M.2 NVME drives (that the G2’s have a slot for).

I switched from Copilot to Codeium after only a couple of months of Copilot use - just based on the cost since currently I’m just a hobby coder.

The main difference I’ve noticed is that Codeium doesn’t seem as smart about the local context as Copilot. Copilot would look at how I’m handling promises in a project, and stick to that, whereas Codeium would choose a strategy seemingly at random.

A second, and maybe more telling example, is that I do my accounts using ‘plain text accounting’ in VS Code. This is a very niche approach to accounting software and I imagine is hardly in the training sets at all - there certainly would not be a lot of public domain text accounts in the particular format (BeanCount) I use in public code repositories. Codeium doesn’t make any suggestions for entries as I’m entering transactions, whereas Copilot would see that the account names I’m using are present in another file in the project and suggest them, and very quickly figure out the formatting of transactions and suggest them correctly.

If you didn’t have to deal with a cumbersome spacesuit, I imagine you could run, but you’d lean over much more towards the horizontal - like maybe 45° or lower, so each ‘step’ would be a push backwards in line with your longitudinal axis. Don’t waste energy by bounding up.

Source: wild speculation.

If we’re making a list of great projects written in Go, I’m putting in a word for PocketBase which is a based around sqlite that works as a backend-as-a-service and does all the tedious auth work for you. It’s the perfect sideproject backend.

Bare metal servers, VPSs, or VM’s you host? If it’s for VM’s you host, then consider Proxmox as hypervisor and use VM templates. I’m sure old school sysops could to the same with QEMU and Virtmanager or something. But basically, I just set up a VM exactly how I like it, then convert it to a template and cookie cutter it out.

I can sense the Nix guys shaking their heads - it’s on my list to try :- )

It has a practical element (Hello Jellyfin, Kavita, AudioBookshelf & Syncthing), but for the rest of it, it’s about 60% hobby and 20% learning stuff that could be potentially career enhancing.

Gnu/Linux absolutely annihilating server operating systems means that I can run the same stack, and use the same tools, that giant companies are based on. All for free. In my spare room. 1L x86 computers cost less than two packs of cigarettes! Little SSD’s are ridiculously cheap. And you don’t even need that stuff - that old laptop in your cupboard will do. Even if you kick in to donate for your software (and I recommend you do if you can) it’s a cheap hobby compared to golf or skating or whatever. Anything you need to learn there’s blog posts and videos available.

We live in an amazing time in this hobby. I know there’s companies that would like to take it away from us, but Open Source just keeps kicking goals. Thank you FOSS developers, Gnu, Linus, FSM, Cthulhu and the other forces in the universe that make this possible.

For anyone without the inclination to wade through 47 pages, here’s what they say about HTMX, which they’ve classified as “Assess” rather than “Trial” or “Adopt”

htmx is a small, neat HTML UI library that recently became popular seemingly out of nowhere. During our Radar discussion, we found its predecessor intercooler.js existed ten years ago. Unlike other increasingly complex pre-compiled JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks, htmx encourages the direct use of HTML attributes to access operations such as AJAX, CSS transitions, WebSockets and Server- Sent Events. There’s nothing technically sophisticated about htmx, but its popularity recalls the simplicity of hypertext in the early days of the web. The project’s website also features some insightful (and amusing) essays on hypermedia and web development, which suggests the team behind htmx have thought carefully about its purpose and philosophy.

This is a genuinely fresh and intriguing idea, but you’ve sort of answered your own question (as have most of the commenters) by noting it would immediately be abused. So I think you are going to have to be the one deciding how your compute cycles and bandwidth are being used.

BOINC/World Community Grid is the obvious choice since they are set up for exactly this use case. There’s also things like Sheepit - a render farm. Maybe you could run a Tor node .

Would be handy for attaching your name badge, or if you need to put those little hard drive screws somewhere so you don’t lose them.

Us looking at developers still on dBase III ~inserts Judgmental Volturi meme~

Great point. Sometimes the benefit of an external dependency being changeable is a great feature.

I read an interesting post by Ben Hoyt this morning called The small web is a beautiful thing - it touches a lot on this idea. (warning, long read).

I also always feel a bit uncomfortable having any dependencies at all (left-pad never forget), but runtime ones? I really like to avoid.

I have Clipper complied executables written for clients 25 years ago I can still run in a DOS VM in an emergency. They used a couple of libraries written in C for fast indexing etc, but all statically linked.

But the Visual Basic/Access apps from 20 years ago with their dependencies on a large number of DLLs? Creating the environment would be an overwhelming challenge.

You don’t need the GUI, the client does all the work. I use a Debian container, so just sudo apt-get install boinc-client.

Once that’s installed, you go to the project (in my case, World Grid) and setup your account. As part of that, it will give you a URL and account key. Then back on your server, you use the boinccmd to --project_attach the URL and key.

I boinc in an LXC container with a cron job to run during the period in the day on weekdays when the electricity is pretty much all renewables (and I’m not watching Jellyfin). The intention is to turn sunlight into tiny forward progress towards curing cancer.

Specifically, the Community Grid projects Mapping Cancer Markers and Smash Childhood Cancer.

I’ve been around - did COBOL at uni. DOne a lot of commercial work in Delphi and C++. I loved the few months of Swift I tried, but started on webdev 6 months ago. I felt really unsafe in JS, and was looking forward to moving onto Typescript. But, as time’s gone on, I’ve found JS just seems to work how I think it’s going to. I haven’t run into problems with types at all. I assumed I’d end up on a complied language for server side, but the Node ecosystem’s so mature it’s just been efficient to stay in JS land.

If I was going to teach kids to code, this is where I’d start. Low friction to get going, and powerful enough to run most of the world. Bountiful resources to learn and get support.