Whoa,
Can I take a moment here and appreciate the generative art posted along-side the blog?
I was up late last night playing with midjourney's generative art system as well (for the first time), so to see art generated with midjourney featured in a blog post today feels like interesting timing!
what really strikes me, is that this blogger has opted to use his generative prompt as a caption. It's tempting to borrow the prompt and keep tweaking the image to my liking.
I can't quite articulate it, but given the communal environment midjourney is typically used in, with everyone shoulder to shoulder in a chat room, glancing over other's iterations. Everyone working in the open... I am left with the distinct impression I could well have bumped into the blog author at the studio last night (whether that's literally true or not).
I guess what I'm saying is it's surprising that this AI generative art tool has a sense of community. Which I find myself rather inexplicably feeling I belong to.
What a well written article! It was as much an ad, a tutorial, a dream, and a plea for the future.
The art was amazing at adding to the narrative. And it was exciting to discover and play with after. The Jobs quote really made it clear what the thesis of the article was (which I thought the author still danced around a bit).
The final section changed tone and where I think the author’s true point became clear. I really like this vision of self-hosting and I think it’s way more inspiring than “avoid SaaS and gain privacy”. It’s also a great pitch for their product, as it happens. It’s a fantastic pitch for any self hosting stuff beyond reclaiming privacy.
This line really stood out to me:
> Ah technology. Just when you get cynical, something like Midjourney turns us all into children again.
As a growing adult working in tech, I feel like I’m often chasing that childhood feelings from holding and playing with technology. I think that’s why certain technology (often more hype than reality) catch our attention and drive discourse: they’re the ones that leave us like children playing and exploring something cool.
I guess it depends on your ISP. I'm stuck with comcast and my IP reveals relatively little about me. I think using social networks to host your words and media gives up much more privacy than an IP does.
That first link shows fake results. 3 of the ~20 results for my IP are real and something I've torrented. The vast majority are mistakes. I assume this holds true for the entire database.
I know I'm the only person with my IP. It changed to this one about 3 months ago. I am the only one living here, I don't use wifi (all ethernet), and my network is secured by an out of network pfsense transparent firewall to monitor the LAN<->WAN(modem) link.
The second link also shows a selection of cities within a 100 mile radius but never mine.
> That first link shows fake results. 3 of the ~20 results for my IP are real and something I've torrented. The vast majority are mistakes. I assume this holds true for the entire database.
Yeah same for me, 3 out of 19. Strange how it would get false results like that, I wonder how they end up there...
> I'm stuck with comcast and my IP reveals relatively little about me.
To the right set of people, your IP (plus a timestamp) reveals precisely where you sleep unguarded each night. It's linked in a database (accessible to government and law enforcement) with the service address.
The consequences of this are heavily dependent upon what sort of material you post on your blog. Those exposing local police or public official corruption might want to go with datacenter-based hosting.
> To the right set of people, your IP (plus a timestamp) reveals precisely where you sleep unguarded each night.
The right set of people already knows my home address (e.g. any government agency). For the complement of that set I think it will be difficult for them to figure it out based my IP address.
I assume that iplocation.io works with usable resolution only in a few countries, if in any.
If I open that page, I see 4 sources.
3 of the 4 sources provide the correct European country where I am located.
2 of the 4 sources show correctly the European city with millions of inhabitants where I am located.
Only 1 source shows beyond the correct city a postal code, but that is not mine, it is a postal code for some building of my ISP, very far from me, in a completely different part of the city.
So not even the country is provided with 100% certainty, much less the location within the city, which is provided correctly by no source.
And I have owned that IP for 20 years, it is not a dynamically allocated IP.
Trivially, yes, but nothing stops you from using a proxy/tunnel/VPN (I'm not sure what is the correct word? They are marketed as VPNs anyway) either for your actual browsing, or just exposing your services through the proxy.
(The author even briefly mentions that in the post on step 3 as a solution to being able to host things at all, but it can also be used just for straight up privacy)
You could argue that's not "hosting at home", as you depend on another service to provide you with a connection, but I argue you'd still keep all the ownership benefits, as most tunnel services have similar TOSs to ISPs, and if it becomes a problem, you can easily switch providers.
geoip can more often than not pinpoint Germany's third largest city and you're being pinned down in one of a handful of small towns in the vicinity, but I guess that's Deutsche Telekom's mapping of IPs to regions? Also most people historically had dynamic IPs, so another useless fact unless you work at the ISP or for the government.
IKWYD is impressive. Not the results. I'm behind CGNAT and it's claiming my IP is static when it's dynamic so I know none of these files, but the fact that it was able to get my local IP at all when I'm behind both a corporate VPN and being routed through a CASB (with SSL interception enabled and working) is impressive. I wonder how it's done that. Maybe something DNS-based?
First time I've seen my local IP in one of these, genuinely impressed.
iknowwhat... for the 1st time got correctly one of the torrents I'm downloading right now but misses the others, and only one of their ip locators finds the right city although it royally misses the postal code (all others place me either some 65Km or about 700Km away from my actual location). If someone sent a non nuclear missile using that data I would almost certainly only hear a distant bang.
I have my dev domain on Cloudfront with my origin server being my very own laptop. I have Certbot working great and the only permissible traffic to my home router is from the CDN.
CDNs still have advantages when sending everything through uncached in how it cuts down on the handshaking needed to deliver static content.
This arrangement enables me to develop on a range of devices without having to do anything complicated with DHCP so my phone can see a dev domain on my laptop. It just works.
Having got this far and it working so well, I now wonder if I even need a properly hosted website if I can just patch through to an old PC under the stairs for that to manage the content the CDN can't just render. It would be a lot cheaper that way. CDNs are brilliant even if people in marketing tout their benefits without knowing how to set one up.
Not really, if I have a "source of truth" in my house, it's very easy to change my distribution partner on a whim. I host predominantly static websites, so using Cloudflare means I take nearly all the load off my own internet connection, let Cloudflare bear the (trivial) cost of distributing my content, and if I need to switch to another CDN down the road, I can with ease.
> Ghost is hot shit, but Wordpress is also available. Ghost is brilliant for home hosting - many of its assets are hosted from free CDNs, leaving your home-server free to simply deliver text to the user
Which I find to be an entirely different kind of "farce" because it's then 100% dependent on a CDN / third party hosting. I very much prefer to have 100% self-contained self-hosting and put a front rev proxy / LB / mirroring CDN that can be switched from or entirely dropped by updating a DNS record.
What’s great is that it’s not dependent. If the CDN is down - ghost degrades extremely well. It’s not pretty but it’s still readable. Excellent compromise for folks with weak internet connections.
We’re pragmatic and not idealistic - otherwise none of this would exist
Since this whole blog is basically an ad for Kubesail and its self-hosting products, I do have to wonder if this was being hosted on one of their Pi products at a home on some cable internet connection, or if they realized, like everyone else that's attempted this ever, that "host it yourself" is great when you see maybe a handful of visits a day and wrecks the connection for you and you family for days when something running at home suddenly attracts any amount of traffic.
It seems pibox.org is a part of kubesail.com. Just a note: the whole world hasn't moved to Chrome yet, nor to new enough browsers that .webp can be assumed to work everywhere. You might want to fix that.
It's nice to see that the story linked here has nice images that aren't .webp.
The only still-supported mainstream browser without WebP support is Safari on macOS 10.15 (which probably goes EOL in three months’ time). Safari on macOS 11 or later or iOS have supported it since mid-2020, Chrome since 2014, Edge since late 2018, Firefox since early 2019.
I think I’ll be fine with WebP-only in all but specialist applications by the end of this year.
There are still many hundreds of millions of people out there who can't afford newer / higher end machines. The ability to run modern browsers shouldn't be taken as a given.
I personally think the RasPi is kinda a trash selfhosting platform. It's popular because it's cheap to start with, but I think most people are better off with something more like an Intel NUC (or one of the many off-brand clones of it). Of course, if you're getting something bespoke like the Pi-Box, one would hope they are managing most of the Pi's rougher bits for you so you don't have to worry about it.
At EUR 320, you can buy a NUC-like computer with an i3 or even an i5 CPU. For much less, even under $200, you can buy a computer with Jasper Lake, which is far more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
For the cheapest possible server bought as new, a better choice would be one of the ODROID models, while the best performance per $ would be provided by an old NUC-like computer, either repurposed or bought 2nd hand.
For a few hundred dollars you can get a second hand thinkpad, which will not only be better for the planet (reuse instead of buy new) but will also have integrated keyboard, mouse and screen for offline debugging and integrated battery for a cheap UPS.
The only price point that makes sense for these self hosting boxes is around 50$. More than that and the hardware already exists and is more than capable.
I recently got a couple Datto Altos for like $40 US a piece. They're basically whitelabeled Zotac NUCs, and they can run circles around anything Pi based.
Sorry but the last rainbow painting is not very easy, weird, even scary. I don’t have empathy since it was made with a bot. I feel stir, turnmoil, mixed feeling of good but more weird.
Have you looked on freedns.afraid.org? Lots of shared domains you can make a subdomain on for free. I even gave back by hosting DNS for two of my own domains so others can do the same.
I have a slightly related question. I host my blog on a cheap VPS, it's mostly text-based with few photos. Every page weighs less than a couple of kilobytes. Are there any benefits to using Brotli or gzip compression when serving the files?
What's faster: downloading an uncompressed 5KB file or downloading a compressed 3KB file and decompressing it?
"We will help you shoot yourself in the foot for a modest fee, while peddling unnecessary hardware and complicated software." Brilliant business model.
What the tech world really needs is a better shared hosting software/standards. CPanel is far too manual. Kubenetes is far too complicated and was intended to solve an entirely different set of issues.
I think the bigger issue is that Yunohost isn't containerizing anything, so a single app compromise can cost you the entire server. It's one of the only self-hosting platforms which doesn't really do anything from a security standpoint to protect you.
Most residential ISPs in the US explicitly prohibit "servers", which is not just listening ports, but also services running over VPNs or tunnels. If you upload too much data, even on unlimited plans, you risk disconnection.
It's an entirely corrupt racket, but they're the only game in town, so you'd best not jeopardize your only option for high speed internet.
Additionally, your home connection IP is PII that points uniquely and unambiguously at the place that you and your children sleep unguarded at night. Don't draw attention to it.
Has this been your experience? Even the worst ISPs I've had never cared about the volume of upload. I also self hosted a blog for a couple of years and never received any warnings. Obviously there could be a problem beyond a certain large scale, but it's wildly unlikely an ISP is going to notice or care about someone's little blog.
My old ISP explicitly prohibited using well-known ports which was annoying because switching ports at the CDN layer isn't free or cheap. My new ISP does prohibit operating as a server for more than personal use at home, or something to that effect. I predominantly use my Sandstorm server for personal access and content, and since Cloudflare is CDNing the crud out of any public content I host, it should be negligible or unnoticeable, unless I host content that gets me in legal trouble enough for Cloudflare to out the real source.
Technically, it’s true. AT&T supposedly blocks port 80 although I don’t think that’s the case for fiber but I would imagine if you’re doing more than just a personal blog site and using way more than a residential customer would use, you’ll attract some attention.
I was up late last night playing with midjourney's generative art system as well (for the first time), so to see art generated with midjourney featured in a blog post today feels like interesting timing!
what really strikes me, is that this blogger has opted to use his generative prompt as a caption. It's tempting to borrow the prompt and keep tweaking the image to my liking.
I can't quite articulate it, but given the communal environment midjourney is typically used in, with everyone shoulder to shoulder in a chat room, glancing over other's iterations. Everyone working in the open... I am left with the distinct impression I could well have bumped into the blog author at the studio last night (whether that's literally true or not).
I guess what I'm saying is it's surprising that this AI generative art tool has a sense of community. Which I find myself rather inexplicably feeling I belong to.