As soon as GPT-4o audio input is available through the APIs, we'll add 4o support to Pipecat. For bidirectional real-time audio, I think they'll need to make new WebSocket or WebRTC endpoints available.
Just letting you know it's available right now, just specify `gpt-4o` -- for text streaming anyway. I'd hazard a guess that the audio endpoints are open now, just not documented (like most of the last launches)...
Building pipelines for bridging LLMs and TTS and STT models with lower latency is fine and all, but when you compare to a natively multimodal model like GPT-4o it seems strictly inferior. The future is clearly voice-native models that are able to understand nuances in voice and speech patterns, and it's not exactly a distant future.
Quick scan of your resume as someone who interviews 20-40 people/year (although not so much lately) ... I couldn't figure what you're actually great at. Strengths, passion and project type gravitation?
FYI, your resume is shallow but still better than a lot I see each year. For someone like me to decide who to interview and spend that 1 hour on, comes down to info presented on resume intended towards the people reading the resume and fit feel to the job description.
Tips:
- Post resume in "doc" format and not "pdf" this is because most recruiters and HR feed resumes to parsing engines that match content of resume to job description for keyword matching.
- Recruiters have a DB of thousands and thousands of resumes, for each job posting, they can only refer top 3. They only get paid if the candidate is hired and bonus if they stay more than a year! So know who your target audience is.
- Interviewers hate doing interviews too! Resume is easiest way to get a feel and reject allocating the interview slot time.
I would advise against using Word doc format instead of PDF. I feel quite strongly about this.
1. PDF will render more consistently across platforms.
2. PDF can be opened in a web browser. Lots of orgs these days use cloud tools, you can't count on MS Office being universal any more. Also on a phone without additional apps, which is surprisingly common too.
3. Default PDF exports from most tools will include fonts, default Word exports don't. This makes opening Word docs annoying on machines with different fonts (or restricts you to "safe" fonts, which is probably a good thing, but this post is about formats not CV design)
4. Opening PDFs, there's less "junk". Opening Word docs in Word, you see all the squiggles under technical terms and non-Western names, draggable icons on tables, tooltips, etc. When I open someone's CV and Word throws up a bunch of popups about the document containing macros, "objects", fonts I don't have, it puts me in a bad mood for the next few minutes.
5. PDF can certainly be read by CV parsing engines. No question.
6. Having been on the receiving end, in my experience PDF is simply more common. Make the reader's job easier.
And you shouldn't use "doc" anyway, modern versions of Word use docx.
I hate word docs, and used to insist my CV as PDF only. I have turned up to interviews only to see the other side having a completely mangled CV in front of them...
But intermediate recruiters love them as they need to add their header to it. They can export and import etc a PDF but it is much more effort so in a famine market like now a PDF is likely to be discarded for the 50 word doc CVs they also received for the same role...
Github open source projects are not at all an indicator of "popularity". There are vast amount RN apps on the appstores and closed source.
As someone who has tried most of the options for streaming realtime mobile app, I landed on RN/EXPO for the sole reason of community size and ease of use. Basically everything is possible!
Typical recommendation has been to build MVPs in RN and then switch to native after your raise funds, but strongly advise against it unless the nature of your app demands native implementation. You can stick with RN all the way to FB/Instagram scale!
Part of it has to do with licensing costs but also "brand-able" ownership.
Say if you use Arial or Helvetica for your logo, then it's a generic typeface easily reproduced by whoever else that has them installed on their computer. So often, many brands for their logo take a generic font and customize it to make it their own. However, when you customize a font for a logo the font file itself is not customized, just the vector version of it for the character of the brand name. So if you want to extend the usage of the font style to say headline text or advertising text, then you need a whole custom built font. Custom fonts cost money, but picking a pre-existing "designed" typeface from other type foundries cost a lot more than getting a custom font. So two birds with one stone, you get a unique font for your brand and don't pay additional licensing since you own it.
The major difference between the 2 is how they're being adopted by customers and the tangible value they return.
AI/ML barrier to entry is far simpler and vastly user friendly compared to crypto. Instant value return or gratification from ML products (GTPs and rest) is far more mainstream friendly.
Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products. I understand content creators and those who, unwillingly, contributed knowledge to learning systems did get circumvented but i'm talking about users/customers. Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions.
GPTs have had immediate tangible benefits without needing to spend an hour preaching or explaining things.
Crypto's sole usefulness remains in providing money transfers/liquidity in parts of the world where the local systems are failing or off-limits to the users.
Crypto's main value to a LOT of people is purely speculation that you could be rich by buying it cheap and then watching the value explode. No one expected DogeCoin to provide any utility at all, but tons of people bought it.
I don't judge anyone in the crypto space for wanting to gamble. I judge them for lying to other people about their crypto being anything but gambling, which is what it is.
I don't think we'll ever even know how many NFT projects there were out there, all taking up space on the various chains, all shilling garbage artwork, all promising all manner of shit from video games to magazines to comics to television series, many of which raised huge sums of money, virtually all of which is now gone. And it's easy to point and laugh at the people who thought these things were anything but scams, but also, in a better world, we wouldn't let tons of people be scammed like this. Being vulnerable to certain kinds of hype shouldn't give other people permission to rob you blind.
> even the stock market is viewed by a lots of people as something of a gamble
the majority of people don't have formal training in probability and statistics, not to mention limit theorems and finance, so who cares how they view the stock market? I mean, I care, in the sense of educating people but most people don't really want to put the time in.
stocks and gambling both have risk, but only stocks reward many/most types of risk; gambling does not. The expected value of stocks is positive; gambling is not.
What people are trying to say about stocks is that they are stochastic, and so is gambling.
on the larger topic, Crypto also does not reward risk or offer a positive expected value. It's stochastic nature is driven by the changing opinions people have about it, or secondary effects from how much other stochastic markets might rely on it. Mining bitcoins is stochastic from the point of view of a miner, but not really from the point of view of the market or at any scale, but without a productive use case providing a reward, no postive expected value and the reward for risk ("you got a coin") is not above the cost of mining, at least not for long.
> Personally I don't partake - but they get a value in it, I guess. Who am I to judge?
The thing about gambling is it's a zero sum game. It doesn't enable any "real" productivity, it's just passing money around (with skimming off the top).
ML/AI isn't necessarily like that, it can be actually useful. Nevermind chatbots, we've already see how "AI" is useful in products for the last decade (e.g. google search results and extracting structured data out of emails, just to name a couple).
The only similarity is the hype/confusion cycle. Lots of crypto people got rich because they were in the right place at the right time, and they want to be there with the chatbot wave next.
The fact that AI/ML can be judged on real utility will limit some of this, and I think these crypto people will be in for a rude awakening if they think they can replicate their success here. With crypto the "game" of gambling / speculating meant that there was a lot of demand for ongoing endeavors, but once people realize that low effort ChatGPT reskins don't deliver anything tangible it'll be pretty obvious the emperor has no clothes.
You can't buy/trade ChatGPT prompts, after all - unless, perhaps, you were to create prompt NFTs?
Movie tickets are zero-sum and people get value out of them.
AI is way too overhyped and also completely not understood. I think most people here immediately think of some kind of genetic algorithm when they hear AI but even a simple thermostat could be marketed as AI even if all it does is turn on the furnace when some thermometer provides a low signal. The only thing reading AI on a product tells you is that there is software.
I'm unconvinced GPT will remain as a mass market tool. Google Docs got super popular because people don't want to fork out like $50 for microsoft word; they're not going to fork over $15/month to do web searches.
Are addicts lesser humans? Do they lack free will? Am I entitled to decide for them and impose my will on their lives?
And who said I am not addicted? I don't do hard drugs but I am certainly addicted to coffee, sugar and maybe other habits I (moderately) indulge in but I would be very pissed off if someone else would try to take away from me.
Crypto haters will do anything to convince you that crypto bad, but other bad things are only bad, dometimes.
There is no logic other than haves and have nots.
Isn't that pretty much settled already? It seems to me our society is becoming more and more permissive while giving up the previous "war on drugs" failed approach which did an incredible amount of damage.
It also created and continues to create a lot of cheap labor, which the United States is in short supply of and likely will be for the foreseeable future.
Depends on the drugs. If you think anyone who is reasonable in their head takes fentanyl (which is 50 times stronger than heroin and can be incredibly easily overdosed on because they are packaged in 24 hour slow release plasters and additionally is either stolen from the healthcare system, sometimes actually ripped off from elderly patients, or bought from mexican drug cartels) then you'd be wrong.
Fentanyl is a last resort painkiller that is extremely heavily regulated in other countries and prescribed for things like tumor pain and heavy burns. It's not a regular painkiller, it's a narcotic. If you dose it high enough it can be used during anesthesia.
That's wrong - crypto's main value is buying and selling illegal goods and services on the internet.
Its secondary value is buying and selling legal goods and services on the internet without having to deal with credit card companies, but only for techbros.
But that's true about fiat money, too. Far more fiat money gets traded on exchanges in a single day, than circulates the rest of the whole world's economy in a year. But I think you'd agree fiat money derives its value from the way you can go down to the corner store and buy stuff, not from the fact it's traded on exchanges, right?
My argument at this point was only that speculation probably triumphs illicit usage. Do you mean that speculation is built on top of illicit use for crypto? It maybe doesn't even matter what the fundamental beliefs are because it has a price, today, now.
Fiat money derives its value from what you say, indeed. It is traded on exchanges because of that. But fungibility is only one of several factors. Money should also serve as store of value, but how long is highly debatable and the point.
You are forgetting ransom payments for hijacking corporate computer systems. Or money laundering. I am sure there are more. Not being a criminal I don't know what they are.
"Lihe Pharmaceutical Technology Company, based in Wuhan, Hebei Province, China, was charged with fentanyl trafficking conspiracy and international money laundering, along with Chinese nationals Mingming Wang, 34, who is the alleged holder for three bitcoin accounts shared by sales agents for Lihe Pharmaceutical, and Xinqiang Lu, 40, the alleged recipient of funds via Western Union on the company’s behalf. " [1]
It's wicked cool for the ~15 or so tech bros in SV doing that.
But outside of a couple of meme articles about how "someone bought a house with BTC!" the only use case I can find for crypto is money laundering or ransomeware.
+1. I have security cameras at home, and my "DVR" is a collection of shell scripts plus a Python script that uses YOLO to find the interesting parts of the footage. The thing works, helps a lot to review daily footage, was damn easy to put to work, and didn't cost me a cent (not even hardware; I run it in a Mini-PC w/o GPU). I knew nothing about ML before writing this script. So yeah, the value is there.
Funny, I built a security camera setup with PoE CCTV cameras, GStreamer and the NVIDIA CUDA element using a Xavier platform. I tried SSDMobileNet and YOLO and found them to be absolutely horrible.
The camera that was pointing down at an angle was the worst. Both models would only identify a dog and a person correctly about 15% of the time (missing me or my partner as I walked by and waved), with an actual object detection about 80% of the time even when there was nothing in its ground truths in-frame!! (usually as desks, beds or chairs, i don't recall exactly but it was furniture - and it was pointed at my empty back lot). It had just as many shadow/sunspot/tree failures as Motion. The other camera at eye level did a great job with cars, but not so much with people's side profiles, only head-on.
It was laughably bad. And I have no intention of training my own models on my datasets because I don't have time to label. I did this in 2018-2019 so I don't know what the state of the art object detection models are like today, maybe they got their shit together for non-canonical angles.
I eventually switched back to full-time recording on a 2 TB HDD and if I need to scan back i can jog the livestream because it saves weeks of data.
I had more luck with YOLOv8. But I still keep the motion-detected archive (generated by DVR-Scan) for some months, and the raw footage for a couple weeks as well.
You are not seeing maybe the numerous consultants and self proclaimed AI experts charging for very dubious solutions. Money is definitely being “stolen”, it’s just a more sophisticated type of stealing. I have yet to see an AI solution that delivers x times the value of simpler rule based models.
You don't see value in retrieval augmented generation? It seems like one of the major use cases in knowledge management in larger organizations that is hard to replicate without an LLM.
They also seem to work very well for summarizing large amounts of data, for automating the generation of basic legal texts, for extracting key data points from paperwork (invoices, mortgage applications, bank statements, etc).
It's useful to separate whether there is a lot of dubious hype (true of any new foundational technology) from whether useful things are being done. Both can be true at the same time. Lots of fraud and stupidity, but also lots of valuable work happening. With crypto, there was none of the latter, other than criminal applications.
The internet also attracted lots of hype and poor ROI consulting projects...but here we are.
As an interface layer GPT is amazing. In some industries things still require humans to pick up a phone or send a text to make things happen. I’ve seen very promising results with pure LLM solutions that replace web forms people often never really understand. The ability to provide deep reporting insights from a question is huge.
I don’t think AI as a general computing platform or as a replacement for coders is particularly close but there are lots of game changing incremental things LLMs do extremely well today. Something I could never find with crypto.
I pay 15 minutes of me take home pay every month for a chat window which I can ask any basic programming question and get a correct answer, 80% of the time, in about 20 seconds. This thing has paid for itself after it has let me avoid looking up about 4 easy Stack Overflow questions, or 1 medium complexity one.
Is this a scam if they still provide value? I get that most apps are a thin wrapper around GPT, but that doesn't mean they're stealing money, just offering a non differentiated product.
- and 10 other things people who have no understanding of business like to say these days.
OpenAI cannot make every product and market them to every segment. If you wrap their API and provide a novel UX with precise positioning, there's value there.
OpenAI can copy the underlying collection of features tomorrow morning, but if the positioning is precise enough, you will easily outcompete them.
For an example developers can understand, see managed SaaS: which is a collection of companies raking in billions in revenue from simply wrapping AWS/GCP/Azure in ways that the underlying platforms even end up copying anyways but succeeding because their developer experience is better, or their feature set is better focused, or they're just plain nicer to work with.
> OpenAI cannot make every product and market them to every segment.
Even if OpenAI doesn't, if its a thin wrapper with no deep proprietary edge, someone else can; your offering is ripe for commodification, even if that doesn't come from OpenAI themselves.
That's why "technical novelty" ranks ridiculously low on scale of things that make most successful software businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is more of an albatross on most software businesses than a saving grace.
Building traction in software is more about the 100s of other concerns that apply to every business: brand recognition, communicating your value proposition effectively, being able to sell to the target customer effectively, having the correct UX, the right proofs, the list goes on.
Copying that is just as hard as ever, if not harder.
> That's why "technical novelty" ranks ridiculously low on scale of things that make most successful software businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is more of an albatross on most software businesses than a saving grace.
Not convinced. Why did Google beat Yahoo? Why is Facebook huge while Friendster and Myspace are jokes? At some point - perhaps further down the line than most of us are used to thinking of - technical ability matters.
If you think that the landscape you build a company in hasn't changed in the 2 decades since the founding of Facebook, there's not much to tell you.
And even Facebook definitely didn't win because if some technical choice... no one cared what tech stack powered a social media site, and if anything Facebook was less advanced than MySpace as far as users were concerned.
—
If you're talking about how it matters further down the line, then you're walking away from the wrapper thesis too: the whole line being parroted is that it's just an API wrapper ripe for the copying. Good luck getting to the "further down the line" reliably as a company, let alone down the line and then killing your competitor with a game plan that mostly consists of copying them.
Are people so used to monopolies in the modern market that the idea of launching a business where there exists a possibility of competition is seen as a sign of a scam?
A lot of these new AI startups just give a plain text prompt to the GPT API with a smattering of web glue. This creates a product that looks impressive and might get funded, but has close to zero value add.
There’s a difference between having competition and having a business that can be trivially cloned. The challenge for a lot of AI startups is to show that they are adding something and are not just a dumb wrapper.
On the contrary, a typical startup is more of a scam on the users. The investors go in knowingly and willingly - this is literally how they make money. It's the users that get shorted once the startup suddenly gets acquired or otherwise "exists" - and if they do it through an IPO, then it's additionally the public that gets scammed.
there doesn't have to be moat to provide some value to some people. These are mostly indie hackers trying to build a nice UI/UX on ai workflows to actually make them usable by general population. Even with retrieval integration of OpenAI, some people will prefer askpdf or likes, or even won't know about openai integration in the first place to consider switching. Or maybe you can build a better UX than openAI since maybe they are too bloated to know what the user actually wants?
This point of view is too simplistic, not everything needs to be a billion dollar idea or differentiated. You can make an absolute good living with no moat and good product senses. Even if you get outgunned, you move on to the next opportunity.
> Another view is the "loss" factor. Nobody, thus far, has has had their funds stolen or lost using ML products.
That is true however I'd say that for example the venezuelian and turkish people who managed to scoop Bitcoin (or Ethereum) didn't do too badly:
Inflation in Venezuela 2022 and estimate for 2023: 210% and 51%
Inflation in Turkey 2022 and estimate for 2023: 70% and 50%
These aren't the only countries.
I personally know a doctor from Iran who tried semi-recently to convert his savings into Bitcoin (and failed: bank didn't let him). And he basically lost all his savings (inflation and bank defaults: double whammy).
From the comfort of countries using strong currencies it's easy to dismiss Bitcoin but there are many countries where shit did hit the fan really hard.
Not it's not a panacea: for example many african countries are experiencing ultra high inflation but cannot use Bitcoin because fees are way too high for these people ($6 USD to move Bitcoin today: I just checked).
> Compare that to the negative stigma of crypto frauds and stereotypical association to illegal transactions.
Seen all the people and exchanges owners busted and going to jail and seen moves like the EU soon de-anonymizing every single wallet out there (as soon as a transaction is made), and seen the public ledger, I don't even know if that bad bad reputation is going to stay for long.
This is an incredibly weak argument for cryptocurrencies.
I have coworkers with family in Turkey (and Lebanon, Iran, Argentina...): they want USD. They don't care about Bitcoin, they want stablecoins. Most stablecoins are inherently dangerous, because you need to trust sketchy (when not outright criminal) and centralized entities to issue quasi-dollars that can get shut down by the US DoJ at any time. If they don't collapse on their own before that.
Venezuela is an exception because a few people manage to mine Bitcoin illegaly, given that electricity is virtually free. Other than that it seems the most practical currencies in Venezuela right now are contraband gasoline sold in Colombia, drugs, kidnapping, prostitution, ...
IMHO they're symbiotic. Generative AI destroys trust; crypto lets you function in a trust-less world.
The killer app for generative AI is going to be propaganda. This hasn't entered the discourse yet because nobody wants to advertise that they're running a propaganda mill. I suspect they already exist though - there've been a number of news articles I've read recently where I'm like "I'm pretty sure somebody fed a tweet or police blotter into GPT-4 instead of writing this."
This works now because people are accustomed to trusting what they read. Once the channel has been flooded and it becomes cheap to make it look like your views are echoed by 1000 mainstream news media outlets and millions of people online, people will just stop believing everything they read. Similarly once any idiot can have ChatGPT write a college-level term paper, the skill of writing at the college level won't be worth anything. When you can have ChatGPT write a recommendation letter with a 15-second prompt, it ceases to be a useful signal for how much you believe in the person you're recommending. When you have GMail expand your one-sentence e-mail into 4 paragraphs with generative AI and then the recipient summarizes the 4 paragraph e-mail back into one-sentence, maybe you should've just written the one sentence to begin with.
The value in blockchain technologies is in unforgeability, scarcity, and forced consensus. In a world where forgery is trivially easy, content is trivially abundant, and nobody believes anybody else, a technology that ensures that mutually-distrusting computer systems all represent the same data gets quite valuable.
> The value in blockchain technologies is in unforgeability, scarcity, and forced consensus. In a world where forgery is trivially easy, content is trivially abundant, and nobody believes anybody else, a technology that ensures that mutually-distrusting computer systems all represent the same data gets quite valuable.
And how does blockchain make this work? By making authenticity too expensive for spammers, you've made it too expensive for 90+% of the population. The spammers/propagandists have orders of magnitudes more money than me.
By going back to how an economy is supposed to work: you exchange money of known supply for items of value, and making the hard tradeoffs about which items of value are worth spending money on.
I suspect that the actual cryptocurrency that wins out here hasn't been invented yet, or it'll be a layer on top of Ethereum. It needs to actually function like a currency, and it needs to give you mechanisms to trade items of value in the real world, goods and services, for future goods and services. None of this "it's just a wildly variable front over USD that you can profit off of swing trades."
Eh, when that one sentence is "fuck you, pay me", I think the paragraphs are a necessity of modern polite society. Maybe some people would be encouraged by the 4 word sentence rather than the 4 paragraph version, but I remain unconvinced.
Crypto is a more direct way of saying "fuck you, pay me". This is why it's currently less popular (although this will probably turn around when it becomes "fuck yeah, pay me!"), but the no-bullshit transaction going on is that something of value which can't be spoofed is changing hands. The benefit of that is that you're going to think very hard about what you exchange for that. (Well, eventually, once all the idiots have offered up their money for scams.)
ChatGPT has something like 40x the weekly users as Bitcoin. There are other AIs and other Bitcoin, but I'm not sure e.g. Bitcoin (or other crypto used by folks) has the penetration to really be average to use. Crypto has a mostly niche use case at this point, exchanging money when it would be illegal, across borders, or in an area with a failing local currency.
I'm not taking sides, but are we going to ignore the fact that crypto users are probably more valuable in the sense that they are paying users in a way?
A chatGPT user could just be someone who popped onto the website and submitted the chat form.
Not to be too cheeky here but paying with what? Cryptocurrencies are mostly hot potatoes everyone is throwing back and forth and occasionally dropping to catastrophic effect, and don't seem to be tied to actual value add.
Meanwhile millions of people pay for tools that are now integrating AI to enhance their value add.
Free ChatGPT is just a loss leader for API and paid acct and a way to better train the model.
What you describe is price, not value. Things may be priced high but have little value, such as in cases of asset speculation. Things can be priced low but have great value, such as the value of human relationships, knowledge, etc.
I think being able to spot where these diverge is really important to understanding the world and where we should spend our limited time on it.
True but in comparison to every other value crypto is the only one which doesn't have any alternative use.
Gold, shares etc.
I believe the criticism is correct as the current driver of crypto is either a 'i put that much money in I'm not selling until it increases again' or gambled los.
After all the miners want to get paid.
But hey binance and others struggle let's see if there is a collapse soon
> I what way does an average consumer/user get value from crypto?
Look at venezuela and turkey inflation rate these last two years (and the estimates for the coming years). Look at the SNAFU that happened in Iran and banks defaulting and now inflation kicking in.
It may be an ultra risky bet (and there are serious opsec risks too) but when your savings are going lose 90% of their value in two years anyway, why not take it?
Bitcoin was, after all, created as a gigantic middle finger in response to infinite money printing.
The world is big and there are average consumers in countries other than the US or the EU.
Let's say I want to send money from New York to Rome. How does crypto enable me sending USD and the receiver getting EUR without any intermediaries?
You need exchanges to do anything useful in crypto. And as we've seen most recently in the FTX case, all the exchanges are wretched hives of scum and villainy.
It's the centralized exchanges, which are more akin to traditional financial institutions whose records are not on a publicly visible blockchain but rather private databases or... apparently spreadsheets... which fall victim to the same issues we have seen in the past in the traditional financial world.
So you need at least 2 middlemen. One exchange where you buy crypto and another exchange where your friend sells that crypto.
Or you could simply use a traditional wire transfer and currency would be converted automatically. USA and Italy exchange millions of dollars every day - it's nothing special.
To actually get the money to the other person via wire transfer is actually quite a process (having done many myself).
- You will need to get permission from your bank to send international wire transfers (sign forms/agreements).
- takes a long time (in the order of days)
- expensive (~$50-$75 for outgoing international wire, and $25-$50 to receive it).
The forms, delays, and fees are because what those financial institutions are doing is providing checks and balances, and de-risking, to the extent they can, performing that transfer.
The forms are for KYC activity, and agreements on what the limitations of liability are. The delays are to validate that the transfers are handled and secured, and ideally can't be charged back. The fees are to cover the costs of the people who do the work for that.
It's not perfect, but it's quite a bit better than the checks and balances that exist for folks who get hit by a scam and are convinced to go to a crypto kiosk and pay a scammer because they have been frightened by a threat to a loved one, or are taken in by a scammer about services being cut off, or desperately paying off a ransomware demand in the hopes that your business or personal records won't be leaked or published.
I think this really depends. I send wire transfers pretty often. For me it's $20 to send and $0 to receive. It takes anywhere from 2 days to a week normally. I don't need permission to send them (though I do need to call the bank to verify the information and purpose), and I also need to provide the purpose of the funds to the receiving bank (and need to show I own the sending account, if I'm the sender and receiver).
Crypto is very likely neither cheaper nor faster, since you can't spend the crypto directly, and need to FX it through an exchange on the sending side and the receiving side, each of which will take a cut (often percentages of the total). You also need to fund the account sending, and you need to transfer from the exchange receiving to a bank account. Both of those transfers could also cost money. You're also doing FX twice (USD -> crypto, crypto -> Yen), rather than once (USD -> Yen).
If you fuck up an international wire transfer, it may take a month or two for the funds to make it back, and you may need to have numerous conversations with both banks (I've been through this pain more than once and it sucks). If you fuck up a crypto transfer you lose your money with no recourse.
All-in-all the wire transfer is the better (and probably cheaper/faster) experience.
Where are you located? I send a fair amount of SWIFT wires, and they cost at most $25 and clear the next day.
Within the eurozone (the 20 countries using the euro), there’s SEPA instant credit which clears in less than ten seconds, is available 24/7, and costs practically nothing (a few cents). It’s a fine example of how thoughtful regulation can enable a system that is better than any crypto solution.
I guess that depends on source and destination countries, because I am able to wire money between different EU countries without any special paperwork. It is no different to domestic transfers or transfers to the same bank. Why would I want to use crypto for that purpose? It seems more inconvenient and risky.
I remember that in the beginning people were dreaming about self-contained crypto economy where exchanges would not be needed - that didn't really work out.
If you've ever done an international wire, you know there's the form question "What intermediate bank to use". So at least the same if not less middlemen apply.
The intermediate is either a trust system in the real world, escrow service at dark net drug pages or the miner.or the traider who traides your fiat to crypto.
I'm a crypto sceptic but I wasn't always like that. There was a time many years ago when Ethereum was brand new and I was an eager early adopter. I tried creating wallets, tried running a node to see what it does, put in some money through an exchange, and then... Nothing. There was nothing to do after jumping through all those hoops. In fact, turns out the only thing to do with the crypto wallet was to wait for its value to maybe increase over time. (Hence the "number go up" meme.) And for that to be realized, I would need to sell the coins to a new sucker to get real money out again — suspiciously pyramid-like.
And it's still like that today. There's no reason for me to ever open those old wallets again (and surely I don't even have the passwords anymore because self-custody is such a terrible idea UX-wise). And there's no reason to try any of the new stuff because it still obviously does nothing I'd need.
The early Internet wasn't like that. There was plenty to see and try, and interesting people to interact with. Once you tried it, you probably wanted to go back.
Today's early AI is like the early Internet in all the ways that crypto isn't and never will be. There's plenty you can do with ChatGPT and other models, right off the bat. You can install interesting stuff locally or run it on somebody else's server. You don't need to run the crypto-style terrible UX gauntlet and buy coins from a shady operator. AI is already so much easier and more useful and more powerful than crypto-web3-anything, it's competing in a completely different race.
OpenSea has lost 99% of their transaction volume in the past year, and even more of their revenue. I'd be shocked if the same happens to OpenAI. One was a fad, the other isn't.
I ran full nodes, wrote smart contracts, even had 200 GPUs mining ethereum at one point. I still have a bunch of wallets, exchange accounts, ENS names, you name it. Interesting, kind of fun, but then a big "Ok, now what?". Turns out not much other than writing some crypto thing to do another crypto thing that does another crypto thing.
Since getting generally disgusted with the sleaze I saw from the inside I haven't touched any of it in years.
How much difference has this made in my life? Zero (other than not being grossed out on a regular basis). How many times have I had to dust off a wallet or write a smart contract to do something I couldn't do better, faster, and cheaper elsewhere? Zero. How many times have I wanted to buy something and needed crypto? Zero. My experience is an anecdote for the entire space - a lot of time, money, and energy spent with no tangible value and nothing to show for it.
Ethereum is over eight years old, bitcoin nearly 15. ChatGPT has been out for less than a year and I use it on a daily basis to save time and come up with fairly novel things I'm not sure I could on my own. Of course the roots of ChatGPT go back quite far but then again so do merkle trees.
I wish I would have saved the time, money, and grey hairs on crypto for "AI" - I have way more fun with Llama, Whisper, and dozens of other models with immediate and real use cases on a daily basis.
Cryptography can be used to hide something, or prove something. The word cryptography encapsulates two different disciplines, cryptography and provegraphy. People who use the term crypto-* to refer to blockchain, do not know that blockchain has nothing to do with hiding information, but it has everything to do with proving information.
So the question becomes, what information are you interested on proving to someone on the internet? Say you want to ask an Israeli on Twitter about some bomb stuff and you want to prove you are a reporter. Say you want to prove in a comment on HN, that a repository on github is yours.
However one problem arises. The digital identity or identities, have to be stored somewhere. What happens if there is an outage? OpenAI had a multiple hour outage just today, and an ISP in Australia had a 12 hour outage yesterday. In that case, people cannot prove digitally their identity or identities (hundred of them if they like), even in real life.
The Greek government requires for the digital identity to be proven, access to internet[1]. I was just researching that right now.
Last, Estonia tries to secure the digital identities of their citizens on the blockchain[2]. Why digital identities need to be secured on a blockchain? Just a server or two, in a government building are not enough? How could a globally competitive network of miners, each one holding the digital information independent of any other, be more secure than the one or two servers solution?
The average person has no need to transact with people that card processors do not like. The most common scenario where that is the case is people "needing" to pay "Microsoft support".
Yeah. I have to say, I've never needed to give money to someone my bank doesn't want me to give money to. As someone spending money, I don't want guarantees like "this transaction cannot be revoked". I want to revoke transactions sometimes! Thus, crypto is anti-value-add for me. (Some would argue, merchants would charge lower prices if all sales were final. That's probably true! But it would depend on them never making a mistake, and everyone makes mistakes.)
Expand card processors to payment processors. There is constantly sites that get unjustly restricted or banned from payment processor like PayPal and Stripe. Even Minecraft, one of the most popular games of all time, had issues with PayPal.
That is like saying insurance is not in not something average, every day people need. If the rare event doesn't happen to you then yes it is a waste of money, but if it does you will be thankful to have it.
The same thing can be said about having bulletproof cars, wearing a helmet anytime when you are outside, carrying a lifejacket with you all the time. Those are things that cater to specific threat models. And those are not the threat models of average, every day people.
beanie babies were booming as an investment vehicle, buying one was trivial, many people received very tangible value.
It'll be interesting when there is more distinction between the two in utility. LLMs already have a fair amount of utility in their relatively early stages and I've certainly seen meaningful adoption of diffusion model generated images to replace stock photo usage.
One other way to look at this is “only people who intentionally invested in crypto lost anything, while creators who were ignorant to or against the idea of ML training set-trawling were injured through no fault of their own.”
Of course, this is not quite true because many people were harmed indirectly when criminal theft of their money was facilitated by the low barrier to entry that cryptocurrency presents to the would-be money launderer.
Also when pensions managed by Sequoia took the FTX hit. Also when the augmentation of FDIC coverage happened for SVB, taxpayers covered that. Pretty much impossible to avoid unintentionally contributing to the grifters
Another major difference between them is that their hype cycles are out of phase by 40 years. The first AI winter was in 1984 and the first crypto winter was in 2014.
For an apples:apples comparison we need to compare the AI of today with the cryptocurrencies of 2063, or the cryptocurrencies of today with the AI of 1984.
There are many things to criticize crypto for, but at least it will never go all Skynet or paperclip maximizer on us and exterminate the human race. The worst case scenario of one is not like the other.
Crypto was being adopted by consumers though, there was a boom at one point that it was incredibly common to see bitcoin ATM's or signs that stores would accept bitcoin. I even remember a bitcoin credit card or something that lets you use your bitcoin anywhere. That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being used.
The problem with AI is that it is being shoved into places without any thought of what the benefit actually is or wether or not its actually works.
As someone else said, I feel like much of what is coming out of this AI boom is basically a scam.
For example I was looking at task management app and I was intrigued by some "AI" powered ones. All it really was, was being able to make a task and it asks chatgpt to generate subtasks. The subtasks it generated were basically useless.
No "AI" to help manage my schedule or any other benefits. We are automating the easiest parts of the task with unhelpful content. This is because chatgpt is limited, it doesn't have api hooks into your application so it can't really provide any real benefit.
Some of the uses if AI are real and beneficial (like Amazon using AI to summarize reviews). But the vast majority are just shoving AI somewhere it doesn't need to be (or at least chatgpt doesn't need to be since its just a LLM at the end of the day).
This bubble is going to burst once people finally realize that ChatGPT is not an "AI" as science fiction has sold us, but it is being used as a general smart AI when its honestly dumb as nails except for certain use cases.
> Crypto was being adopted by consumers though, there was a boom at one point that it was incredibly common to see bitcoin ATM's or signs that stores would accept bitcoin. I even remember a bitcoin credit card or something that lets you use your bitcoin anywhere. That stuff wouldn't have been done if it wasn't being used.
The trail of broken crypto startups serve as counter evidence. There were plenty of merchants initially dragged in by the appeal of cutting out at least Visa/Mastercard's cut, and in many cases governments too.
And then the consumer adoption wasn't there, and the prices for merchants were also too high, so many ripped them out again.
Talking and using aren’t the same thing. Did you ever see people using one of the crypto ATMs or buying anything with a crypto credit card? Especially outside of the Bay Area? If not then it’s likely a marketing expense / stunt, just the same as the commercials starring Tom Brady or Larry David. Create the perception that crypto is mainstream, and people will want to jump onboard just because of FOMO.
I spend a lot time inside vim/neovim on daily basis. I do have vscode open as well but it's mostly for referencing or file exploration on repos I'm not familiar with.
Building a mental and muscle memory is tough but it requires grinding. You have to put in the time! It took me months!
My biggest mistake was starting and playing around with configurations and plugins for days/weeks and constantly having a broken environment!
Configuration hell is the worst path to get into neovim! Start with the starter kit but avoid going into installing 10s of plugins, custom key-mappings and themes until you have learned the fundamental of motions, navigations and editing.
No that's not true! Svelte is a standalone project. Rich Harris, the founder and face behind Svelte, is paid by Vercel to work on it full-time.
From the same link above:
>> "Joining Vercel enables Rich to work on Svelte full-time, giving the project its first dedicated contributor. The governance of Svelte does not and will not change – it's still the same independent, open-source project and community. With Vercel's backing, Svelte can get even more ambitious."
Interesting to see this article again since it was the trigger of starting a homelab for me. After realizing cloud services are putting a major dent in my pocket to get a lousy startup idea off the ground, I started to wonder if there's "The Cheapest" way? (I'm not cheap but I'm very frugal)
Nowadays internet speed is great to do self hosting. I have a business line internet at home with ~1gb up&down! Bought couple of 6-7 year old enterprise Dell servers (2x12core xeon, 128gb ram each) and no longer pay any cloud provider ... i'm also hosting 2 backend solutions for mobile apps with decent traffic for friends' startups!
The learning experience has been tremendous! It has actually gotten a lot better and easier with new solutions coming out for homelabs. Get started with Proxmox clusters and go from there...
After this talk [0] I had several most interesting conversations with
media folks about the real cost and advantages of "cloud".
One thing that came up is development. Modern devops culture is quite
a good thing, and what's lovely about "cloud" - as in the ability to
quickly buy compute and storage capability - is that ideas you would
have tinkered with in on-prem labs (or across private sites) for
months can be imagined and prototyped in hours.
I'm a big advocate of rapid prototyping as a _huge_ business lever,
because the ability to try out ideas quickly, to easily reconfigure
things, is the key for time to market. You can quickly see if
something is going to fly or not.
And that's where the advantage ends.
After that, it's all downhill. Asymmetry. Lock-in and portability.
Trust and privacy issues. Security perimeters. Unpredictable costs....
So the way forward is to render unto Caesar only the things that are
Caesar's.... in other words, take the advantages of "cloud" when it
suits you, and then get the hell out of Dodge.
What is ongoing from that conversation is media companies being
interested in strategic planning to build, and even share, their own
distributed computing resources to pull back to once a technology is
off the ground.
Someone even mentioned that it's time for a European Cloud initiative,
Yeah it's interesting devops is a lock-in on the cloud when (if you squint, a lot) it should be the opposite: there are devops tools that .... almost ... should make you more independent.
IMO it should be a sneaky powerful declaration by major corps that your app should be built to be deployed nearly at will on at least two clouds. I mean terraform is so tantalizingly close to it, until it isn't. This is like Bezos sending out the "thou shalt service everything".
AWS knows this and they are all about lock-in. They want you on the more complicated products, because those are really hard to move off of. Oh yes, don't use cassandra, use dynamo. Man you'll never move off that.
So if you let the devs have "you can develop on AWS" but then they have to deploy on Hetzner ... that will force the devs to be far more cloud-independent. I guess if I was a CIO (never let me become one) I'd try to institute that.
> I'm a big advocate of rapid prototyping as a _huge_ business lever, because the ability to try out ideas quickly, to easily reconfigure things, is the key for time to market. You can quickly see if something is going to fly or not.
And that's where the advantage ends.
Too many businesses aren’t even properly utilising that key advantage. They’re moving servers to the cloud but still using their outdated development and deployment processes, and things move just as slowly in the cloud as they used to on prem. They know what Infrastructure as Code means, but only as separate words.
They’re moving servers to the cloud but still using their outdated development and deployment processes, and things move just as slowly in the cloud as they used to on prem.
For many non-tech corps, the purpose of moving to cloud is to downsize IT admin staff. It works well.
your sysadmins are now Cloud Admins and can get an extra 50k in the market with a GCP or AWS certs. you're going to bump up their salary, right?
the useless offshore team is now a Cloud useless offshore team, and also wants their 20% bump. And bet your ass that Tata or Cognizant will get blood from a stone to make it happen, cuz as useless as they may seem you still need them.
change control meetings haven't gone anywhere, and if anything they're more important since now your entire infrastructure is a long one-liner away from being borked; cloud is an API, basically. just because you're not racking and stacking doesn't mean the demand, architecture & design, review boards, implementations, and due diligence steps go faster.
now we need an entirely new strategy to handle costs, since our architects and procurement can't track day to day cost changes easily, so when SuperDev decides he's going to #yolo 6 VMs and a few dozen containers into existence to test a few things we now have launch a technical and financial investigation into 1) how that happened, and 2) how much it cost.
still gotta use fortigates or palo altos, and internal networking hasn't changed too much overall; lean teams to begin with.
so in exchange for shoveling huge quantities of OpEx to companies that don't deserve more money, we don't really cut labor, and lose control of practically every other facet of our infra. Hope that Azure AD doesn't fail again, cuz the dashboard says 100% green but nothing is working and the execs are concerned.
Maybe the most demonstrable is egress/ingress bandwidth. But since
there's a power asymmetry when dealing with mega-corporations I had
other asymmetries in mind too.
The cloud providers are so large that they don’t really need you. It’s all about churn management at the macro level. With hardware and software, there’s always an end of quarter leverage point.
I spent most of my career in large enterprises. The leverage you have against AWS or Microsoft is 0 compared to the old days. They are probably landing more infrastructure every month than my global company had in datacenters 15 years ago.
You can just have on-premise k8s and keep most of the velocity gained from developers being able to "just run stuff" instead of anything having to go thru sysadmins.
You can just rent few servers off OVH to start and not have to worry about actual hardware, while still being few times cheaper than cloud.
Yeah you won't have access to the slew of cloud services and will have to deploy your own database but with amount of readily available code and software to do it it doesn't really slow down experimenting all that much
Yeah the delta in cost/CPU/memory/storage between self hosting on second hand stuff and paying cloud services is insane. It's a no brainer if your use case needs beefier hardware than the typical $5/month VPS host and you don't have enterprise level liability/uptime expectations.
With stuff like proxmox you get a pretty similar level of ease of use to managed VM services too.
I generally find these discussions unproductive on HN because of how binary they become, but definitely once you go off the beaten path it seems a lot cheaper (sans power though) to run your own infra. I've been thinking of doing some data ETL for something that generates 1 GB / day and has retention for 30 days and it's much cheaper to host a Postgres myself at that scale than run it in the cloud. I could store in something like S3, but then I need to deal with querying S3. I'd like to combine some of this with cloud infra but I suspect cloud bandwidth costs would kill me. Colo-ing 2-3 servers is probably the best bet here.
I was an ops engineer at Fastmail. We ran our own hardware. A mix of Debian on one stack and SmartOS (Illumos from Joyent) and there were plenty of physical problems and costs. Now putting petabytes of data with replication and syncing and all that would have been a cluster F on the cloud, we missed out on a lot of the awesome newer deployment other tooling because we had written our own. Before I left we swapped out a good chunk of these snowflake software but it was impressive actually how well it worked. Good multi data center multi master mysql support in 2008? Killer feature. Maintaining that in 2020? Horrible.
Also there were plenty of upstream routing issues where solving that became a headache. The #1 thing we wanted was uptime and the #1 outage was our upstream providers having trouble routing to other upstream providers.
The number one reason and tradeoff for cloud is uptime and availability and the cost of not having it
> The number one reason and tradeoff for cloud is uptime and availability and the cost of not having it
100%. I ran API networking teams at a Big Tech and I know the difference. My workload here is at a hobbyist+ grade, no controls, no compliance, best effort SLA. I don't want to ignore the reality that to get enterprise grade uptime and availability, it's really hard to do this on prem.
If you use it correctly, with multiple availability zones and even multi regions you can reach very high reliability. They surely don't offer five 9s for a single zone.
I am not aware of many multi regions outages.
And they are also getting better over time, spending a lot more engineering hours on reliability that most companies.
And if they fail to deliver on SLA they might give you money (depending on your contract I guess).
Do you really think on-prem has more uptime than commercial cloud? For non-tech companies, no even close. Commercial cloud is adding nines to uptime and saving money by removing in-house IT admin staff.
the biggest miscalculation is really on expected uptime. People say they need 5 nines, yet take their car in for service twice a year for a tire rotation and oil change. How much uptime is _really_ required?
I'm always curious about the power cost here. Everyone I've talked to who runs servers at home either lives in a low COL area where electricity is cheap (and electricity is dirty, but I don't really want to get into that) or just pays the power as a sort of "cost of playing around" which is completely fair (it's not like I need to use my table saw at home.) Most folks I know who run servers use a lot more power than I do at home. Of course I don't know how much of that is just that the folks that build expensive homelabs being attracted to beefy, power hog servers as opposed to an actual incentive to cut power costs.
My rack draws around 750W at mid-idle (not totally idle but not doing anything big either). I have about $0.14/kWh delivered electricity cost in southwest Ohio. This means the rack costs me approximately $77 per month or approximately $920 per year. That's not a particular small cost, but it is far less than I would pay to host the same things at a professional data center, or shivers the cloud.
If I really wanted to optimize for power efficiency, I could do much better. I've seen decent homelab setups (with NAS, router, switch, and some slow compute nodes) that run under 100W, which would cost me only $10 per month in power, and would be far more powerful than a small DigitalOcean droplet.
> I've seen decent homelab setups (with NAS, router, switch, and some slow compute nodes) that run under 100W, which would cost me only $10 per month in power, and would be far more powerful than a small DigitalOcean droplet.
I do some homelabbing at home and i do work for some "big tech". The difference, essentially, is reliability and high availability.
Most homelab posts i see are one decent (not even large) disaster away from losing everything.
I do something in that space at home, mostly around data backup and replication, but i am well aware that in case of decent disaster I'd probably be at least a couple of days offline (potentially up to one or two weeks).
Most people underestimate facet of the discussion.
Agreed. Most people seem to take a very cavalier approach to backups, for example, or using risky Ceph/ZFS setups without understanding the consequences.
In the absolute worst-case scenario for me, barring a lightning strike that fried my UPS and entire rack, I would lose a day’s worth of changes, as my backup node kicks on daily to ingest snapshots. Downtime would probably be 15 minutes or so - boot up backup, change target IP address on other nodes to access it.
I’m only running RAIDZ1, so I’d have to lose two disks in a VDEV for this to occur. I understand and accept the risks, but were I hosting anything of import, I’d probably accept the additional power draw of keeping the backup server on 24/7 and stream snapshots to it continuously.
Also, of course, I’d be streaming those snapshots off-site. Currently I do so for things like photos and documents.
If I lost 2/3 of my compute nodes, I’d be down for a bit longer, as I’d have to shift workloads to the backup server (which is a dual socket with enough RAM to handle it), and currently it doesn’t run K8s. I can shift things to Docker Compose easily enough, or I suppose I could register it as a worker node that’s just tainted most of the time.
I'm posting this just to compare power rates not to win an internet fight. My power bill is tiered, and at the lowest tier I'm paying double your rates ($0.28 / kWh.) Once I add a rack like that on I'd probably be bumping up to the next tier which will increase my power to something like 2.5-3x that rate. Because of the tiered system even my non-server load will be metered at a higher cost. It's really not worth it here to run servers at home if I'm not being highly power conscious.
Meanwhile in Germany, the tiers are the other way around: base fees and meter costs increase effective rate at the low-consumption end, while you end up with only (even discounted, somewhat, usually!) per-kWh rates dominating at high consumption.
Industrial loads also get assessed for peak power sustained for like a few minutes at least once a year, to reflect capex/depreciation of sufficiently-overprovisioned distribution transformers and other related last-mile power-handling capacity.
This is relatively negligible if you average over 10% of your peak draw, though. And even beyond, recent energy prices Matt have shifted the balance spot to even more-peaky consumption.
I looked into cloud, but it's just not really feasible. It really is possible to do a lot with a little at home.
I'm using about 60-100W for my home-prod, and a lot of it is "older". I'm running about 15 small VMs at any given time these days, and probably 20 containers.
I think my biggest single draw is the Mikrotik CCR1036 in the garage, but it saved me from buying new gear. Sure there's a break even point with hydro, but that's years in the future when the device is free. It's also pretty fun to watch VPN connections testing at 700Mbps from home.
I don't really care about uptime, and I've got gigabit fibre to the house, so bandwidth isn't a huge problem. It worked fine on 300/60Mb cable too.
Ryzen 3 2200G, 32GB RAM, 1T NVMe, 10TB HDD. This one runs services.
Orange Pi 5 16GB with another 500GB NVMe. This runs redundant services and monitoring.
My rack lives in an expensive energy market, and pulls just under 500W. Almost 40% of that is a Dell R430, which by itself costs about $50/mo to run.
Next time I have the energy (hah) for this flavor of home maintenance, the idea is to split the work it does off to a few fanless systems, I'm pretty sure I can knock at least 100W off that. Main challenge there is storage - I have a SAS shelf and need a low-wattage machine that speaks SF-8088.
Experimented some with a couple Raspberry Pis for some things, but they just don't seem built to run 24/7. One lasted about 4 months, the other died at about 12. (They PXEbooted, no local storage, it wasn't that.)
I have a Plex server with 6 spinning disks and a GPU which costs me around $20/month. The most expensive part is when the GPU is running (based on my Kill-A-Watt.) I host around 15 Docker services on it.
I think even with the cost of electricity, you can easily beat cloud hosting on a per-month basis. But, factoring in the initial cost of hardware and electricity, it's probably a wash.
But then, if you're running a hypervisor, and would otherwise have a LOT of VMs in the cloud, maybe it swings back the other way?
My quarter rack Home lab in my basement is pulling 133 Watts right now with a low power 1U Supermicro SOC, an older Supermicro mini tower used as a NAS, and my networking gear and Internet modems. I don't have any intense workloads running at home. I was really power conscious when buying my two home servers as I know it is very easy to buy a beefy server off of Ebay that sounds like a jet engine 24/7 and pay out the nose on my home power bill.
My rack is about 500W, up to about 700W when the backup server kicks on (lots of spinning disks).
That’s a UniFi Dream Machine Pro, UniFi 24 port switch (powering two APs), 3x Dell R620s with a few SSDs and NVMe, and 2x Supermicros (one of which is the aforementioned backup server), each with a lot of spinners. Also some additional load from the overhead of the rack UPS.
I pay about $0.08/kWh, although with the base fee of $40 it's more like $0.11/kWh. In any case, it means I pay maybe an extra $30-40/month for my homelab, plus whatever additional heat load costs it places on my A/C.
If I moved to somewhere where electricity was significantly pricier, I would probably either invest in home solar, compress compute to a single node, or both.
> Sit back and relax? Being massively overprovisioned is a benefit of homelabs.
there are many dimensions to provisioning, not all of them are one ebay/amazon/newegg purchase away.
you could hardly get a symmetrical 10 gbps internet connection at home (in most places), and if you do it would be unlikely to be timely (and in that case, your business could probably be suffering).
Frankly, i think that the time when your startup is taking off might be the right time to start thinking about moving to the cloud (or to a proper datacenter).
If anything, if your startup is taking off then you're starting to get a real sense of what kind of compute and storage you actually need, and can maybe negotiate accordingly (eg: long-term committment for resources in some clouds give you very relevant discounts).
EDIT: regarding the internet connection... on a consumer connection, most contracts include a minimal guaranteed bandwidth that's usually way lower than the advertised peak bandwidth. i wouldn't be surprised to discover people getting throttled at those speeds if they start getting serious traffic...
The shitty code most places are running have such horrific latency between awful SQL queries and choices like Node as a backend that the difference between a 1G and 10G uplink is unlikely to make a large difference, especially if you’re caching static content with a CDN.
This does presuppose you have a business class internet connection, of course.
> you could hardly get a symmetrical 10 gbps internet connection at home (in most places), and if you do it would be unlikely to be timely (and in that case, your business could probably be suffering).
if your startup takes off and you can't get a professional connection on time... it might just drive users away. particularly paying users.
and depending on where you are, that might not even be possible at all.
Depends on what "taking off" means for the start up too. Taking off at a mass consumer scale might need that flexibility, taking off and even getting to market saturation in a specific B2B might be achievable on a raspberry pi level hardware. There are many more of the later.
Agreed - 1gbps is a surprising amount of bandwidth, you could easily host a fairly popular mobile app, saas, etc with plenty of breathing room. And in a lot of cases, you can just move your static file hosting behind Cloudflare, or onto something like s3, and give yourself even more room to grow.
Any business that you can run from a home server with a residential business line is not the kind of business we are talking about here. Yes, you can potentially serve a lot of customers with that setup, but your reliability story is terrible so you better have very forgiving customers.
What if your internet goes out? Even with a business line, I've had to wait five days for them to replace a fiber line that a squirrel chewed through.
What if the power goes out? I just had a five hour power outage. Even if you have a battery backup, when the neighborhood power is out for a while, the ISP equipment will die when its batteries go out.
What if your hardware dies and you aren't home to switch it out, assuming you even have spare hardware?
What if your A/C goes out and your server overheats and has to get shut down?
All of these are things you usually don't have to deal with when using the cloud or even a $5 VPS, because they design for all of these failure cases from the start.
If you're running a business from your house, it is by definition a lifestyle business, and that's not really what we are talking about here.
Any business that you can run from a home server
with a residential business line is not the kind
of business we are talking about here.
What kind of business are we talking about here? What does the "taking off" in your previous post mean, exactly?
Depends on what you're trying to do.
You are not going to be able to run a Netflix competitor out of your garage.
You're not going to get high availability without some significant investment and even then you'll be at the mercy of whatever your ISP is doing upstream in the event of a power outage. I live in an area where we average something like 99.99% power uptime, but not everybody is so lucky.
You could, potentially, host something that serves up something non bandwidth-intensive to tens of thousands of users, give or take an order of magnitude. (SaaS, APIs, etc) You can do a lot of interesting things with a homelab and some of them are potentially profitable.
Perhaps more crucially: you're not exactly locked in to a homelab. You can start with that and once you reach a certain point, migrate to colo or cloud.
The only realistic concern for me here is the ISP failure. Even then, if I really wanted to I could have both AT&T and Spectrum uplinks with an LACP bond.
I have enough battery backup to run my rack for about 30 minutes, more if I shut down a node. That’s more than enough time for me to set up my generator and route power; it has an extended gas tank and can power the rack, fridges/freezers, fans, etc. for over 24 hours. I periodically run drills on this to ensure it’s doable, and that the gear works as expected.
If I’m not home, then yes, the latter would fail. Dual hardware failure is an unlikely scenario; single node failure is handled between K8s and Proxmox clustering.
That would be dream come true! Everything is automated with Infrastructure as Code tools like terraform, plumi, dagger etc... You can easily point to another K8S and redeploy there then update the domain DNS records to divert traffic.
Additionally, if the company starts to grow you can hire other people who are familiar with the cloud provider (and it has extensive documentation). The last company I worked at that had stuff running on a rack in the office just had a "Keep Calm and Sudo On" printout taped to the cage and the guy who'd set it all up had quit.
App still needs to be written to be scalable. And if shit hits the fan moving to cloud (...or just renting dedicated servers at 1/3 the cloud cost) isn't too bad
This is precisely what I plan on doing when I eventually launch my app. I have 3x Dell R620s in a Proxmox cluster running K8s nodes, Ceph on NVMe with CSI-RBD, and a separate Supermicro 2U exposing ZFS for spinning storage. The only missing link is 10G networking, because 10G switches aren’t super cheap.
this is the most undersung hero. Internet speeds are reaching the equivalent of a datacenter. This will open up so many possibities, that it makes it seem like the 2000s again. And finally we might actually need ipv6
I just moved out of the consumer internet dystopia that is California (or most of US I guess) to Spain and am just about to get 10 Gbit symmetric for €25/mo. Even if I get half of that I’m ecstatic. This kind of infrastructure is so conducive to all kinds of interesting and “decentralized” innovations.
Yes indeed. My Bell.ca ~1gb fiber has a monthly cost of $100 + $20 for dedicated IP. Since it's business line fiber internet it comes with monitored service quality meaning it's prioritized over others using regular/residential fiber internet (claimed!)
I basically wrote the same thing a few months ago. TL;DR for most systems public cloud is not cost effective not secure. Another interesting Apple exploit using Spector on Safari on the front page today. Most systems better off self hosted with cloud tools to manage: https://open.substack.com/pub/rakkhi/p/why-you-should-move-b...
In my case Xfinity kept the same IP for me for two years, then an outage happened where everyone in the neighborhood lost connectivity. When connectivity was restored I got a different IP.
I feel like the biggest difference is the fact that there's no guarantee that the dynamic IP won't change, so all systems need to be prepared for that, or you need to be mentally prepared for that day.
Renting dedicated server off company like OVH, or even co-locating your own is also far cheaper than cloud, few times over, without fuss of turning your house into datacenter.
First cable tv prices sky rocketed with a lot of ads and cord cutting became a thing. Now streaming services are raising pricing and subscription fatigue has started the cord 2.0 cutting.
I've gone from about 12 subscriptions (Netflix, Crave, Disney+, Apple Tv+, Fubo, Dazn, PrimeVideo, TSN, SportsNet, Funimation, CrunchyRoll, YouTube Premium) down to 6 and thinking of cutting another 3 and only keeping Netflix for kids, Prime (well because of Amazon Prime) and YouTube for me.
At least so far most streaming subscriptions are easy to cancel, so you can rotate through the different services depending on what you want to watch. Only a matter of time until services try to prevent that by locking you into yearly or longer contracts.
It might be counter intuitive but using general purpose directories like ProductHunt or similar to showcase your project is likely just showing off to off-target, extreme churn, user base with high potential to becoming competitors.
In my opinion, the best and only place you should showcase your product is where your actual target customers are!
The demo on real-time multi language translation conversation blew me away!