I think the point is that if the same shooters had only more 'normal' guns available to them, they would not have been able to cause nearly as much death and injury before being stopped.
This all has me wondering, if I just want to play with stuff in this space as an individual homelabber who earns a tech salary and wants a nicely designed rack-mounted alternative to a mess of unorganized NUCs and cables and whatnot, what are my best options?
If you're willing to spend money on rack-mounted gear you definitely have options, and what you get sort of depends on what you're interested in playing with.
A lot of homelabbers (and even some small businesses) go for Proxmox as a virtualization distribution. I don't use it myself, but IIUC it's effectively a Debian distro packaged to run KVM/LXC, with support for things like ZFS, Ceph, etc. It has some form of HA, an API used by standard open source devops tools, handles live migration, etc.
So buy some used rack-servers on Ebay (or new, if you're ballin'). A lot of businesses sell their old stuff, so you can pick up a generation or two out of date for a good price. If you want to do fancy stuff like K8s, Ceph, etc you'll probably want at least three nodes, ideally more, and a bunch of disks in them. Networking gear is a sort of pick your poison thing. A lot of people love Ubiquiti gear; a lot of people hate it. TP-Link is another that's good and budget friendly. StarTech sells smallish racks (including on Amazon), if you want to start there.
It won't look exactly like SoftIron's HyperCloud or Oxide's Cloud Computer, but you can certainly get pretty sophisticated.
Not sure if this answers your question, but other great spaces to explore are the 2.5 Admins and Self-Hosted podcasts.
I'm really thinking mostly about the hardware part here, and maybe just enough layers of the stack to feel like an integrated hardware setup. Let the nerds play with whatever software they want above that.
To go ahead and dream a bit:
I'd hope for an online configurator like the one SoftIron's HyperCloud has [1] but instead of "talk to a sales rep", show a price for what you just configured, like you're configuring a macbook.
Relatedly, there should be a standard rack form factor in the size category of NUCs and Mac Minis, rather than having to go all the way to the 19 inch monster racks that medium to large businesses use. If it were nailed down to the point of being able to blind mate (just learned that term from Oxide's article here!) gear into it, that would be kind of perfect.
I recall hearing that Google and Bing have a nearly insurmountable lead in terms of raw ability to index the web, and that all other "alternative" search engines are using Google and/or Bing under the hood. Is this the case for Kagi? Or is Kagi actually maintaining and drawing upon their own independent index?
wondering if you're talking about a twitter event pre-Elon (so people on the right were mad at the twitter exec) or post-Elon (so people on the left were mad at the twitter exec).
Guessing the former, since that would put the juxtaposition you're highlighting in left vs right terms...
Yes, I’m referring to the many very active discussions that occurred after Elon made “censorship of conservatives” on Twitter his pet issue which ultimately led to the Musk/Twitter circus. It coincidently became the pet issue of many around here at the exact same time. At the time it was supposedly about the importance of protecting the principles of free speech.
It’s become evident since then that it was really about protecting their preferred speech. Some of us suspected as much at the time.
I've set up feeds that watch many of the popular instances, using score thresholds (a weighted sum of boosts, likes and replies), so that the feeds just get posts that break a previous threshold I had set (the point being to just see some of the breakout popular trending posts and links, sort of rolling my own algorithm). Every time a post appears in these feeds, I up the threshold again, to a bit under the score of that new post.
In a downward trend, I might reasonably expect that this set of feeds I've set up would go quiet, as new posts fail to hit the high water mark I had set at the peak. Instead, my experience over the past couple months has been the opposite. Breakout posts are getting scores that have kept me pushing my thresholds higher and higher. I don't know what this says about overall usage and engagement, but I think it at least suggests that in certain ways related to popular posts, it's continuing to go up and to the right.
That is, join the fediverse. Stop being a walled garden. That seems passé now that we have millions of people able to follow, @-mention and reply from one domain to another.
Twitter's business model is already completely chucked and will need a ground-up rethink, so we might as well build from this more modern starting point.
"oh yeah, I have plenty else going on. I'm the head of other innovative companies. I don't need this crap over at twitter."
At this point, twitter's goal (whether headed by Elon or someone else) should be to join the fediverse, and be accepted by other large instances for federation with them.
