I too use Kagi but it’s worth noting that Kagi gets most of its results by paying and using other search engines including Google and Bing, so it’s not 100% independent or immune from say Bing’s outage. Still the best option by far though.

I started self-hosting a bit prior to when Docker took off, and getting multiple services running was much harder. Service A wants a certain version of PHP installed with certain plugins while Service B wants a different version. You’d follow a tutorial for installing Service C and desperately hope that it wouldn’t somehow break Service A or B. You installed Service D for a bit despite all the installation pain and now want to uninstall it - I hope you tracked exactly what config changes you made throughout the system so you can undo it.

Docker fixed all of this by making each service independent through containers which made self-hosting 10x easier. I’d also add that I love how easy it is to transfer my setup to a new server - I keep all of my container volumes in a specific directory and my docker-compose files in another and that’s all I need to backup / transfer. Without Docker you’d have to specifically handle each & every configuration file and database location, and if you later upgrade to a newer version of the OS or a different distro you’d have to handle possible conflicts between your versions and what the distro expects.

Worth noting that (at least for Red Alert 2) , they aren’t requiring you install whatever their launcher is.

I suggest checking out their discount brands Kimsufi and SoYouStart. I pay like C$12/month for a dedicated server with a few cores, 8GB of RAM, and 2TB of hard drive space.

Yeah they make the same point in their subscribers-only podcast. They did say that they earn enough to be sustainable, so it sounds like they aren’t having to dip into their savings anymore. I hope they get more than that though as everyone deserves to thrive.

Yes there will always be demand for coders, but will there be enough demand for the current (increasing) supply? Right now the global number of software developers is growing by about a million per year (total is only 28.7 million) - this means that (very roughly) to keep salaries stable we also need demand for new software to be growing by about 3.5% per year. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but a decade from now you’ll need 1.4 jobs for every job now to keep up with the supply.

In the past we had new dynamics to get end-users to spend more and more time using computers and hence software (desktop PCs, video games, internet, mobile phones, social media, etc.). At this point there’s so little time left in a consumer’s day that tech can grow into that I worry that any further advancements will have to cannibalize from another area; I.e. we’ve reached peak demand for software.

Not even just AAA studios, but I’ve seen a lot of indie studios that used to provide Linux builds aren’t anymore in their newer games. Two games that come to mind are Everspace 2 & Talos Principle 2.

Sometimes a game just takes off like this and then dies back down to reasonable levels. Remember when Valheim was released? It dropped out of nowhere, everyone and their friends played it for a month, and then it decreased down to a lower level. Sometimes a game just scratches an itch people didn’t know they had and explodes for a while, which can explain why no one hears about it until the day it releases and people start telling their friends to play it too.

FYI I’ve had a really good experience with using Headscale for a true open-source Tailscale experience. It helps that the Tailscale clients work with it too and that Tailscale (very unofficially) help support it.

It’s not released yet but it’s one of Valve’s goals.

Source

I don’t think the poster is saying that we shouldn’t make these games, just that there’s a ton of competition.

Barely related, but this kind of relates to my fear of increased automation and unemployment this time around. In past periods, like during the Industrial Revolution, the jobs lost by automation were eventually replaced by new jobs as people used the lower prices to consume more. Making clothes needs less labour and so gets cheaper, so consumers buy more clothes, which needs more labour - this but on the scale of the whole economy. Of course it wasn’t this simple (jobs created in other industries, switching industries is hard, new jobs take a while to form, displaced workers never recover, etc.), but given enough time it worked out.

The difference this time is that consumers now spend a ton of money on digital goods for which there’s a weaker relationship between increased consumption and jobs. Unlike physical goods where increasing consumption requires new factories & jobs, digital goods are a zero-margin product. If you doubled the number of gamers in the world you wouldn’t have a ‘game shortage’, you’d still have the insane amount of selection you find on Steam. Yes there’d be more opportunities for profitable niche games but you wouldn’t double the number of game developers as the generic mass-market games would also double their revenue despite not needing to hire anyone new.

Add onto this that:

• As the world gets more developed there are more gamers coming in but also more game developers, often able to work for lower salaries.
• Older games can stay competitive long after they’ve been made. How old is Skyrim and it’s still selling well? How many game developers are being paid to work on it still?

To tie it all together, basically I worry that this time around we may not create enough new jobs as a result of automation. The current number of game developers is more than enough to satisfy market needs and making games cheaper isn’t going to result in people buying enough new games to make replacement jobs for game developers. I used gaming as my example here but this also holds for music, TV, movies, software, etc. The one silver lining that keeps me from despair is that this can be solved by shorter workweeks which would both help spread out the remaining jobs while also giving consumers more time to consume digital goods.

It hurts to do it because right now Valve is an amazing company, but I’ve started buying games where possible on GOG and archiving the installers for exactly this reason. If some horrific Valve-EA merger ever happens in the far future they won’t be able to hold all of my library hostage

To summarize for people who don’t want to click in, different gamers are willing to pay different amounts for the same game. If you keep the price high then you earn a lot per customer but on a small customer base. Set the price low and you earn a little per customer but on more customers.

Price discrimination is basically finding ways to charge each customer the most they’ll pay - that way you earn a lot for the customers willing to pay the inflated amount while not losing the customers looking to save money.

There are a variety of ways businesses do this - sales are one way. Grocery stores often use coupons, as higher income consumers often won’t bother to deal with clipping coupons. Sometimes the exact same manufacturer will make both a brand name product and then the generic brand with a small tweak. For business to business sales, some companies do pricing per customer based literally on the most they’ll pay.

It uses a newer HTML feature called popover which Firefox doesn’t support by default yet.

Thanks and I do indeed use Cloudflare DNS. Glad to know that it’s not some bad IP reputation thing.

Is anyone else having trouble reading the link (and can someone send me the original URL?). I just get stuck in an infinite captcha loop where I verify I’m not a robot, the page refreshes, and then it asks me again.

I think you should take baby-steps and focus first on just getting something running for you to use. Maybe first experiment with configuring an application you’d like in a virtual machine before you spend money on hardware too.

Fortran was actually a pretty solid language, and I actually regularly use programs that still have pieces written in Fortran.

If the values fall low enough relative to transaction fees then there won’t be any transactions at all for creators to collect royalties. Also values can drop to literally $0 if it isn’t even worth a buyer or sellers time to deal with the NFT (i.e. seller can’t find buyer at any price or doesn’t bother trying).