On the contrary, lots of us write our own scripts and programs. And when considering how to self host that software, serverless is a perfectly valid choice.

Just because many self hosters are hobbyists who are only capable of using things off the shelf doesn’t make self hosting infrastructure outside the scope of… selfhosting lol

Why wouldn’t serverless technologies be relevant to the self hosted community?

The problem is that the companies that actually produce revenues and profits are also in turn being propped up by AI.

Brother what are you talking about. The last president of both major political parties were equally complicit.

It was a DNS issue with DynamoDB, the load balancer issue was a knock-on effect after the DNS issue was resolved. But the problem is it was a ~15 hour outage, and a big reason behind that was the fact that the load in that region is massive. Signal could very well have had their infrastructure in more than one availability zone but since the outage affected the entire region they are screwed.

You’re right that this can be somewhat mitigated by having infrastructure in multiple regions, but if they don’t, the reason is cost. Multi-region redundancy costs an arm and a leg. You can accomplish that same redundancy via Colo DCs for a fraction of the cost, and when you do fix the root issue, you won’t then have your load balancers fail on you because in addition to your own systems you have half the internet all trying to pass its backlog of traffic at once.

It’s plenty reliable. AWS is just somebody else’s datacenter.

Colo is more feasible, but who is going to travel to the various parts of the world to swap drives or whatever?

Most Colo DCs offer ad hoc remote hands, but that’s beside the point. What do you mean here by “Various parts of the world”? In Signal’s case even Amazon didn’t need anyone in “various parts of the world” because the Signal infra on AWS was evidently in exactly one part of the world.

If there’s an outage, you’re talking hours to days to get another server up, vs minutes for rented hosting.

You mean like the hours it took for Signal to recover on AWS, meanwhile it would have been minutes if it was their own infrastructure?

Also you know… building your own data centers / co-locating. Even with the added man hours required it ends up being far cheaper.

It’s not the responsibility of the cloud providers to democratize the internet, I don’t know why you thought anyone was making that argument.

Cloud providers however are responsible for their negligence given their role in the current internet.

Democratizing the internet would mean half the known internet not hosting their infrastructure in us-east-2.

It would work and be functional exactly as the internet was designed to be, and worked and functioned for years, by hosting their own servers.

Isn’t part of their mission that the reputation shouldn’t matter?

Not at all, at least when it comes to their organization and its investments. Their donations to OSS are one thing, but FUTO controls the name and brand of their direct investments like GrayJay and Immich. This makes FUTO a brand and separating a brand from its reputation isn’t something that can be done. FUTO is a company and companies aren’t your friends. They can promise whatever they want, but they are accountable to what they do.

They themselves have put a huge emphasis on their reputation in terms of their OSS donations as well, often at the expense of transparency and the sovereignty of the projects they’re “supporting”, which is actually what the original post we’re commenting on is about. They were caught slipping donations to individual maintainers of projects and not the projects themselves in order to avoid project rules about institutional donors, and then they plastered the name and logo of these projects on their website without permission. They did this to improve their reputation and instill a sense of trust in the community. Doing so in such a shady, under the table way actively undermines trust.

FUTO is an investment company like any other, only with a mission statement of “Don’t worry, we’re one of the good ones, primarily due to INSERT BELIEFS”. Then they act in a way in flagrant contradiction of those beliefs.

Anybody who feels uneasy over this behavior is 100% justified. Anyone’s who’s lived through Apple’s “Monopoly busting underdog” or Google’s “free and open internet for all, don’t be evil” eras doubly so.

The problem isn’t that FUTO platforms an out and proud self proclaimed fascist in a vacuum.

The problem is the close association FUTO has with an out and proud self-proclaimed fascist while selling itself with a libertarian mission statement. Fascism and libertarianism are fundamentally incompatible ideologies on the far opposite ends of the spectrum. The idea that this contradiction doesn’t hurt the reputability of the organization is absurd.

If you think I’m worried about the ethical purity of the founders of an investment firm, you are mistaken.

Can’t say I’m surprised but it’s such a shame. I’m guessing this ties inter their newly launched timeline feature. Maps was at least up to this point a better alternative to Google Maps.

He didn’t say “supporting fascist projects” he said “supporting fascists”

Some background on FUTO that doesn’t look great

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Mini PC. Beelinks with the N100 chip are absolute beasts at doing video encoding at low power.

I mean also shouldn’t somebody be reviewing these MRs? I’m an infra guy not a programmer but doesn’t it like, not really matter how the code in the MR was made as long as it’s reviewed and validated?

Hard to tell what the actual value is here since “Online contractors” is a bit vague. AI coding is error prone and pretty limited. It’s basically a requirement to have someone to babysit it and studies done on this exact arrangement have shows that practically speaking far more time is wasted implementing AI in this arrangement than just having people do it.

The customer responses thing is fairly simple but is one of those cases where it works until it doesn’t. Small hallucinations by AI can mean serious liability for companies. At a bare minimum customers know they’re being replied to by a text generator and that results in feelings that you don’t value their patronage that much. Nobody liked getting pre-written responses written by humans. Having a bot generate a response without any input from an employee of your company is practically an insult.

When I say “AI can’t replace anyone’s job” I don’t mean that you physically can’t fire somebody and then turn on an AI, but that it is not and likely won’t ever be a worthwhile replacement. In your case you’ve “replaced people with AI” in the same sense as you can “replace” someone by firing them and not hiring a replacement at all. You save a few bucks, customer experience gets worse, there are more efficient ways to do that without investing in AI.

I’ve worked with a lot of companies that have tried to implement AI and I haven’t yet come across a success story. What little wins companies do get will disappear when the sweetheart pricing inevitably ends and the companies who are now relying on their AI have to shell out big time.

It’s just MITM but with extra steps

No