Re names, I like "homeprod". The main goal isn't to experiment and learn, and you're not scrapping to get a pair of Cisco 2501's to study for your CCNA. Rather the main goal is providing services that support your family's larger existence, independent of the surveillance industry - the tinkering is an (unfortunately necessary) side effect.
I very much like how the name "homeprod" contrasts against "homelab."
But I'm not as convinced as the article's author that "NAS" is outdated as a separate concept, just that as new people learn more about networking they rediscover why just having storage on in its own box can be a good setup. And when new people are brand new, having everything on one box is conceptually simpler, though not always optimal.
I think, in the family/household context, I like the names:
Homelab: the box/cluster you use to experiment and test new stuff.
Homeprod: the box/cluster you use to deploy stable services for family. Runs only things that have graduated from at least a yearlong successful deployment or so on homelab.
Homebase: the box/cluster you use to make ZFS pools and databases available to both homelab and homeprod (on the same network or overlay network). Basically a NAS in the older sense of the word, before homelabs started expanding its scope in casual use.
Famadmin: the sysadmin for the family (i.e. "you" in the three items above). The person to whom, as you say, "providing services that support your family's larger existence, independent of the surveillance industry," is a matter of deep principle. And well put, BTW.
Putting aside the awesomeness of the term homebase, what exactly differentiates the base from the prod? Aren't those ZFS pools just production? Or something like an MQTT broker that supports home automation - you're likely running experimental devices/services over that as well, right? And to the extent that experimental MQTT or NAS traffic could inadvertently disrupt the production services, you could separate those out if you really cared. But that would still just be lab and prod.
Maybe the division is more apparent if you're using containers, and/or have more of a social group to communicate support levels to? Personally I'm just using NixOS and am still at the stage of "I'm going to reboot the router now, it might take ten minutes or it might take days" [0]
If we don't need this distinction, then perhaps "homebase" could actually make more sense than "homeprod" ? Slightly different connotations, less putting on a show for lots of people but more homey like for a small family?
[0] from a technical perspective I'd love to separate the router out onto its own machine, but I want fast wireguard/openvpn/TOR/etc so it's a VM on a larger machine and I'm not really looking to expand my power consumption footprint to another large machine. I suppose I could split it out to two routers, one with straight NAT+wireguard and one with openvpn/TOR/etc, then the main could run on its own low-power box.
My homebase has the around 30TB usable storage, but the only workloads I've found really need to run on the same machine (rather than the same local network) are media transcoding for Jellyfin and ML classification of footage in frigate. With those two happening, and with ZFS (appropriately) using a majority of the RAM as a cache, it makes sense to put the rest of services on another machine.
My prod (now homeprod, thanks for the name!) has no HDDs, just SSDs. It's a proxmox cluster that runs opnsense in a VM for the whole network, Home Assistant also in a VM[1], and most other services in containers. In the age of expensive storage, it has just enough SSD space for VMs and containers. VM backups live on homebase, except for opnsense which also needs a backup on the same machine (same machine, not just same cluster) if the network goes down.
So my conceptual distinction is mostly that the only services/containers I put on homebase are doing work that really benefits being that close to the data. Oh, and I'm in the jolly position of needing to replace the hard drives this or next year. Yaaaaay.
My homelab is currently a cluster of 4GB Pis that I had lying around from before even the Raspberry Pi shortage. Whenever I upgrade my Framework 13 mainboard, I'll probably use the old one as a homelab instead of the Pis.
[1]: Home Assistant's plug-ins are themselves containers, so it's a good idea to give it either a VM or its own machine.
Absolutely, I was running the server on my main desktop before this, and it was super stressful. One of the main drivers was to move things to something more stable. NGL, I still experimenton it though...
This is an underestimated part of operating IT infrastructure at home. Something a lot of homelab builders miss. They have a homelab that mixes in the same environment and same equipment the role of delivering standard services for the house and family, with the role of experimenting and toying around.
Everyone who builds this should really have "homeprod" and "homelab". And when the experiments and tests inevitably lead to an outage, the movie streaming or photo storage or home control parts don't die with it.
Honestly telling your kid going off to college (or elsewhere) "you have to take everything from you care about, the rest is going to go away" seems like a good way to stunt their independence. The natural reaction would be to take as much as they can of their current life, which is then going to be a burden preventing them from growing into a new life.
When you put it this way, it is very anxiety inducing and I understand that. What this is helping me realize is that my childhood, and our lives of our children were different than many of the commenters, not necessarily better or worse.
As children, my siblings and I didn't have a lot of stuff, and our family didn't have a lot of stuff either. It certainly wasn't our intent to traumatize and stunt our children and this doesn't seem to be the case. I will certainly ask them.
I really wish articles like this wouldn't anchor around this refrain of "... while their wealth increased by $XXX". It's a staple of tax law that you're only taxed when income is actually realized, and there are a few glaring loopholes that allow people to avoid realizing capital gains. At the very least, things should be changed such that taking a loan against an asset beyond its basis is considered a realization of income - similar to how if you take a loan against your IRA it is considered a distribution.
But we already knew all that! We don't need numbers calculating out infinitesimally small fictitious "tax rates" (for a tax regime that doesn't actually exist) to illustrate it. Unless someone is actively selling the stock they own, they are not paying any income tax on its value, period end of story.
And so rather it feels like a wasted analysis to keep focusing on the value of zero divided by $big_number, when there are going to be far more interesting things like exactly what income did they realize, and what type of expenses did they use to offset it, what amounts did they actually pay tax on, and so on. Because capital gains deferral is not the only way the tax code skews towards the rich by far, yet it's currently using up all the air in the room.
I like the article, but I'd say it has left out descriptions of those people who weren't in the social Matrices it described (either because they didn't want to be, like "one family who had moved out of the West End into an aging lower-middle-class town" or because they couldn't like those lower orders in "volunteer work is part of what separates them from the lower orders".
In fact I'd say that angst from this type of person (I consider myself one) is a good chunk vocalizing concerns about "a world without work". "Going your own way" is a large part of the American psyche, so what happens in a world where there is not work that needs to be done, which had been laying out straightforward paths for "your own way" ?
I'm personally not feeling too much of this angst, being both happy working on the kinds of physical things that aren't going to be automated away any time soon, and also having the engineering knowledge/skills to effectively use LLMs and benefit from the automation. But I'm also not looking so far into the future as to worry about those endeavors becoming trite.
Do you feel like you have much agency in the economic and political systems that rule our lives? The problem does indeed always come down to humans, but the specific humans with the most agency are generally quite eager to take away the agency of everyone else to increase their own share. And by the time they themselves are actually affected, it's generally too late.
Right on! It's always frustrating reading articles framed in terms of "security breaches" and "dark web", invariably doing hand waving at unspecified harm, when the real threat actor for pretty much everybody is the "above board" surveillance industry. Random people who buy this info outside the law can't really hurt me - it's not like I'm a witch and my DL# is my "true (system-given) name" and I disappear when they say it or something. Rather the parties who can hurt me are the ones who pretend knowledge of this semi-public information is an authentication system, and then hassle me with legal nastygrams when they get defrauded. Or who keep comprehensive dossiers on my behavior to unaccountably sort me into corporate-defined boxes so they can better extract my wealth and otherwise form anti-competitive arrangements against me. These actual attackers operate mostly according to the (very broken) law, and they are what needs fixing. Not just scaremongering when some bogeyman "wrong people" get a small taste of the exact same information.
Did anybody think Grumpism was going to go somewhere other than here? It's merely been the spite choice the whole time - a way for economic losers to stick their thumbs in the eyes of people who had been mildly successful. Pure crab bucket mentality, now with $40T more in the hole - and still no actual solutions to the problems we are facing. But that certainly doesn't stop those problems from being brought up to rally support for the next con job. And the people at the top certainly aren't suffering! We have basically squandered the advantages our grandparents sacrificed for, to satisfy some kind of collective ego based around American exceptionalism and ignorant fundamentalism.
(edit: I guess a lot of people still aren't ready to hear it)
Obama sped up the rate of growth of the debt around 2010 and the percentage growth annually has been consistent since then (i.e. linear on the log scale): https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-debt-does-the-us-have/.... Not even counting the jumps in response to the 2008 recession and COVID.
Let's see, the biggest increases of debts under Democrats have been during the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression And the biggest worldwide pandemic in a century.
On the other hand, the biggest debt increases under Republican presidents have been to A) Start and fight multi trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and B) To cut taxes for billionaires and corporations.
It's because the country went through the great recession and was attempting to pull out and avoid financial collapse.
Look at Revenue per year as a % of GDP and look at Expenses per year as a % of GDP. It's pretty clear.
Expenses went up avoiding a depression which was done successfully, and revenue dropped due to the falling economy. The president was handed a collapsing economy and saved it.
The issue is the other party that keeps getting handed great economies since the late 90s and fails to do anything but make the problem worse.
To some extend I hope that the Republican party wins the next election. They should be the ones fixing the economy, raising taxes, and doing something responsible for once.
If Democrats win they are going to be blamed for being the "bad guys" for increasing taxes, controlling inflation and trying to get the economy back to shape.
For Republicans to burn down the economy during their mandates has paid of as the next government needs to focus on firefighting instead of doing the good that it could have been done.
> To some extend I hope that the Republican party wins the next election. They should be the ones fixing the economy, raising taxes, and doing something responsible for once.
Why would you ever think they’d be interested in doing any of that? A non-insignificant fraction of the gop wants to collapse the US entirely.
Genuine question: I think making things worse to motivate later making them better is a relatively common idea. Are there any historical examples of it actually working well?
To me, it seems more likely to concentrate power among people who don't want to make things better and make it easier for them to resist ever changing.
Trump floated that trial balloon a few months back, though currently the administration is proceeding with the much more American plan of widespread voter suppression, intimidation, and bribery, if in the most ham-fisted and unconstitutional way possible.
The Republican plan appears to be to run the de jure government into the ground so that the corporations can occupy more and more governmental roles, eliminating what little shreds still remain of our Constitutional/natural rights. So no, I wouldn't assume that there will be some clean collapse, nor that said collapse will leave a power vacuum in which a democratic government could be rebuilt.
The current GOP plan is “if you can’t best them, join them.” So it’ll be a game of both sides buying votes from their constituencies until we need an Argentina-like reset.
You really do seem to love this type of "Democrats made them do it" excuse. At a certain point you've got to ask yourself if you're trying to convince others or mainly just yourself.
Throwing money at recent immigrants in return for votes was a pillar of the FDR coalition and it’s a core pillar of the Obama coalition. It’s simply inevitable as the culture of the United States converges to be similar to those of the other countries in the hemisphere. There is no constituency for fiscal responsibility in any of these countries.
Your game here seems to be throwing out simplistic partisan tripe, to either prompt an equally-inflammatory opposite-partisan response that will leave you feeling vindicated, or you can always fall back to arguing the shreds of truth in it while continuing to ignore the big picture.
I would ask you to "do better", but the whole problem is that once you've bought into the contradictions of destructionism, there is no doing better without coming to terms with what you're actually advocating. Talking about an "an Argentina-like reset" you're closer than most, but I suspect that's due to a better ability for rationalization.
In other conversations of ours, you've gone on about the need to preserve American culture in the face of immigration. So once again I will implore you personally, to do your part by working to adopt our culture rather than proudly championing the exact zero-sum politics you're bemoaning (regardless of having changed the color of the partisan flag you're waving). A core tenet of American culture is personal responsibility (for better and for worse), and so these types of choices right here are where the rubber meets the road.
> Your game here seems to be throwing out simplistic partisan tripe
It's not a partisan point at all, it's an observation about how immigration and changes in the polity interacts with politics. Left-wing parties rely on immigrants for votes all over the developed world. And the larger topic of how foreigners influence a democratic system is one Aristotle was writing about even in 350 BC.
> do your part by working to adopt our culture rather than proudly championing the exact zero-sum politics you're bemoaning
You should read up on game theory. It doesn't matter what I do, the millions of other immigrants that come to the U.S. will change its culture to be more like their homelands'. Your only choice is whether you want the left-wing version of those countries' politics, or the right-wing version? Both result in fiscal disaster, followed by an Argentina-style correction. (We should be so lucky--Javier Milei seems to be doing a pretty good job.)
Truthfulness does not imply that something is not partisan. That it's brought up as a talking point to motivate a certain line of thinking is what makes it partisan.
> You should read up on game theory. It doesn't matter what I do
How does this differ from "I might as well drop my trash on the ground in the park, because everyone else is going to do it anyway" ?
You're fallaciously excluding the middle - there will always be some people who drop their trash on the ground. So a clean park must employ groundskeepers to pick it up. But such centralized action can never make up for mass distributed behavior, so it behooves us all to adhere to and propagate good culture that keeps most people from throwing their trash on the ground. And the same dynamic applies to basically every societal construct.
So no, I do not buy your [self-serving] argument that the culture you're simultaneously bemoaning and also engaging in is inevitable.
> To some extend I hope that the Republican party wins the next election. They should be the ones fixing the economy, raising taxes, and doing something responsible for once.
The last small-government Republican was Herbert Hoover. Reagan paid lip service to the concept, but he maintained high spending levels to keep former FDR democrats in the fold.
Cool story bro? I remember a whole lot of people who complained about the debt during the Obama years (I was right there with them), who are now completely silent or even full-throated support. Perhaps a few of the more "honest" ones you might be able to get a "I don't like everything he does" out of them.
If I recall though, you personally did support Obama? Which would make your point doubly moot.
Also note that my condemnation wasn't just about the debt per se, but rather the decreasing creditworthiness. Say what you will about Obama (I certainly have), but at least he kept up relations with our allies so they saw us as a strong partner worthy of holding their wealth.
> If I recall though, you personally did support Obama? Which would make your point doubly moot.
I did personally support Obama. I still think he was a pretty good President! I’m simply describing the chart I linked to of debt levels on a log scale. Obama increased the slope of debt growth around 2010 and it has stayed around the same slope, with a vertical jump during covid. The point is that the debt growth rate isn’t a Trump thing. It’s the “new normal” since Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again.
So you were "simply" responding to one small part of my comment, with a narrative that sane-washes the whole larger picture.
If you personally don't care about the debt, that's fine. But there are a lot of people who had claimed to, who have now turned their denial circuits up to 11. My "$40T more in the hole" aside was aimed at them.
Debt per GDP/size of US economy is more useful. Debt/GDP has the 2008 jump as the Obama Admin tried to (but not nearly enough) stimulate out of the housing crisis. Debt/GDP looks flat until 2020.
2008 and 2020 jumps make sense in the setting the 2008 crisis and COVID which was effectively a recession assuming you believe in Keynesian economics.
Paying for US debt if you are the US is cheap when interest rates low. Trump/Bessent/Elon have been doing everything they can to drive up inflation, so now interest rates are necessarily going higher...
> if someone writes an app with a backend service or library, should they be required to document the API for people to build their own tools on top of?
Yes. Network services and client software should be considered two separate products/markets, and tying between them should be seen as anti-competitive behavior worthy of anti-trust enforcement.
That the software industry has been able to develop some brazenly anti-competitive pratices does not constitute an argument that it should be allowed to continue.
Games could clearly be an exception - they're the only place the locked down computing paradigm has a reasonable argument.
The multi-user productivity apps you listed would most certainly be better off as separate clients and services! The entire point is that you shouldn't be forced into using one (often terrible) piece of proprietary client software simply due to the network effects of other people using it. Wouldn't it be nice to use the Slack client in a Teams environment (or vice versa if that's your thing) ? This would produce more competition because companies would have to develop the client software to be compelling itself, rather than relying on the pull of installed deployments with captive victims^wusers.
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