A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...
- A Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a 3 gigabyte hard drive setup as a "server" (makes this site available on my home network[9])
- I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access (I have the least expensive subscription for this)
...
[9] I can view my personal web on my home network from my phone, tablet and computers. So can the rest of my family.Hosting on GitHub is merely a convenience; they can up and leave anytime.
Simple to use software... this would be grand!
> Raspberry Pi OS (a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU Linux)
Is this simple? I would contend that it is not. Why do I tell people "buy apple products" as a matter of course? Because they have decent security, great ease of use, and support is an Apple Store away.
They still manage to screw things up.
Look at the emergence of docker as an install method for software on linux. We sing the praises of this as means of software distribution and installation... and yet it's functionally un-usable by normal (read: non technical) people.
Usability needs to make a comeback.
Apple stuff is a nightmare of dark patterns and user-hostile idiocy.
Maybe it's easy if you have Stockholm syndrome and have internalized all the arcane gestures, icons and bug avoidance patterns.
The average normie has no clue, though. (This is borne from experience, I have like 8 iPhones in the immediate family among children and seniors.)
HTTP requires always-on + always-discoverable infrastructure
It's all over the place.
Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.
I have tried to get them to publish markdown sites using GitHub pages, but the pain of having to git commit and do it via desktop was the blocker.
So I recently made them a mobile app called JekyllPress [0] with which they can publish their posts similar to WordPress mobile app. And now a bunch of them regularly publish on GitHub pages. I think with more tools to simplify the publishing process, more people will start using GitHub pages (my app still requires some painful onboarding like creating a repo, enabling GitHub pages and getting PAT, no oAuth as I don't have any server).
Yet your approach is appallingly low on the other side of the spectrum. I've been in IT for the past 25 years. I have yet to see a non-IT person who knows what dedicated IP is. If you are not publishing it on the internet, then what's the point?
I've seen plenty of companies where the owner just had a read-only shared drive, where people can rummage thru a pack of PDFs. This' was all fine with that.
You have to understand, manage and work with the complexities of the tools, and offer tools quite enough for the task. It's alright to offer what you do to an engineer who has a spare Pi and a couple of days to kill. But it's quite useless for anyone else to adopt.
That always-on device? To get critical mass, instead of just the nerds, you'd need it to ship with devices which are always-on, like routers/gateways, smart TV's. Then you're back to being at the mercy of centralized companies who also don't love patching their security vulnerabilities.
With IPv6 it would theoretically be possible, but currently with ipv4 and NATs everywhere, your website would almost never be reachable, even with fancy workarounds like dynDNS
(1) Security. An always-on, externally accessible device will always be a target for breaking in. You want the device to be bulletproof, and to have defense in depth, so that breaking into one service does not affect anything else. Something like Proxmox that works on low-end hardware and is as easy to administer as a mobile phone would do. We are somehow far from this yet. A very limited thing like a static site may be made both easy and bulletproof though.
(2) Connectivity providers should allow that. Most home routers don't get a static IP, or even a globally routable IPv4 at all. Or even a stable IPv6. This complicates the DNS setup, and without DNS such resources are basically invisible.
From the pure resilience POV, it seems more important to keep control of your domain, and have an automated way to deploy your site / app on whatever new host, which is regularly tested. Then use free or cheap DNS and VM hosting of convenience. It takes some technical chops, but can likely be simplified and made relatively error-proof with a concerted effort.
This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon when you have a printer and glue at home.
thefounder•1h ago
sowbug•1h ago
The current wave of AI agents is diminishing the value of identity as a DDOS or content-moderation signal. The formula until now included bot = bad, but unless your service wants to exclude everyone using OpenClaw and friends, that's no longer a valid heuristic.
If identity is no longer a strong signal, then the internet must move away from CAPTCHAs and logins and reputation, and focus more on the proposed content or action instead. Which might not be so bad. After all, if I read a thought-provoking, original, enriching comment on HN, do I really care if it was actually written by a dog?
We might finally be getting close to https://xkcd.com/810/.
One more half thought: what if the solution to the Sybil problem is deciding that it's not a problem? Go ahead and spin up your bot network, join the party. If we can design systems that assign zero value to uniqueness and require originality or creativity for a contribution to matter, then successful Sybil "attacks" are no longer attacks, but free work donated by the attacker.
caconym_•18m ago
I would rather just read the thought as it was originally expressed by a human somewhere in the AI's training data, rather than a version of it that's been laundered through AI and deployed according to the separate, hidden intent of the AI's operator.