That’s what I meant by hiring a self-employed freelancer. I don’t know a lot about contracting so maybe I used the wrong phrase.

This is amusing because practically every backend is fiber. You need it for speeds above 10Gbps, and all ISPs will have at least 40Gbps or 100Gbps connections in their data centers, sometimes even faster (QSFP can do up to 400Gbps).

There’s a lot of other expenses with an employee (like payroll taxes, benefits, retirement plans, health plan if they’re in the USA, etc), but you could find a self-employed freelancer for example.

Or just get an employee anyways because you’ll still likely have a positive ROI. A good developer will take your abstract list of vague requirements and produce something useful and maintainable.

Meta’ s Edits app

This is a phone app. OP is asking for an app that can run on Arch Linux.

At this burn rate, I’ll likely be spending $8,000 month,” he added. “And you know what? I’m not even mad about it. I’m locked in.”

For that price, why not just hire a developer full-time? For nearly $100k/year, you could find a very good intermediate or senior developer even in Europe or the USA (outside of expensive places like Silicon Valley and New York).

The job market isn’t great for developers at the moment - there’s been lots of layoffs over the past few years and not enough new jobs for all the people who were laid off - so you’d absolutely find someone.

I didnt realise that repl.it pivoted to vibe coding. It used to be kinda like jsfiddle or CodePen, where you had a sandbox to write and run web code (HTML, JS/TypeScript/CoffeeScript, and CSS/LESS/Sass).

One of my friends was part of the original NBN trial in Brunswick. I also lived in Brunswick but unfortunately I was a few blocks outside the test area. That was back in 2009 or 2010, and if I remember correctly it was 100Mbps down and 40Mbps up via FTTP.

15 years later, there’s still a lot of people with connections slower than that. My mum’s on a 12Mbps plan because she finds higher plans to be too expensive. Meanwhile, the slowest speed I can get from a major ISP in my area in the USA is 300Mbps.

It sure does, but AFAIK it was only available to houses that use fiber (FTTP - fiber to the premises) until recently. My mum could only get 250Mbps max over the coax network before (Aussies refer to it as “HFC” - hybrid fiber and coax).

They do have a 1000/250 plan but it’s ridiculously expensive compared to the “standard” 1000/50 (called “NBN 1000” - NBN is the National Broadband Network)

https://sonic.com/

I’m actually paying $40/month because I’m on a legacy plan that’s $10/month cheaper in exchange for no phone or email support (SMS only) and no free addons like email, web hosting space, eFax, or VPN.

Sonic has caused the other ISPs to lower their prices here. For example, Comcast Xfinity has 2Gbps for $70/month, although that’s not symmetric and only has 250Mbps upload speed. AT&T’s fastest plan here is 5Gbps for $155/month.

There’s a few cities throughout the US that have a similar service, or cheap municipal fiber (ran by the city itself). Unfortunately it’s not very common though.

Oh yeah that’s a great point I didn’t consider. Thanks.

I get that, but a lot of people are already using a VPN to access their self-hosted system.

Passmark isn’t that useful for measuring transcoding performance, as as far as I know it doesn’t benchmark iGPU performance? Transcoding is done nearly entirely on the iGPU.

I recently watched a video about Beelink’s factory and was surprised as how high-quality their production process is. Great video. https://youtu.be/ohwI3V207Ts (and if you enable captions, it explains what each process is).

Yeah Australia still hasn’t quite caught up to the internet speeds some other countries had 15 years ago. It’s kinda sad. I’m still sad the original (good) NBN got replaced by the janky NBN that’s taken years to fix.

The other weird thing in Australia is that even the expensive fibre plans are asymmetric. Most countries that have fibre have a 1Gbps symmetric plan (meaning upload and download are both 1Gbps) whereas the 1Gbps NBN plan has a ridiculously low ~50Mbps upload speed.

I moved from Australia to the USA in 2013. Back then, I had ~9Mbps ADSL2+ in Australia, compared to 600Mbps in the USA. Huge difference. Now I’ve got 10Gbps symmetric in the USA for $50/month through a local ISP.

I haven’t watched the video yet, but it’s generally not worth the hassle of setting up mutual TLS if you’re already using a peer-to-peer VPN like Tailscale, as the VPN software is already doing mutual authentication.

Edit: A peer-to-peer VPN (or mesh VPN) is one where two systems that are connected to the VPN can directly communicate with each other, instead of needing to go through a central server as with something like OpenVPN. With Tailscale or Wireguard, the peers need each other’s public keys to communicate.

Do you mean the TPM? Any system made in the last 7-8 years should have a TPM 2.0 chip and I suspect people won’t want to run Windows 11 on anything older than that (since newer versions of Windows tend to be pretty slow on old systems)

due to medication prices

There’s no reason for medication prices to be as high as they are, though. Look at the prices in practically any other developed country.

I’m from Australia which uses a single payer system (meaning the government negotiates medication prices for the entire country and buys them in bulk) and some medications are literally 5-10x the cost in the USA compared to Australia.

medication like Ozempic being used for recreational weight loss.

There’s a variant of Ozempic called Wegovy that’s used for weight loss. That’s what it’s designed and marketed for.

I like this version better.

Doesn’t work in Boost either.

The legal system in Australia is better because if you win a lawsuit, the losing side usually has to pay your legal fees. As a result, there’s far fewer frivolous lawsuits, and companies don’t drag out lawsuits hoping the other party runs out of money (which is a common tactic in the USA), since they could be on the hook for all those costs.