I’ve always thought it sounds like a horror song as well, which is why my favorite version is by the Lovecraft historical society: Carol of the old ones

You’re talking about XMPP, and it was google with google chat that people refer to with it.

That said, there’s a lot of details that story people throw around about google killing it that lacks some details. Specifically that the premier service that used and developed the standard, jabber, was acquired by cisco like 8 years before google supposedly killed it, which i would argue affected it far harder than google chat did.

It’s also lacking a lot of modern features that were becoming staple around the time that it was killed; i.e. QoS, assured delivery, read receipts, and a few other things. I still don’t think the protocol supports them.

Also, the protocol still exists and is used. It’s used by microsoft in skype for business, it’s also the IM protocol for lots of gaming platforms like origin, playstation, the switch (for its push notifications for their online service), League of legends, fortnite, and others. It’s still a reasonably popular standard when it comes to chat programs, though none of them that i’m aware of use the actual federation piece of it to talk to each other.

While the tactic alluded to does exist (“embrace, extend, extinguish”), i’ve never been necessarily convinced that google “kiled” xmpp, as its been around a long time and continues to be for various reasons. Even with google chat, it was never a ‘front end’ thing many users even thought about, because it’s back end frameworks tech, and it continues to be so in lots of different places today. I’m reasonably sure that the people who get upset about it and proclaim google killed it are basically just upset that it didn’t become the defacto chat standard today, which i would argue almost nothing is the defacto standard anyways, unless you count discord which kinda came out of nowhere like a whirlwind and took over the chat space and has nothing to do with any XMPP drama.

Ultimately, its up to you (whoever is reading this) to look into the facts of the matter and decide for yourself if that’s what really happened, but keep in mind, the people who usually repeat the anecdote about how google killed it have an agenda to push. I’m personally skeptical, because there’s reasons for google to have dropped it (see mentioned limitations above), and even back then, it wasn’t that outrageously popular. In fact, i would argue its more widely used today than it was back then, but i have no hard numbers on that.

Also, I assume it’s because the xml file in maven is typically called a “pom” file, so expanding that to pomni for some reason? It still doesn’t make a ton of sense

As of java 21, you can actually just use:

void main()

You cant go by “serving sizes” to compare things like that, because serving sizes are fairly arbitrary and can are likely measured differently between products. You’d have to compare by net weight.

This lists the net weight as 27.1 pounds, or about 433 ozs. A box of kraft is 7.5 oz net weight, or in other words it’s almost 58 total boxes of craft Mac and cheese. Which makes things way more in Kraft’s favor.

Notepad++ is perfectly fine to code in. With the wealth of plugins it has, it’s pretty similar to vscode in how you can trick it out with all sorts of things it can’t do by default.

You’d hear the roar of the baseball cards in their tire spokes long before you see the bicycle horde coming over the sand dune.

isnt that basically what government contracts are? subscriptions?

-0.5 + (float) C++

ARM vs x86 is part of the equation; ARM uses significantly less power than x86, but has a simplified instruction. x86 consumes more power but is more robust and has higher computing capabilities and higher workload efficiency

The other half of the equation is OS level software that can restrict what is allowed to process during said low power sleep.

In theory nothing stops x86 hardware from having something comparable, but it would probably use a lot more power than you’d expect.

There are ways to make windows and Linux wake at certain times for actions via wake timers which isn’t quite the same, though

$200k divided by $5 is 40,000 sales. You aren’t likely to have 500k installs from 40,000 sales…

I have mediacom as well, but in a larger city of the midwest. They have datacaps here too, and i was paying about $100 for exactly this same plan up until a couple years ago. They started upgrading our speeds/caps because a new fiber company (metronet) is building in the area. Now i’m on 1 gbps down and a 4 TB cap. I still plan to switch to metronet when they finally light up my area, as its cheaper for the same speeds (plus no data caps)

If that’s the case you’ll probably be well served with that model you linked above.

As for what your options are, there’s a ton of functionality you can add to them through apps and can even practically run whole VMs on them. Probably not a great idea with the above model but the option is there.

Technically you could set it up as a pihole as well, yes, you’d need to install the docker service and load a DNS service and pihole into it, you can probably find some guides online how to do so.

Pending on your use case, it’s probably fine; If you just want to have your own photos backup/home cloud server, it will probably serve you very well. This particular model is not very powerful (though most synology nas enclosures aren’t super beefy in general), so as long as you arent expecting it to be a work horse for any heavy duty calculations (transcoding in plex, hosting VMs or docker containers, etc.), it will probably work out great. It would probably also struggle if you expect to have lots of user (10+) using it frequently.

Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions!

No problem!

Is there any benefits of buying directly from them? I think I would get a single bay enclosure and 4tb disk (I should be able to close in a $200$250 range).

Not really. I just wanted to point out that base purchasing from official stores does NOT include storage, generally. As far any “advantages”, the only i can think of is that you know its brand new if it comes from an official synology store. Depends on how comfortable you are with second hand or refurb hardware if that’s what you’re looking at (though other stores can be selling brand new as well)

It probably wouldn’t be just me using it though - I would probably include my partner in it. Is it possible to have separate accounts for Drive and Moments so our photos/files wouldn’t overlap?

Yep. It has multi-user support, and you can even designated shared spaces for photos you can both access. Each of the synology cloud offerings (photos, drive, and all the other stuff) generally requires one account per user that is sectioned off into their own area.

EDIT: Have you used the self hosted email functionality? Can you recommend it over let’s say Proton Mail?

Nope, i haven’t. I’d be wary of self-hosting email in general, though, just because i feel like that’s a one-way ticket to all your emails being marked as spam.

Yes, DSM is the OS on all the synology nas enclosures. I’ve heard you can install it on custom built nas devices, but I don’t know the details there, or if its easy to do or not. I would suspect its probably more difficult than not, just because synology is in the business of selling their nas devices more than anything. I have no idea how it would work installing it on 3rd party hardware at all, though.

As for synology moments, its an app that can be installed on DSM. Most of the additional apps are free (moments included), but off hand i know of one notable exception: Surveillance. You need a per camera license for their surveillance software, and IIRC every nas device comes with a “free” 2 camera license, but you have to purchase more if you want more cameras.

They actually have a pretty good ecosystem of apps on synology as well, including things like docker, plex, git, etc. that can all be installed directly on the nas itself and run as a service off of it.

It’s worth noting that if you’re buying the enclosures directly from synology, they generally don’t come with any HDDs at all, you have to buy those separately. Not sure where you’re seeing your “$200 for enclosure + 2TB”, but i just wanted to put that out there as “make sure it actually includes drives if its through an official store or something” warning.

second/third this. synology nas’s are great! I’ve been running one for almost a decade now. They run a good line between being very powerful and very user friendly so you don’t have to be super technical to get them working. To a large extent, they can almost be completely plug and play, depending on what you’re looking for.

well, yes, i dont think there’s anything stopping you from doing that in any way. But the bot account flag is basically just honor system is my point. I wouldn’t expect it to be a rock-solid way to deal with bots. Only the good/non-malicious actors are going to properly label themselves.

Only for accounts actually labeled as a bot. Thats basically just a flag that can be turned on and off, someone who is going to make a bot for malicious purposes such as spamming content probably won’t flag it properly.

Even more frustrating when you realize, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, these new “AI” programs and LLMs aren’t really novel in terms of theoretical approach: the real revolution is the amount of computing power and data to throw at them.

This is 100% true. LLMs, neural networks, markov chains, gradient descent, etc. etc. on down the line is nothing particularly new. They’ve collectively been studied academically for 30+ years. It’s only recently that we’ve been able to throw huge amounts of data, computing capacity, and time to tweak said models to achieve results unthinkable 10-ish years ago.

There have been efficiencies, breakthroughs, tweaks, and changes over this time too, but that’s just to be expected. But largely its just sheer raw size/scale that’s just been achievable recently.