Wesley Aptekar-Cassels

> I believe the idea of Web3/Crypto is that it's decentralized

Web3 is Centralized: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/web3-centralized - discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29766497

Even if it were decentralized, the moment a technology appears to be decentralized, we do everything in our power to add a centralized (management) layer on top (e.g. github). That layer is what the masses will flock to and eat the lunch of the original technology.

If you have a technology that is already centralized which you try to decentralize it will be nothing more than a niche existence (that might not be a bad thing. See centralized Twitter vs decentralized Mastodon as an example of this)

"Distribute", is more practical than "Decentralize" because it lets you articulate the players and don't have to worry about sybils.

The funniest thing right now is the noisy people into NFT "art" who get their work stolen and are appealing to authority in meatspace.

Hi hn,

Since I shared the AudioCraft cool project with my family, they were keen to try it but there does not seem to be any live version from it, I decided to host my own for a while and detailed my steps in this guide.

There is a live MusicGen demo app for hn users to try, I don't know how long it will last online because the server doesn't seem to be capable of handling many concurrent requests: https://audiocraft.wiringbits.net/

In a preview hn discussion about AudioCraft I saw a few people that weren't sure how to execute it, this guide can hopefully help the community (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36972347).

The way to deploy this version is the old-school way, similar to a previous hn discussion (https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/how-i-run-my-servers) that generated some interest.

Overall, this piece of technology is pretty interesting and fun, I hope the guide helps.

Thanks.

I do not quite understand the premises:

> Given the complexity

Which complexity? It is the simplest possible widespread, reliable and effective solution. Which makes it a primary choice.

> it seems like there are use cases or needs here that I'm not seeing

On the contrary, the use cases for the traditional Relational DB engines are defined: when you need a concurrency manager better than filesystem access. (Or maybe some unimplemented SQL function; or special features.) Otherwise, SQLite would be the natural primary candidate, given the above.

Edit:

I concur about https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite being a close to essential read if one has the poster's doubt.

To its "So, what's the catch?" section, I would add: SQLite does not implement the whole of SQL (things that come to mind on the spot are variables; the possibility of recursion was implemented only recently, etc).

Not an expert, however (lol) - even if the recommendations here are solid - this doesn't feel like a particularly well-reasoned comparison.

IMHO maintaining a large number of files on disk (be it 16m or 1.5b) should be a non-starter (not to mention that zipping them to slightly reduce the count removes one of the benefits of having them in the first place). A database makes sense - as does SOC between generation and distribution if it brings benefit - but immediately writing off SQLite because of write performance[1]? Similarly the arguments against pmtiles feel outdated and ignorant of the developing nature of the protocol (appreciate it's a 2yo post!).

OSM deciding on a format here has potential to significantly shape things to come. Hopefully Paul has progressed his thinking a bit since this was written.

[1] https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite

c.f. Nix survey results from last year, which indicates many of the respondents use NixOS as their daily Linux distribution. (e.g. number of responses for just "uses gnome" and "uses plasma" are about half of the number of responses for "use NixOS daily").
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983

Many of those who do use NixOS as a desktop Linux are enthusiastically happy about it.

Indeed, this user described the combination of nice features & rough edges as "cursed". (It's so good you won't want to use anything else, but it's too rough to recommend generally).
https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/the-curse-of-nixos

I think this is a good question and NOT monitoring services is something I need to fix. Consider https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/how-i-run-my-servers. His unit files do not mention any monitoring. There are a variety of sysadmin things I'm bad at. For example, I do not know off the top of my head where to look for cron job failures or the IP addresses of malicious ssh login attempts, to take two examples. This concerns me because normally I'm very curious, and even a bit of a completist, but when it comes to sysadmin tasks I tend to "hope for the best".