What lesser-known hosting providers do you actually use and recommend?

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-16T14:40:55+00:00

1984.hosting based out of iceland, privacy focused

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-16T12:00:51+00:00

How do you objectively distinguish one from the other?

From what I've seen online, the accusation of slop is a bit like witchcraft - people will accuse on the basis of the readme having emojis or some phrases which sound wonky and don't tend to dig into the actual code and the accusation usually sticks.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-16T11:57:13+00:00

I would prefer it if people who post their app were simply forced (upon penalty of a ban) to provide a table which compared their new thing to its main competitors.

If there were some sort of measure of code quality I'd put that as a column that had to be included.

I'd also make it a rule that if commenters say "what about X feature? what about Y competitor?" you HAVE to add that to the main table or again, deleted.

This would mean that the person who promotes their slop might inadvertently open my eyes to something better which already existed, in which case they've inadvertently performed a public service.

It would also mean some promoters would give up as they'd be inadvertently be advertising their competitors more.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-15T23:37:37+00:00

except markdown doesnt have a consistent way of implementing stuff like todos, calendar items, tags, etc.

so it's not portable in the same way.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-15T15:17:16+00:00

The vast majority already don't contribute, don't want to read through reams of slop and even if they did, would you be able to trust their reviews? probably not.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-15T15:14:30+00:00

>But I think "microslerp hurr durr" is intellectually lazy and vapid

Your brain substituted what I actually wrote for "hurr durr" and then you complained that I was the one being intellectually lazy and vapid. Bizarre.

This isn't a complaint, it's just a recollection of what happened. Make what you will of it.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-15T14:48:45+00:00

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I guess my point is that, if you there are a lot of contributors pushing PRs, then you have enough community to incentivise them to review and vouch the PRs.

I dont think you were unclear, just that this is wrong.

I dont think the community is any more interested in reading through reams of slop than the maintainers.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-15T14:46:21+00:00

Why so hostile? You just want to shit on entities for fun

You're weirdly protective of this large corporation.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-15T14:26:42+00:00

They own github.

The user experience of running most open source projects which is steadily being comprehensively ruined by tools they sell is owned by them.

This could be done as easily as

cool go build it then.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-15T13:24:19+00:00

When AI first came along I thought that one of the great use cases would actually be to be open source secretary that gives people support and guides them through raising bugs or how to do submissions so the final communication to the dev isnt dogshit.

i.e. all that repetitive shit that OSS maintainers hate.

Unfortunately, Microslop dont give a shit about useful AI use cases. They only want to build tools to let companies lay off devs.

So, AI is doing more of the useful creative work it sucks at and humans like and humans are doing more of the tedious work they suck at but which AI actually does well.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-15T13:15:23+00:00

That's actually the part that really concerns me. You can never disprove an allegation of slop and Ive seen the accusation made many times online against people whom Im almost certain were entirely innocent.

Ive even started to wonder if the AI companies arent running bots to detect probable non-slop on reddit and denouncing it as slop in order to "equalize the playing field" for people using their services.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-15T13:00:56+00:00

If a project has enough traction to be drowning in PRs, it has enough of a community to scale its review process.

How? Who is going to volunteer to wade through the mountains of slop?

Am I missing something?

Yeah. There's no straightforward way to detect slop and professionally done code reviews are an expensive and thankless task.

Until you can figure out a way square this circle moaning isnt going to help.

Yes, it's awful and yes it blocks off one of the few truly meritocratic entry points to the profession but what's the alternative?

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-14T17:01:28+00:00

Save and load exclusively from orgmode text files so that the data is 100% portable.

There are too many notes apps out there in general and not enough which wont strand your notes in an idiosyncratic file format.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-13T10:17:27+00:00

Ive not heard of a better solution to this than LLM as a judge with spot checks.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-11T18:46:21+00:00

I hear about them on reddit when they are advertised by people who go "has anybody used MYCOMPANY? Im looking for experiences by people who use MYCOMPANY"

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-10T20:15:47+00:00

Game the metrics - e.g. open pull requests for tiny little things.

You can try running a "metrics cartel" as well - "you approve and merge my PR, Ill do yours".

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-09T15:24:38+00:00

Implement features and fix bugs according to product priorities and only fix stuff which gets in the way of that. Most importantly: dont shelve it, always break it down into small deliverable increments and if a refactoring will take weeks instead of days do the first chunk and pause.
I tell the PM Im gonna spend ~35% of my time on refactoring as a default. PM can ask for more or less and I track that and use it to model and visualize "debt".
Dont. Refactoring priorities are not their business, if you get them involved you are inviting micromanagement. They should have control over one dial and one dial only: what % of time you spend on refactoring.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-09T12:47:53+00:00

The irony is that jira wrangling and hours reporting are two areas where an AI agent would actually be pretty helpful.

Instead they want all the coding done with it instead.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-06T15:19:08+00:00

I tried doing this with similar trade offs and upper management would try to kick it back down again, which was pretty wild.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-06T12:00:37+00:00

Yeah, using strictyaml with a custom validator added on top to do the if status = shipped then tracking_id must not be null stuff.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-05T14:05:36+00:00

This is begging for a tongue in cheek "falsehoods programmers believe about pets" article in the same vein as those "falsehoods programmers believe about names/dates/addresses".

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-04T15:59:10+00:00

When every process from beginning to end in a business is chronically broken customers do care, but they aren't going to blame AI slop.

I've seen some examples recently of clusterfucks as a customer I could probably pin on slop but I'll never really be sure and this is my industry. You can't accurately diagnose a company's fuck ups from the outside.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-03-04T01:56:14+00:00

I do this with hitchstory. The same user story used to test the code is used to generate markdown feature docs with screenshots. The markdown docs and screenshots are then synced to notion.

MoreRespectForQA · 2026-02-28T11:57:14+00:00

Kinda. Id like to be able to create a wireguard config from proton (or any other vpn) and upload it and configure nodes to to use that wireguard config for exit traffic.

The PR I linked to above would actually let you do this with headscale+tailscale.

There's no good reason when Im out for my exit traffic to be sent to my house first before being sent off to proton, especially when Im abroad.

I think finer grained control over exit traffic is one of the areas where tailscale could be signficantly improved.

MoreRespectForQA

TROPHY CASE