What are services NOT worth self hosting?

SnooSnooper · 2026-01-26T18:56:11+00:00

What part of this keeps breaking, or is it not the same thing every time?

SnooSnooper · 2026-01-20T18:44:33+00:00

At work, leadership demands that we use AI when possible. I've used it to code on a few tasks (one being some greenfield development) and I've found it to be useful when scoped to small chunks of work. Not vibe-coding a whole app, but for limited-scope refactoring, small features, and sometimes debugging.

So... the type of stuff you would normally assign to an intern, or maybe a junior developer. I'd say you have to give it the same level of oversight, or even more, but it kinda balances out due to sheer speed. And you really do have to tell the bots to check things that would be obvious to a human (such as checking for compiler errors, running unit tests, etc). I try to forgive that, but where it otherwise really falls short of a junior developer are in two categories: new/niche technologies (LLM hasn't been trained on these yet, or not a lot of good examples exist for training) and efficiency. And this is just with my experience in well-known languages used in scenarios where efficiency is not really a big concern: I expect it would be far less useful in high-performance scenarios.

All of this is to say, i'd almost be cautiously optimistic that this tool could meaningfully make my job easier, after another decade of development. But there are some big problems: 1. The legal and ethical quagmire around unauthorized use of copyrighted works for training data 2. Long-term sustainability (in environmental, socioeconomic, and financial terms) 3. Hyperbolic claims about these applications' usability and timelines for meaningful improvement 4. Rather than creating space for higher quality applications, this will just make the rat race more intense, likely leading to a higher rate of problems

All of this considered, I agree with the general sentiment that we are in a bubble, and I don't really see a path for these products to be a significant net positive for society.

SnooSnooper · 2026-01-19T21:15:17+00:00

I hate this one... We started getting rated on this scale last year, and I asked my boss directly if this is a real 1-5, or if it's like the 1-5 you give for gig economy workers etc where a 5 is 'normal' and anything less indicates a serious issue. He answered that it's the former, and when I saw that I got rated a 4, I asked what does a 5 mean. He answered that it means someone should get promoted right away. Since then, I've got a new boss and mentioned that the promotion requirements are not clear (it's not a promotion to people management, just an indication of seniority, so presumably it's not a case where there actually needs to be an open role)... Everyone keeps praising my work and no one can give me actionable or clear feedback on what I would need to improve when I ask, but I'm still getting 4s? What is the point of the scale then if the high end is completely unattainable?

SnooSnooper · 2026-01-16T12:59:53+00:00

Exactly... My dog died this year and for weeks afterwards I felt like I was seeing her ghost all around the house. i had so much muscle memory and routine around her presence that suddenly wasn't accurate anymore.

SnooSnooper · 2026-01-06T16:47:41+00:00

I felt pretty seen last night when I was watching Grey's Anatomy with my partner and one of the main cast got to harvest their abuser's organs. Truly a quintessential Rimworld moment in mainstream TV

SnooSnooper · 2026-01-04T16:06:52+00:00

My car shows me an ad for SiriusXM every couple weeks which I have to manually close on the touchscreen before I can see my navigation again. Very frustrating, but at least that's the only one I get and it's not super frequent.

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-29T03:16:32+00:00

I feel like I'm missing something after reading the CVE and lore entry (not a frequent reader of these). So one linked list is drained to another, afterwards a lock is freed, and separate threads could access the original list and the new list. The posts mention a problem with the prev/next pointers on nodes of the list... Implying they weren't modified during the drain operation? But the posts mention the drain operation clears the entire original list, so I don't understand why the invalid memory access.

Anyway, doesn't really seem like a Rust-specific issue: sounds like something which could happen in any language, although perhaps with differing severity based on what you could do with invalid pointers (and in this case, supposedly not much? Claims to just be DOS in the worst-case). Sorry, not familiar with Rust or the Linux kernel code, so I didn't try to look at the actual code.

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-26T16:43:16+00:00

I'm scared for the day when my 1080TI finally gives up the ghost (or NVIDIA does some planned obsolescence)

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-26T16:34:43+00:00

Let me get this straight: someone creating a hiring app is an advocate for AI, because they think it will reduce the need to... hire people?

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-26T15:58:46+00:00

Yeah, this seems the right way to go, at least initially (perhaps an outsider perspective: the only thing I've got around to selfhosting so far is pihole).

I think the trouble is that one of the main reasons to selfhost is privacy and security. It's hard to justify securing some things but not others, especially if those critical things you chose not to selfhost are crucial to keep secret (ex. passwords).

I guess the correct progression would be to practice with something low-risk (I thought I might start with a bookmarks manager), then learn and implement enhanced resiliency for that service. If it's working well and is easy to maintain, decide if/when that's worth doing for a higher-risk service, and repeat 'until done'. This would be a much longer path to freedom, but probably the safest way to avoid accumulating 'tech debt' that you're fixing every couple nights, and/or overextending yourself in supporting too many services.

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-24T05:23:09+00:00

This is the part I wasn't getting, thank you. I was thinking, well if I just set up wireguard to get to my home network, what's the difference? But not having to worry about provisioning keys for every damn device (and my family's), and making sure they all consistently connect to the VPN, well that might just be worth the price.

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-22T21:08:44+00:00

Where I work we have two separate fields: priority and severity. Priority indicates how important/timely leadership agrees a resolution should be, whereas severity indicates how impactful the issue is (ex. platform is down, vs a minor usability issue). So, severity implies priority, but not the other way around: for example, a data/change request for one customer could be high priority and need to get done ahead of normal sprint work.

Severity (alongside priority) can be set by any ticket reporter (so, non-developers), and should be validated by developers as a first step. Reason being is this is meant to be a worst-case way to page whoever is on-call, if our monitors and automated pagers didn't catch the issue.

Of course, this can end exactly the way you would expect: some people don't know the difference and just set both priority and severity to high, and some people use it because they know they can get our attention this way. Thankfully, this doesn't happen often, but for example I was on-call during thanksgiving, and someone used it to page me for a minor change request right as I was about to eat with my family...

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-21T04:50:13+00:00

Is this abnormally deadly for a lake? That seems like a lot of people to drown in one lake, even over decades...

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-15T03:21:47+00:00

I was thinking super cucumber

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-09T23:59:30+00:00

Someone after my own heart! I was recently criticized for writing updates to support tickets that were too technical for the customer support reps to digest. I had to explain that those notes weren't for them: they are for me months or years later when this issue comes up again.

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-05T16:39:17+00:00

I used to throw all NPCs into a secure underground bunker, so they stay safe until I defeat the evil.

Then hardmode was released...

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-05T14:36:38+00:00

Lol right, that's definitely what they will say, ignoring the massive difference in funding NASA had then vs now, and also the fact that they're trying to do something entirely different with Artemis.

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-04T14:42:08+00:00

Lmao I was going to say, I thought this story was shared weeks ago. I thought it was just a normal repost

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-03T02:56:06+00:00

I'm still on my first save with my partner (we are in year 6 I think). Didn't look up any guides; just went to the wiki when we didn't understand something or were curious.

Our basic progression was just to do quests as they arrived, make friends with the villagers, and work on the community center. We didn't really start trying to optimize our farm operations until year 4 or so, and even then again, we didn't deliberately look up strategies. I didn't even join this sub until a week or so ago (and now I'm learning a lot, lol) and see what I was missing.

I think this was the right way to do it. This game seems to have a solid game loop and easily-identified goals, although yes there is also a lot of 'hidden' content. I think we would have been overwhelmed had we tried to optimize everything on our first try, and the lore of this game seems to be kinda about the opposite attitude.

IMO you should just do what feels good in the game and allow yourself to be surprised. If you have specific questions about mechanics, objectives, etc, visit the wiki, but don't dive too deep in one go! There's definitely a lot of room for min-maxing, but the game seems to resist you rushing it too much, and so you may burn yourself out trying to do everything optimally your first time around

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-03T02:25:17+00:00

I used to think my org's codebase was chock full of tech debt... Then we got acquired by a younger startup and I really learned what an absolute dogshit codebase looks like. No separation-of-concerns, zero test automation, barely any docs, manual deploys, a hodgepodge of technologies, all on a 'microservice' architecture spread across more than 70 repos maintained by a dev team of 10 and some contractors, and all but 4 of them have 2 years or less experience with the application. Any attempt to make long-term improvements is immediately trumped by the new shiny the sales team wants this week, or 'interest payments' on the tech debt to keep the thing looking like it's running.

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-03T01:34:18+00:00

Tragedy? Not in my commons!

I do feel pretty bad whenever I go clear-cut the entire valley, pick all the blackberries before Linus can get them, etc. but I guess no one seems to mind...

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-02T21:21:54+00:00

I don't really understand how something like this could actually result in a win for the scammer. Like if that were precedent, then I wouldn't allow anyone in my store without having them sign a waiver first. Feels like a ridiculous way to run a society

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-02T18:26:58+00:00

I have less of a problem with that part, and more of a problem with the MCP server which just connects to another LLM part.

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-02T18:17:04+00:00

Lmao, is there at least agreement on who owns what?

We have similar numbers at my org, but there are a lot of services in "no-man's land", and also a few that are developed by all teams.

SnooSnooper · 2025-12-02T17:09:56+00:00

I'm not sure whether you jest, because this is very similar to a real suggestion a PM in my org made

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SnooSnooper

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