Last night, I put up a post on my personal server about newsboat and sfeed, two RSS readers that I use. ~gome asked for a write-up, and I obliged. And I really flipped-flopped about putting it on ctrl-c.club, or my personal server. Ultimately, I decided that the post was about some services run on pgadey.ca and so I should host it there. But! That tension and flip-flopping was really interesting. Why didn't I want to self-host it? Why did I feel like it mattered?
On reflection, I think that social computing is important. It would be nice if ~gome's question got answered on ctrl-c.club. It is nice that they asked about my thing via ctrl-c.club. I feel like I want to keep that sort of thing inside our little community of hackers and tinkerers.
I've seen a few people move from the tilde-verse towards self-hosting. And that's a totally reasonable move. You get more control, you can do more things, you learn more about admin. But you also lose something about community and camaraderie. It is another push in the direction of individualization. More and more, I feel like people are all flying away from each other. Self-hosting, while very enjoyable, creates isolation.
Of course, self-hosting and participating in a pubnix are not mutually exclusive. Here I am doing both. But, I think the tension between social and solitary computing is very interesting.
One thing that I was thinking about working "headless" is that LaTeX rendering might be a hassle. It turns out that it's not! I've just tried the following hack: I'm working on a document with latexmk running locally (on zenbook) while editing and viewing a file (on officebox) via sshfs. It works fine.
This is a bit of a crazy way to work on a document. The idea is that officebox is doing all the storage and zenbook is doing all the rendering / displaying. What is to be gained here? The idea is that officebox is the "official" computer doing all the storing and zenbook is the "un-official" computer.
mapn :set relativenumber! :set number!
Stats: 371 days with records. 136683 total characters. This page was generated by a modified version of soc written by papa@tilde.center. For details about the modification, check out my write-up.