I was curious and looked up the origins of ‘ham’. Apparently it originates from “ham-fisted” describing second-rate morse-code skills of telegraphists before radio was a thing
Interesting. I’ve originally heard it loosely attributed as a kind of homophone aberration where ‘ham’ comes from ‘hamature’. But maybe it’s vice-versa, or that’s a corporate line from the organization ARRL Amateur Radio Relay League.
I’ve been self-hosting Mastodon for a while and mostly using it to share bird photography, but also to provide comments on a static site. Since Mastodon and Lemmy both speak ActivityPub, those get crossposted to /c/flashlight so Lemmy comments are also included on my site. Federation is cool.
I don’t follow many accounts that post Fediverse meta stuff on Mastodon. While I have some interest in the best examples of that content, the only way to attract a broader community is to promote accounts and content appealing to the interests of that broader audience.
It could be their own cloud. I refer to my VPSes as “the cloud” even though that’s still self-hosting. My “cloud storage” would just be a 10TB storage VPS I’ve got.
That part of this comic really stuck out like a sore thumb. I can’t tell if it’s an oversight, a comment about the challenges of self-hosting, or subtle mockery of self-hosting hypocrisy.
Broadly, “the cloud” is just someone else’s computer. VPSes still fall into that definition. A lot of VPS providers describe themselves as “cloud” now too (eg one of the main hosts I use, HostHatch, describes themselves that way on their site).
If a single AWS EC2 or Lightsail server (which is essentially just a VPS in one region) is considered to be “in the cloud”, why not a much cheaper, more powerful server with a different provider?
I broadly agree that "cloud" has an awful lot of marketing fluff to it, as with many previous buzzwords in information technology.
However, I also think that there was legitimately a shift from a point in time where one got a physical box assigned to them to the point where VPSes started being a thing to something like AWS. A user really did become increasingly-decoupled from the actual physical hardware.
With a physical server, I care about the actual physical aspects of the machine.
With a VPS, I still have "a VPS". It's virtualized, yeah, but I don't normally deal with them dynamically.
With something like AWS, I'm thinking more in terms of spinning up and spinning down instances when needed.
I think that it's reasonable to want to describe that increasing abstraction in some way.
Is it a fundamental game-changer? In general, I don't think so. But was there a shift? Yeah, I think so.
And there might legitimately be some companies for which that is a game-changer, where the cost-efficiencies of being able to scale up dynamically to handle peak load on a service are so important that it permits their service to be viable at all.
My case is a variant of that - I used to host on a VPS, but the storage available was extremely expensive for, say, more than 16 GB. Tired of having to trim data literally daily, I went and purchased a home server with all the storage I would need. The problem? My home internet, being residential, is behind CG-NAT (not even a dynamic IP!), and that means renting a (much cheaper) VPS solely to expose my server to the open internet with a static IP.
For exposing your server to the internet, a $10/year 512MB RAM VPS would be more than enough. You can also get VPSes with way more storage for a reasonable price, especially during Black Friday. The VPS I’m hosting Lemmy and Mastodon on has 99GB disk space and is only $33/year, but that was part of a limited sale.
If by “easy” you mean someone else already spent 5 years and a nice chunk of cash training a model for it, which you get to use. And if you accept that it will not be accurate across all possible species and environments, only very specific subsets.
I’m waiting for the day Google Recaptcha will ask me “is that traffic light red?” and after a couple of seconds “hurry up, I’m approaching the intersection!”
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