Yep, and I see evidence of that over complication in some ‘getting started’ questions where people are asking about really convoluted design points and then people reinforcing that by doubling down or sometimes mentioning other weird exotic stuff, when they might be served by a checkbox in a ‘dumbed down’ self-hosting distribution on a single server, or maybe installing a package and just having it run, or maybe having to run a podman or docker command for some. But if they are struggling with complicated networking and scaling across a set of systems, then they are going way beyond what makes sense for a self host scenario.

Based on what I’ve seen, I’d also say a homelab is often needlessly complex compared to what I’d consider a sane approach to self hosting. You’ll throw all sorts of complexity to imitate the complexity of things you are asked to do professionally, that are either actually bad, but have hype/marketing, or may bring value, but only at scales beyond a household’s hosting needs and far simpler setups will suffice that are nearly 0 touch day to day.

Fear will keep the local systems in line.

The question is how many people would be receptive to a conspiracy theory.

There are some that will see, in person, an earthquake collapse buildings including one that kills Trump and assume the earthquake was made to assassinate him, but not too many folks would bite.

If he gets taken out by a “lone gunman”, then a lot of people are going to assume conspiracy.

Given his lifestyle, age, and physique, the most likely seems to be some cardiac event which will still be bad because some folks will scream “poison”.

Best case is that the voters reject a still-living Trump, and weather the least bad of the likely unfounded conspiracy theories.

Oh no, that would just open up a whole huge can of worms.

If he goes, then it would be bad if there’s even a whiff of it being murder or assassination. As it is when he dies there’s going to be conspiracy nuts that will declare it an assassination no matter what.

I know someone who still calls themselves a Republican but hasn’t voted for a Republican in the general election in decades. They argue that they are still a Republican at heart, but all the republican candidates have been terrible.

They said they were going to vote for McCain, but when he picked palin, they couldn’t vote for that either.

This applies down ballot. They do vote in the GOP primaries, but their preferred candidates almost always lose.

I plan to vote for Biden.

I do not plan on telling any polls that. If Biden polls too well, I’m convinced voters will be complacent and risk not voting.

For 90% of static site requirements, it scales fine. That entry point reverse proxy is faster at fetching content to serve via filesystem calls than it is at making an http call to another http service. For self hosting types of applications, that percentage guess to go 99.9%

If you are in a situation where serving the files through your reverse proxy directly does not scale, throwing more containers behind that proxy won’t help in the static content scenario. You’ll need to do something like a CDN, and those like to consume straight directory trees, not containers.

For dynamic backend, maybe. Mainly because you might screw up and your backend code needs to be isolated to mitigate security oopsies. Often it also is useful to manage dependencies, but that facet is less useful for golang where the resulting binary is pretty well self contained except maybe a little light usage of libc.

But it you already have an nginx or other web server otherwise required to start up (which is in all likelihood the case), you don’t need any more auto startup, the “reverse proxy” already started can just serve it. I would say that container orchestration versioning can be helpful in some scenarios, but a simple git repository for a static website is way more useful since it’s got the right tooling to annotate changes very specifically on demand.

That reverse proxy is ultimately also a static file server. There’s really no value in spinning up more web servers for a strictly static site.

Folks have gone overboard assuming docker or similar should wrap every little thing. It sometimes adds complexity without making anything simpler. It can simplify some scenarios, but adding a static site to a webserver is not a scenario that enjoys any benefit.

Because serving static files doesn’t really require any flexibility in web serving code.

If your setup has an nginx or similar as a reverse proxy entry point, you can just tell it to serve the directory. Why bother making an entire new chroot and proxy hop when you have absolutely zero requirements beyond what the reverse proxy already provides. Now if you don’t have that entry point, fine, but at least 99% of the time I see some web server as initial arbiter into services that would have all the capability to just serve the files.

The problem is with Trump, particularly, there’s good reason to be afraid.

“We want to punish the democrats for supporting Israel, so we are going to let Trump win”

GOP proceeds to double down on oppressive wars, no improvement for Gaza. Further, you get a government full of leaders that, in the wake of losing in 2020, openly pondered ways of just rigging the election so they don’t have to get votes to win anymore. You had laws proposed in GOP states to declare the legislature could pick whatever electors they wanted ignoring their voters. You had people running for non-partisan election administration positions promising they’ll make sure Republicans win, no matter what. They actively tried to send fake electors that particular cycle, even without any legal backing.

So, in at least one scenario, congratulations, you successfully admonished Biden for his misbehavior, and now, we have at least as bad misbehavior, and maybe some unwinding of democracy to make sure we never get to influence foreign policy ever again.

The thing is the concerns for control are pretty much moot in an EV.

Need torque right this second to overtake regardless of speed? It’s already there. Want efficient operation when you don’t need acceleration? It’s got the efficiency, even though it still has the power. Want a higher gear for a quieter ride? The EV is quiet all the time. Need a lower gear because you are going down a mountain and need engine braking to spare the brakes? EV constantly wants to do regenerative breaking so the brakes aren’t the first resort for allowing down anyway.

Now automatics try and are generally good at naturally providing for most of these. However you can feel them changing gears and may sometimes disagree with the shift point, e.g. the automatic may delay shifting more than I would because it wants to keep the general power band higher even if I know I can tolerate a bit slower ride for quieter engine. There’s also the delay when you punch it and it downshifts. In real terms, it’s almost certainly faster than your downshifting, but it feels worse because you are waiting on something else instead of it being your actions being part of the delay. Also you might want to downshift before pushing the pedal instead of a reaction to pushing the pedal. In any event, all but the most superficial concerns are not applicable to an EV.

My car had always been a stick shift. I bought an electric car and am very happy.

As a consolation, EVs can be considered “manual”, they never shift gears of their own accord. They just only have one gear… So it’s a one speed manual transmission…

Gitlab is an interesting project.

Admittedly looks good and has the feature set, but…

You dig in at all it’s a mess. If it screws up, it’s a mess. Every five minutes they seem to have another extremely severe security issue. Even when it’s working right, it’s a resource hog.

Has the feel of a lot of mismatched stuff duct taped together, but the duct tape looks great. So as a user, great. As an admin, a bit of a mess.

It’s not about them being dumb, it’s them not caring about the particulars of their platform. Can it play some mobile games? Can it keep them connected to their friends through text and social media? Once it meets those criteria, that’s enough.

Then comes the next challenge: social status. Particularly during the teen years, social status is a keen focus and every little thing is part of the equation. iMessage versus SMS and RCS means that an Android user can’t tell their peer is an iPhone, but iPhones highlight Android users very obviously. So if either platform might align with social groups, Apple is the one that makes it easy to identify “outsiders” and ostracize them.

So knowing that, fundamentally, both platforms will give them what basic stuff they want in a handheld computer, so they just care about the ability to use the differences to identify “in” versus “out” in every possible way that presents itself. Apple does that most obviously.

That’s the rub, management has no idea about the deliverables, they don’t understand the product or customers at all. They got spoiled by a self actualizing team that figured things out better than the hierarchical leadership, and effectively peer leadership.

When the group is broken up, then some folks stray, and while they are talented and working hard, they get caught up in their own little world when the work doesn’t organically come.

Frankly, while I bemoan how little our management does, I’m happier more directly engaging with clients, marketing, and sales. My peer groups that have clearly more direction handed down seem doomed to have suboptimal product inflicted by the game of telephone through the bureaucracy.

In short, I see challenges either way it gets sliced. Self directed teams with clear purpose and connection can thrive in any scenario, however I feel like you are lucky to find 2-3 people to make that team, and there’s some value to be added by having people along that might need some more clear steering.

Number of things at play.

Most companies can’t take advantage even in theory of saving costs if they have an office today. If they own it, who is going to buy in this climate? (keeping in mind that if it is office space, then it pretty much has to stay office space, without exorbitant effort and money to change it to something else) My company has 10 years left on their lease, with penalties of vacating early so bad that they would be just as well letting the lease run. If there’s one thing a company hates it’s being forced to spend money/have assets that are not seeing use.

Contributing to the above, a lot of these folks have a big part of their portfolio invested in real estate, so collapse of the office space segment of real estate would be bad news for them.

A lot of management looks awfully superfluous in a remote worker scenario. Without the visual aid of dealing with people in person, it seems like maybe you could double the sizes of departments, maybe erase a layer of middle management. So management needs people in person to maintain the appearance of relevance.

Companies also like to give tours to clients and show a busy looking office space of people working toward their customers goals. You need people in person in order for those tours to look adequately impressive.

Some of their levers to get longer work out of people work better in the office. For example, my office had way less parking than they had people coming in, and an overflow lot dangling a literal mile away from the buildings. In response to complaints that there’s no reasonable parking, that there’s no shuttle, that folks have to cross a fairly busy street without a signal light, an executive said “if you cared about your work, you’d come in early enough to get a good spot”. They considered people who came in at 8AM to be lazy slackers, because the real dedicated people came in at 7AM, even though office work technically started at 9AM for most of them.

Frankly, remote work isn’t objectively more productive across the board. You can find/create metrics to “prove” either side of the argument (measuring “productivity” is really subjective, and many of the studies are self-reporting where employees decide for themselves their productivity, or even outright state how productive the workers feel. In my experience, individual productivity may see a boost with improved focus, removal of commute, fewer work social distractions. However, the relevance of the work may suffer (for example, in my group one guy spent three weeks doing something no one needed done because he didn’t have the presence of others to remind him about what really mattered) and others that depend on collaboration may falter (for example, new college hire is left adrift because it’s really hard for an early career person to get traction in a pure remote scenario). We tend to care less about folks who are little more than icons next to text most of the day, or a disembodied voice for select meetings. Ambient collaboration takes a hit, as the barrier to talk to someone is a bit higher when you have to explicitly go to the trouble of typing a message or calling. It seems more intrusive.

As to why the message tends to be softball, well a number of things.

They don’t want to get into the “data” game because the employees can find studies with data saying the exact opposite. Employees have a vested interest in believing their favored data.

Other statements are too aggressive, and they want to try to maintain some semblance of morale by being the “good guys”. At least at the company level. From what I can tell, the corporate level at my job gets to send the happy, gentle prods to come into office, but the managers are expected to go as asshole as needed to “fix” the attendance problem.