Glitchvid

Alternative roots are an interesting concept, but really people just need good alternatives recursives.

Further, US national electric code states that a continuous load (3+ hours) is de-rated to 80% ampacity, so we're looking closer to 1400W.

The solution if you really need that much wattage in the US is to use a 240V circuit, dual pole 20A breakers are commonly available, Romex yellow is fine for 240V@20A, just gotta get a NEMA 6-20 outlet.

Mostly we need advanced packaging built out stateside, all the most advanced SoCs have to go elsewhere to be built into their final configuration.

Don't worry, the new strategy is to string a company along with talks of a buyout, then when their cash runs out and they declare bankruptcy, to buy all the assets on fire sale.

I've had failure rates as high of new BD discs, even.

The US BD pressing plant shut down a while ago and the new ones are very hit or miss, I've gotten several that were heavily scratched or otherwise unreadable – brand new in sealed case, from the only NA factory.

If they were a small or free service I wouldn't have much issue, but they do charge, I don't think it's too much to ask that they at least attempt to scrape the wider web.

Building their own database seems the prudent thing long-term, I don't doubt they could shore up coverage over Bing. They don't have to replace the other indexes wholesale, just supplement it.

They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can't.

Running a scraper doesn't need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.

Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn't extremely broad, unfortunately.

I've been using Kagi for the last year+.

Personally, I wish they'd tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.

Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they're limited by their existing index providers, I wish they'd run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.

In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.

Very interesting move, you really would think that a unified storage provider would scale very well, and hedges the business on both sides.

I've really liked WD, I exclusively use their enterprise HDDs and haven't had a single failure (bar one caused by incorrect shipping) and their SSDs been similarly good offerings.

Matrix is probably something worth looking at, at least from an intellectual standpoint, for you. It uses shared message state and a DAG, plus some fancy perfect forward secrecy (using Signal's Double Ratchet algorithm), which is at least interesting. There's also Tox (chat/protocol) if you want totally distributed chat.

Personally, I really like distributed models from a theoretical standpoint; but for end-user applications they pose very difficult constraints, we live in a world with ⪅50% publicly routed IP for one, they fundamentally require immense data replication, latency in peer-finding, bandwidth constraints, and ultimately sub-par UX. I thought IPFS with a way to pay nodes to pin content was a really neat idea, but hasn't caught on, for example. Not to discourage you, if you think it's workable then have at it, but I think it at least explains the current state of things.

I do think the other home server implementations gaining parity (production-ready) with the reference home server would go a long way. I haven't run a home server but I've heard from those that have that it really has a hard time scaling. (Though this serves as impetus to give it a try over spring break)

Which brings me to the caveats of the protocol, I personally don't think the design is ideal, it's more described as a distributed message bus, what I've read of the spec it's over engineered, it made good decisions wrt using modern web technologies (JSON, WebRTC), but it didn't scope itself to the particular task.

That said, I haven't written a federated protocol, and they have. But if I was going to, I'd really want to look at Discord and see how to copy a lot of that model, but break parts of it out to facilitate federation:

I originally wrote a huge hypothetical design here that I speculated would fare better, but honestly the specifics become less relevant, point is that the shared state of rooms is a real challenge, and one out of scope for just a federated instant messaging system, and I'm no longer certain it's viable.