3 ms·

The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of tr

The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. The original home computing explosion didn't come about because of the power of those early platforms -- it was because the thrill of accomplishing something under the limitations of a popular platform is the reward early pioneers needed to keep going. So yeah, the Pi is not ideal for so many use cases, but successfully arm-wrestling this well-known-but-limited platform into serving web traffic or doing something equally useful is why people keep using it.

kkielhofner 3y ago
> The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. How is this any different from self-hosting on any other hardware? Other than the admittedly fun and engaging aspect of putting the work in to string together a bunch of USB hubs, cabling, and SATA bridges, etc. I think a lot of that thrill comes from the challenges of pounding a square peg into a round hole along the journey. Again, whatever works for you but it's been curious to watch it progress over the years.
- mmastrac 3y ago
  You're right about the square peg, but the big difference is the size of the community. I could do this work on any platform but if there's only a handful of people that know what a MangoPi or KiwiPi (names invented) can do, there's a whole lot of context to understand how cool a hack is. Ditto for reading about projects -- it's great that Alice's Intel nuc can serve X pages per second, but it's easier to read and understand the technical feats of someone hacking off traces on a Pi 4 to expose PCIe because we all know the limits of the platform.
  - kkielhofner 3y ago
    The comparison to other ARM SBCs is kind of a non-starter to me considering what the software support and ecosystem/community looks like. I have an entire graveyard of ARM SBC Raspberry Pi alternatives and I've given up on that approach due to the horrendous software support and fringe ecosystem. However, I'm primarily talking about x86_64 here and is has the broadest software support and biggest community of all.

kkielhofner 3y ago

> The answer to all of this is "where's the fun in that"? I can afford to pay Amazon <$10 a month to host progscrape.com given the absolutely minimal amount of traffic I get, but there's something fun about using an underpowered, popular platform to build something that a handful of people use, and keep it up over time. How is this any different from self-hosting on any other hardware? Other than the admittedly fun and engaging aspect of putting the work in to string together a bunch of USB hubs, cabling, and SATA bridges, etc. I think a lot of that thrill comes from the challenges of pounding a square peg into a round hole along the journey. Again, whatever works for you but it's been curious to watch it progress over the years.

mmastrac 3y ago
You're right about the square peg, but the big difference is the size of the community. I could do this work on any platform but if there's only a handful of people that know what a MangoPi or KiwiPi (names invented) can do, there's a whole lot of context to understand how cool a hack is. Ditto for reading about projects -- it's great that Alice's Intel nuc can serve X pages per second, but it's easier to read and understand the technical feats of someone hacking off traces on a Pi 4 to expose PCIe because we all know the limits of the platform.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  The comparison to other ARM SBCs is kind of a non-starter to me considering what the software support and ecosystem/community looks like. I have an entire graveyard of ARM SBC Raspberry Pi alternatives and I've given up on that approach due to the horrendous software support and fringe ecosystem. However, I'm primarily talking about x86_64 here and is has the broadest software support and biggest community of all.