anyfactor

I often tell myself that I am conscious and rational when it comes to gifts. I don't care about brands, but rather the value something offers. Yet I do have a soft spot for "Made in Japan" Casio vintage watches and Sony devices.

To me, they represented the highest form of functional and consumer utility at a justified price. No fluff, no marketing that bordered on propaganda. Japanese consumer technology meant something incredibly precious to people in underdeveloped and developing nations.

It wasn't just about utility. It was about social status, too, and owning a generational asset that would continue to work for decades.

A Japanese consumer device meant that you had worked hard to afford a luxury, and that luxury did not derive its merit from a brand name, but rather from manufacturing ethics, quality, and the long-term, sustainable value it offered, all while being at the cutting edge of technology.

A Rolex watch uses essentially the same mechanical principles that have existed for generations. Its merit today is largely in its brand, not in being at the cutting edge of technology. An iPhone, on the other hand, is largely seen as consumable. Most modern electronic devices are treated as disposable, depreciating products.

But a Made in Japan Casio watch in the 1980s or 1990s was an asset.

There is a beauty and a tragedy in those vintage Japanese watches.

I see it when I talk to people in their 60s or 70s who struggled to raise families in developing countries on middle-class incomes. A Casio calculator for their children when they start their high school. A Sony TV for the family to gather around and watch. A Toyota as their first family car.

These weren't merely consumer products. They were milestones. They represented years of hard work, sacrifice, aspiration, and the dignity of finally being able to afford something that was genuinely well made. Something that would last. Something that could be passed down.

I don't want to hear about GDP, artisanal blue jeans, or deer based tourism industry when it comes to Japan. I see how an industry and an economy that once produced these things on such an extraordinary scale have been diminished.

I don't want to rationalize it or dissect it.

I simply find it truly beautiful what that nation once built on an industrial scale.

In another comment, I mentioned that I was “the guy who knew about computers but was more approachable than the IT guy.” Even the rudest people tended to soften their tone when talking to me. I think when it comes to IT, most people’s default reaction is frustration. Trying to turn that frustration into a lesson can be frustrating at any age.

My approach was always: let me fix it first, then hand over the solution. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to follow up with “how did you fix it?” In my experience, 9 out of 10 people didn’t ask. The 1 out of 10 who did were often just making small talk.

The conversation was usually about how they ended up in that situation and what they wanted to achieve. I fixed they talked mostly to vent. That is part of the process.

In software engineering and professional culture, we often ask, “What have you tried so far?” That can be frustrating. The person you’re helping isn’t someone you have authority over—you either help them or you don’t. This cuts both ways, as they do not have authority on you to have you help them.

My thesis always has been people are generally polite. It’s not about manipulation or being overly conscious of achieving a goal. Impolite people usually are struggling with something internally, so you should pity them.

I have worked with people in their mid 30s who had an utter disgust for computers. I was “the guy who knew about computers but was more approachable than the IT guy” at a large office. Even though some people hate doing this kind of work, I always enjoyed it. Sometimes, people would hang around my desk first thing in the morning to get help with IT issues.

I made contacts with the executive team when I had to sign them up for their ChatGPT accounts and set up their VPNs (which often just involved pressing a button). They saw a YouTube ad about how a VPN kept them safe, and they paid for a year in advance...

People of all ages can have a hard time dealing with technology. And to be honest, the IT ecosystem has become adversarial. About a decade ago, installing antivirus software would eliminate many risk factors. But these days, with sponsored content and advertisements, there are so many ways people can mess up their systems.

I am sorry for the late reply. Everyone says "you need backup" but that is the thing, I need just scripts. But I will look into your recommendation for sure. Thank you!

My VPS was purged due to a platform hack. I did not keep a backup, and I am trying to figure out what to do. There is no plug and play solution for backup. From what I understand, I have to set up rsync and dump files via cron to a Raspberry Pi. But there is no snapshot-like feature.

I am using KVM from Cloudcone (their virtualization software was hacked about a week ago) and I am using RPI4.

Then I need to set up my old website again, which is a pain in the butt. I hard-coded cron and a git-based auto-deployment feature (I think).

This is surprising to me. I actively used Heroku during the early to mid 2010s. I do not remember ever seeing the Salesforce logo there much later.

I think the "Heroku story" was less about technical limitations, but everything except technical limitations. More than a decade ago, I started learning and building on Heroku and hosted all my side projects and client projects on Heroku. Then when they got acquired, I was naive; then they removed their free tier and that broke my trust.

I primarily worked on PoC/MVP development where I worked to bring ideas to something barely tangible. And Heroku's free tier decisions meant it was a barrier for developers to develop on their platform. Pay first, develop later. It was like the rest of the industry.

After that, I just exited containerized platform-based application development entirely because convenience and having that weird developer philosophy "I must not pay because I can find a way" was less of a reason than sustainability. For me, containerized application platforms was about POC and MVP. If there was growth then me or the client can pay for the convenience. But if there was nothing, pretty easy to delete the project.

Then I committed to replicating the Heroku experience with a small VPS, backing up via rsync, and moving from PostgreSQL to SQLite. I can even charge clients for hosting (+ maintenance) on my VPS.

I do not know, to me containerized application platforms are limited by commercial challenges rather than technical ones. I see tons of containerised application platforms, but the trust has eroded because of a single company.

I have changed my development facility and laid the groundwork to not commit to these platforms. Sustainability over convenience.

Sure, I understand and respect folks at fly.io, render, railway, and even the open source variants of these companies (Caddy etc.). But there is no sustainability guarantee for these platforms. It was not just about the "free tier", to me it transcends to a philosophical point about building applications in general. Sure, there could be a new era with AI making MVP/PoC development easy through hosting in containerised applications, but that is a tangent point.

If Heroku were doing everything right, there would not be a dozen application platforms out there, but they made mistakes and, in my opinion, made the entire containerised application platform model untrustworthy.

Thorium powerplants, nuclear fusion powerplants, solid-state batteries, quantum computing, and TSMC producing chips in the US are news that should be considered speculative until they go into production. There has been plenty of coverage, but little real-world utility or impact from these technologies so far.

The projects I worked on always had a mechanism to dump data into a proper database. For example, I built a daily scraper to collect some of the inventory. I didn’t keep all the data in a single sheet. Instead, all the data was stored in a cloud-based managed SQLite or PostgreSQL database, or sometimes a local SQLite database. Only the day's data was stored in Google Sheets because the client wanted to see the spreadsheet themselves and have the UI be accessible for their users.

In a separate comment, I mentioned how Mozilla should have been more like Proton with their cloud storage, VPN, password manager, and cloud office suite.

In fact, they should have done that a decade a ago.

Mozilla has been around since the late '90s and should have evolved beyond just being a browser company. They launched a VPN service when VPNs were already everywhere, and they did the same with a bookmark manager when others were already offering similar solutions. Mozilla is always catching up, never leading, and that's a common issue with many big open-source and free software companies. They often pretend to be a business that isn't heavily propped up by big tech donations.

If I were leading a browser company, my focus would have been aggressively directed towards small business software. I’d create an internet and privacy-focused affordable minimal business software suite that lives within the browser — a combination of Proton and Zoho. And I’d strongly avoid building things that should be browser extensions.

I've built quite a few dashboards while working on proof-of-concept feature/product engineering. Even though people often think I'm joking, almost always the backend database was a Google Sheet. Google Sheets has great API support, easy to write functionality, convenient read and file dumps, works well with Pandas/SQL, and has a universally appreciated UX. Data validation can be annoying if the "admin" directly enters data, but for building a proof of concept, nothing beats Google Sheets. The data from Google Sheets would be passed through an API to a web UI/dashboard. The dashboard I built for end users was a simple Bootstrap (Vue-Bootstrap) table from the API, with enough easy-to-use filters and views to work out of the box. If the data was too large, I would use a templated snippet to convert the JSON into a card view. Ignoring long-term maintainability, this was one of the most foolproof ways to build dashboards. After that, I'd slap Firebase Auth on top, and that was it.

I haven't worked on these types of projects for nearly two years now. Folks I know use Retool or Softr with an API connectivity platform like Portable, Pipedream, or Zapier. If you're staring at a spreadsheet on a daily basis, the next step should be looking into an app builder combined with an API connection platform.

The only useful (or even paid) browser-integrated AI service I can imagine using would be a browsing history-aware AI chatbot. Essentially, it would just spit out a link from my history based on the context or prompt I give. Since privacy will be a crucial factor, I can imagine building an extension that reads page contents, stores them in a database, and connects to a self-hosted LLM.