markonen

If you see photos/videos of Hetzner datacenters, their servers are essentially plain, low-end motherboards (1G network, few slots) sitting on shelves (don't mean that as derogatory, it's an efficient design). What it does mean is that their per-server costs are absolutely dominated by the very components that are exploding in cost right now: RAM, SSDs and (to a lesser extent) CPUs.

LC connectors are smaller and what the actual SFP+ modules typically have. If you want to run a link with just one fiber, you need BiDi optics.

FS does custom multi-fiber cable assemblies too (beyond the duplex patches which is basically the standard), and they can also include pull eyes on them if that’d be helpful.

Single mode is a good choice, common wisdom used to be multimode for short runs but the single mode stuff is not much more expensive and the standard 10km optics will likely brute force the signal over any mistakes like cable kinks or dirt on the connectors.

There’s nothing hard about it if you can run pre-terminated patches. Which you typically can since the connectors are so small.

What a blast from the past. I added that!

TIL! My problem with them requiring sqlite was that I assumed it would make a high availability setup either hard or impossible. Maybe that's not true, but definitely off the beaten path for headscale.

Apparently they've deprecated Postgres support and now only recommend sqlite as the storage backend. I have nothing against sqlite but to me this looks like Tailscale actively signaling what they think the expected use of headscale is.

Just had my first uncorrectable memory read error on our servers in 10 years or so today (in Sacramento). I'd like to think it's related because the alternative (buying new DIMMs) is too horrifying to contemplate

In the performance tests they said they used "consensus among 64 samples" and "re-ranking 1000 samples with a learned scoring function" for the best results.

If they did something similar for these human evaluations, rather than just use the single sample, you could see how that would be horrible for personal writing.

From the PostgreSQL 17 Beta 1 announcement:

> PostgreSQL 17 adds a new connection parameter, sslnegotiation, which allows PostgreSQL to perform direct TLS handshakes when using ALPN, eliminating a network roundtrip. PostgreSQL is registered as postgresql in the ALPN directory.

I'm looking forward to being able to offload PostgreSQL TLS to a standard (non-pg-specific) proxy.

I moved away from Cloudflare—to self hosting our network infrastructure—because, while this didn’t happen to us, I was very aware that it could. We had a great deal on Enterprise for a couple of years, but zero guarantees that it would last (and some indications that it wouldn’t). I wanted to stop praying that they wouldn’t alter the deal.

Do you mean to imply that cloud services at higher levels of abstraction are cheaper per unit of compute than simple VMs? I believe you’ll find that the opposite is true.

At the scale discussed here, there are no free lunches.

Not really, because Concorde died in the seventies when the lie flat business seat didn't exist.

BA and AF managed to keep the zombie fleet going very profitably all the way until the end in the early 2000s, and that business wasn't killed by the lie flat business class seat either. It was killed by the impossibility of continuing to operate a tiny fleet of '60s planes forever.

Now if you said that the reason we don't have ANY supersonic passenger jets today is because lie flat business seats are good enough, then that's a more defendable position, but I'd still say that the overland flight restrictions limiting any SST to just a couple of routes is a bigger factor.

When I flew on Concorde the one thought I never had was "I wish I had a lie flat seat and half the airspeed".