As someone who cares about audio fidelity a lot, there is definitely a diminishing returns. You’ll see me here telling people who complain “I have to constantly turn volume up and down for dialogue in movies”. That’s because your sound is TV speakers, basically phone speakers, go buy a sound bar and your life will get infinitely better.

If you want to go further you can get a nice set of speakers, even surround sound, and it’s fun, but it’s not as impactful as the first step.

Then though if you’re already at a sweet 7.1 surround sound system, it’s not going to matter if you get the high end cables, or spend 5k on the most bestest receiver. At that point you’re just wasting money. You may get… 1-5% better fidelity for… 500% of the cost?

Some people honestly don’t have a sense of humor, and think their one joke is hilarious even when it’s beaten with a dead horse.

First, assume they’re not doing it to be malicious, and talk to them, say it was funny the first few times, it’s grown old and you’re tired of hearing it. It started off funny, but them saying it every time has switched to hurtful. Hopefully that’s enough to get them to stop.

If they don’t, then don’t blow up, but next time they drop it start saying “Yeah, you said that last time we were together too”, deflect the humor with neutrality. Jokes like that only work if people laugh, and if other people aren’t laughing then usually it stops.

Just don’t blow up. Blowing up sounds like a good idea, but will make you come off as “they can’t take a joke”

It’s all about your perspective and what you can handle. Housing is a great example. Do you pay for rent for 30 years while you save up to buy a house outright with no mortgage (but having paid rent that entire time on top of paying for the house) afterwards, or do you get the house now and pay the bank a percentage while you also get to live in the house.

The math seems bad when you look at one item, like paying interest seems like a lot. Until you realize the alternatives worse, like paying rent for 30 years and at the end you have nothing. At the end of the mortgage, you have a home.

It’s the same no matter what you decide to take financing on. Personally I agree, I only do it for house and car (although we were very clear about what terms we wanted for the car), and beyond that not much. I have a credit card I pay off every month to keep my credit score high. Beyond that, I never take financing from places.

Good practice. Good luck then! Let us know if you need anything, on matrix I’m @scrubbles:halflings.chat, feel free to DM with questions

That’s how I started too, so very good plan, and good way of thinking ahead. Ssd will be fast so the app will load fast for your users, and images can take a few seconds and no one will mind.

Make sure you have a solid backup plan for both

Basically for a cloud provider s3 storage is just any storage. It’s not a disk that needs to be high availability with programs reading and writing to it with an OS on top, its just blobs of data. Images, video, isos, whatever. Its meant for access that is lower than what a VM would need for an active program.

For matrix this is ideal for its content. An image uploaded will be read a fee dozen times, and then less and less until eventually it isn’t really needed ever unless someone scrolls and scrolls up.

So for hosting, if you store that on a disk you’re saying “this is critical to the operation of the software and must be highly available and optimized for vms reading and writing to it.”. Think like m.2 ssds. Blob storage then analogous to us home labbers to throwing it on a giant nas. Its there, may take a bit to load, but its there.

Then s3 has classes too, where if you need your data even less you can pay even less trading off access times, you can get even better rates if you know you need it extremely infrequently, like audit logs. Tape drives are actually used quite a bit for those opt-in low access tiers because if you think about it the data storage is incredibly dense, but opening up a tape can be minutes or longer to access. No problem if you’re pulling up some archive from 20 years ago.

If you’re running locally on your own system then yes you can use your own. You can use something like MinIO or Garage to self-host an S3 bucket, and then point Matrix to that

Docs would be helpful, I can’t find much of anything, I think you honestly did the best writeup.

Star Trek quotes is hilarious and perfect!

I’m not sure your level of understanding of cloud infrastructure, so let me know if you need me to go into more detail. Disk storage, like what is attached to a VPS/VM is very expensive, and it’s the 100GB drive you have attached. What is much cheaper is object/blob storage, known in AWS and most cloud providers as S3. This is far far cheaper for many reasons.

Matrix (and really I should say Synapse, what I use) can be configured to save images, photos, uploads, etc to save to a blob storage “bucket” instead of disk. So you can lower your disk from 100 down to something lower because your data is stored in blob storage (fully encrypted). For synapse, the module you need is here: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-s3-storage-provider

Thank you! I’m going to start playing with this and see what I can figure out! I’ll be referencing this frequently!

How do you do that, I’m very interested! Also good to see you Admiral!

You can set it to use object storage instead, much cheaper

My friend group has already moved to Matrix, and we’ve been happy

I Will never understand why the open source community hates the GPL license. Maybe they just haven’t seen themselves how big corporations taking advantage of free individual independent developers. I still remember the core.js developer, whose code is in pretty much every giant framework out there basically begging for any sort of income for his work while his family was going hungry in Eastern Europe. Angular, react, all major frameworks absolutely depend on it and never gave them anything.

They do have this, unless I’m not understanding. I run a space (same as discords servers) and in there I have channels that are just like discord’s.

They always forget that others deserve to have places without cars. Seriously why do they need to drive through a park. It’s a park.

I watched a guy pee on an electric fence! That was a fun day.

The real thing is that if we wanted fair and open elections we wouldn’t be looking internally to solve this, we’d be going to other countries who do and trying to emulate what they have. The fact that we haven’t even thought of doing that shows where the priorities are.

Sometimes it don’t be that way unless it do

Others have said it here better than I could, but I was the same way but for probably other reasons. My mother lost her home, not due to misfortune but because she couldn’t manage her finances. Quick splurge items and random ideas too priority over long term stability. Anyway, so I thought mortgages and loans were scary too.

Then I got educated on them. They’re not scary if you understand what you’re doing. Loans are not scary, they are tools to achieve your goals. A tool can be extremely useful to accomplish your goal, but you also shouldn’t reach for that tool every time either.

If your goal is to own your home, a mortgage is a great tool if you know what you’re doing. Learning about interest rates, how they’ll affect you, sitting down and looking at your long term finances and knowing what you can manage paying every month for the forseeable future is how you can calculate what works for you.

Where it gets scary is when people walk in, not knowing what they can afford and taking everything the bank will give them, not knowing how much they’ll be paying over time. That’s when things get predatory and scary. Knowledge is power as they say.

Now when I need a loan I go in, and I know what interest rate I want, what duration I want, and exactly how much I need, and the bank usually says yes. I’ve proven myself with my credit score to be a trustworthy person to lend to, and l can now usually get pretty decent terms.

Learn about finances, learn the math, and learn how you spend money. Once you get that knowledge it stops being so scary.