First you probably need some silent, persistent and occasionally cantankerous folks that can grudgingly work on annoying boring problems all night just because they want to solve it no matter what. If you have a few of those, you really have to start looking for more social people that can glue the herd of cats together so all noses point the same way.
My experience has been that solving a very technical problem and solving a social one are very different skill sets and very few people have both skills and are capable of using both of those skills at the same time.
> First you probably need some silent, persistent and occasionally cantankerous folks that can grudgingly work on annoying boring problems all night just because
So you want people who are willing to be overworked and underpaid with the statistically worthless equity?
What next? You also want people who after they do a 996 work schedule to also have enough “passion” to work on open source projects during their free time?
It's important to keep cortisol low, and over-exercise can cause cortisol to spike – as does depression in general, hence the sleeping difficulties many depressed people experience. Likely that's why resistance training and HIIT are more helpful in this case as there is less built up of stress hormones.
I've been diagnosed with moderate to severe depression, and I'm a trial runner and do CrossFit. It's a balancing act to find strength and feeling capable through sport without increasing insomnia and early waking, likely because of cortisol spikes.
Sport does more for me than antidepressants, which have little effect than making me feel tired all the time. I've gone through a whole battery of them with little success and I've become quite critical of them. But I'm lucky to generally like sport and eat pretty healthily; I can imagine for others that can be an extra stressor they really don't need.
You just described causes of depression, like divorce, social isolation and being unemployed. I know there are people that can feel free in a place as horrible as a concentration camp, but most of us have some basic needs that have to be met to feel OK and have some hope.
Some people have actual neurotransmitter imbalances, but many of us just have monkey brains that don't know how to deal with (real, abstract) modern-day stressors that trigger a fight-or-flight response.
Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read? Or content that makes either extreme of the political spectrum feel passionate? I fear it would drown out little truths and balanced opinions.
Many European countries have decent authentication, banking and payment system alternatives or even innovative solutions. I think, like usually, it's just a problem to break out of national or regional circles into something pan-European.
A lot of people seem to agree that relying on a handful of too powerful American companies, especially in the ad and social media space, is a terrible idea and running foul of privacy requirements. Remains to be seen if some larger alternatives manage to pop up though. The European landscape is pretty fragmented.
While it's true Europe might not be producing the next Apple or Google, there are lots of alternatives, like national academic login systems, logging into third parties with bank credentials or government IDs... Solutions that depend less on one commercial company capturing the market, that are in place on a national level and work well. It's a different landscape. Factors like current day political turmoil make people much less trusting of "American" solutions. It remains to be seen if this goes beyond sentiment into some actual pan-European solutions that (claim to) safeguard privacy and data.
What about non EU users? Americans don't second guess themselves when they slap google/apple/meta sign in only. They know everyone in the world will never pause when they see their logo on the buttons. To reach this scale of worldwide adoption for a European service requires a massive amount of investment.
What's even the entry point? Google and Apple make the devices that everyone uses. Even if you build a service like you suggested, how do you ensure that everyone is using it?
> They know everyone in the world will never pause when they see their logo on the buttons.
As in, that they won't run away when they see them or that they will all happily use them? If you mean the latter, then it's just false.
Also, why do you assume that such product would need to be used worldwide all of a sudden? Having something for the local market would be sufficient to call it a success in this instance. There's an ICC judge who could tell you a thing or two about having a whole digital life on the hook of services from one country, so reducing this dependency is a clear benefit.
> Also, why do you assume that such product would need to be used worldwide all of a sudden
Because I'm talking about not running on any American services. Which Americans can do and do all the time. I don't see how we can reach a point where we can one day not include google/apple sign in and not lose a massive number of potential users. Sure it's possible that one day we'll see a "Sign in with EU login" but below it they're always be sign in with google/apple, for a very long time.
That post mostly concerned infrastructure, you won't likely run the same managed DB with 2 different providers, for example, but you can well offer sign-in with EU/non-EU options, and as long as the first one is viable, I'd say that would already be a win in terms of OP's goals.
I think the landscape has changed with those hyperscalers outcompeting open-source projects with alternative profit avenues for the money available in the market.
From my experience, Ceph works well, but requires a lot more hardware and dedicated cluster monitoring versus something like more simple like Minio; in my eyes, they have a somewhat different target audience. I can throw Minio into some customer environments as a convenient add-on, which I don't think I could do with Ceph.
Hopefully one of the open-source alternatives to Minio will step in and fill that "lighter" object storage gap.
Apart from Minio, we tried Garage and Ceph. I think there's definitely a need for something that interfaces using S3 API but is just a simple file system underneath, for local, testing and small scale deployments. Not sure that exists? Of course a lot of stuff is being bolted onto S3 and it's not as simple as it initially claimed to be.
SeaweedFS's new `weed mini` command[0] does a great job at that. Previously our most flakey tests in CI were due to MinIO sometimes not starting up properly, but with `weed mini` that was completely resolved.
Minio started like that but they migrated away from it. It's just hard to keep it up once you start implementing advanced S3 features (versioning/legal hold, metadata etc.) and storage features (replication/erasure coding)
There's plenty of middle ground between "just expose underlying FS as objects, can't support many S3 operations well" and "it's a single node not a distributed storage system".
For my personal use, asynchronous remote backup is plenty for durability, a Bee-Link ME Mini with 6x4TB NVMe is plenty of space for any bucket I care to have, and I'd love to have an S3 server that doesn't even attempt to be distributed.
Yes I'm looking for exactly that and unfortunately haven't found a solution.
Tried garage, but they require running a proxy for CORS, which makes signed browser uploads a practical impossibility for the development machine. I had no idea that such a simple popular scenario is in fact too exotic.
From what I can gather, S3Proxy[1] can do this, but relies on a Java library that's no longer maintained[2], so not really much better.
I too think it would be great with a simple project that can serve S3 from filesystem, for local deployments that doesn't need balls to the walls performance.
The problem with that approach is that S3 object names are not compatible with POSIX file names. They can contain characters that are not valid on a filesystem, or have special meaning (like "/")
A simple litmus test I like to do with S3 storages is to create two objects, one called "foo" and one called "foo/bar". If the S3 uses a filesystem as backend, only the first of those can be created
My experience has been that solving a very technical problem and solving a social one are very different skill sets and very few people have both skills and are capable of using both of those skills at the same time.
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