A mirror of Anna’s Archive.

Information is meant to be free.

…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.

Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.

What I find incredible is just how slow-moving and cruft-filled it has become.

For example, DotNet has had string interpolation since C# 6, back in 2015. That’s a decade, already.

Java recently yoinked their implementation because they just couldn’t make it work.

That’s damning.

Right now - ignoring the wider ecosystem and looking purely at the core language - I am seeing the very latest LTR version of Java as being on-par with C# pre-2010 in terms of continual material improvements and ease of use.

Yikes.

I still use Java, but… yikes.

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.