sparky

Ask it to do something illegal, then wait to see if it starts its reply with some version of, “as an AI language model…”

/s

I, a human, am also here, doing completely ordinary human things, like buffering, and rendering. Have you defragmented your boot partition lately, fellow human?

We’d pour out a few bottles of rubbing alcohol somewhere with a “streak” back to where we were standing and then light it on fire. Basically catches ablaze for 5-10 seconds and then it’s gone, with minimal to no burning to stuff underneath. So obviously it’s not safe exactly. But we’d pull pranks with it. “Bro your bike is on fire, look!!”

Feels almost like going back in time, to the earlier days of the net. IRC, XMPP, Usenet… all distributed.

It’s not always public, but it’s designed for use in a cloud application environment, so it’s not literally DropBox, but the metaphor is useful to understand it in that, it’s a remote store not accessible by the local file system / device explorer, and it lives on a server whose specifics you don’t know or care about.

Block storage is also another option, but I believe it then becomes your problem to mount it, etc. You can think of object storage as a “cloud drive” that has its own web serving capabilities; you upload your files “somewhere” that now live in a cloud that you don’t have to manage, and that end users’ browsers can directly pull files from. it does tend to be cheaper as well. So some advantages there for our use case.

It’s like Bioshock except optimistic

Thinking about this a little more: I think yeah the HTTP requests will always hit your VPS, but if what you're saying is that pictrs is loading from object store and then re-serving them off your VPS, then an NGINX rule might be able to redirect the GET directly to the object store; so that instead of transferring the actual image bytes, it just 204's the browser through to the object store. I don't know how feasible this is but I may play around with it to see.

Ah! Noted. That said, it is definitely storing the bytes on the object store. I imagine someone clever with nginx or such could set up some rewrite rules to bypass pictrs entirely for GET requests, but unfortunately that's beyond my pay grade here.

Comment seen!

I assume the larger instances would probably know this already, since they likely have more skilled sysadmin teams than we one-man-show types, but very true - if anything it would save them money to a much greater degree than small instances!

Roger that.