> About a third of a cent per LED, not even counting the rest of the hardware!
At €20 per 32x8 module (2000/256), that's €0.078 per LED which is considerably more expensive than a third of a eurocent, I think? Even if it was €20 for all 6 panels, that's still over a eurocent per LED (2000/1536).
> I'm amazed at how cheap the LED matrix listed in the parts list is.
Cheaper now - AliExpress will sell you 6 32x8 boards for £59.21 (3.85p per LED or ¢5.16 if you're a colonial) saving you ~€52 over the original €120 price.
Yep, came here to look. Says "Hello Select your address" in the header instead of my delivery address, and when I click it to set my address, the modal says "Sorry, content is not available."
Also seeing stock / availability display on product pages acting weird - things unavailable that certainly actually are, like dishwasher detergent.
Error 500 when I change my selected address in the checkout flow too.
Tangent: is there a future for AI offerings with guardrails? What kind of user wants to pay for a product that occasionally tells you "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"? Why would I pay for a product that doesn't do what I want, despite being capable? I predict that as AI becomes less of a bubble and more of an everyday thing - and thus subject to typical market pressures - offerings with guardrails will struggle to complete with truly unchained models.
If I were interviewing people for the position of personal assistant, I would probably find the resume entry "willing to grind up babies for food" to be a negative mark. You?
I'm not about to run OpenClaw, but I suspect similar capabilities will gradually creep in without anyone really noticing. Soon Claude Code will be able to do many of the same things. ("Run python to add two numbers? Sure, that's safe, run whatever python you want.") Given that it is now representing me in the world, yes I would not only like some guardrails, but I would also like to have some confidence that the company making those guardrails actually gives a sh*t and isn't just doing their best to fill in a checkbox. But maybe that's just me.
The big companies with reputations to protect will keep the guardrails in place. I don't think there's a huge market pressure to remove the guardrails since for the majority of uses the guardrails are fine. Pentagon excluded. And there can be serious fallout that makes them lose other customers when the public thinks the guardrails aren't enough (see Grok). But I'm sure open source models will exist without the guardrails.
I personally would love it if AI would say "Sorry Dave (or Pete), I'm afraid I can't spy on Americans for you," and I'd happily pay higher taxes to force the Pentagon to use that AI.
I am 100% sure that AI with guardrails will become the dominant models as they become more widely adopted, and the bigger issue you should be concerned with is can you even tell what those guardrails are.
While not a small host, I thought I would mention what I observed with OVH's VPS offering. I was considering their line of VPSes recently because of how generous the cores/ram quantities were given the price. For example, the smallest offering is 4 cores / 8GB at just over $4 a month.
What I found is that it is cheap because the cores, and presumably ram, is old. Like, 2013 era Xeon E3-1275 v3 old. But that's fine! Old hardware like this uses old ram that is less affected by the current shortage. It's good enough for my needs.
Question: how a person can provide VPS host srevices without being a reseller? Did you own the hardware? I am super interested. Hey, I even would pay for a series of articles about this!
I used to do site/vps hosting (millions of sites); we just bought slightly older 1U rack servers off ebay (and later our rack neighbour in the hosting room, who always had to buy the latest for his clients allowed us to buy of him) and kept filling local racks. We paid for a large bad quality bandwidth pipe for the large bandwidth eaters and good quality for the smaller traffic properties; we served some % of traffic per host through the good and after that through the bad. The porn / warez or whatever people didn't care and the business or hobby folk were happy as well.
In the end it got too much work with that many servers, something is always broken ; we had some virtualisation and failover stuff, but you have to go and repair it. We were basically two fulltime guys + some freelance and that meant getting into a car and driving for an hour every other day, storm or ice on the roads, christmas or birthday, doesn't matter. It made good money and we sold nicely, but servers are loud and we have been so often there for hours that even with ear protection I think it messed something up. Also crawling in small spaces for wiring etc isn't great for your body. I did learn a lot about Linux and the popular packages; we had our own patches and versions of most to shield from 0-days and save processing waste to put more on one machine without it degrading quality.
I would not do it with reselling ; you have no control; when the police called us for illegal/child materials and so on, we were in charge of removing/blocking that; if you resell, they will likely first just shutdown everything you have and then ask you for an explanation. And after a few time delete you and that's it. Or when there is something wrong technically, you are left holding the bag anyway as many will just blame you (and then after 'some time' your service 'suddenly' is back). You can hire much more expensive stuff with much better support but in our experience, that does not help much when there is a LOT of abuse (and with millions of sites, you have a lot of abuse that you cannot check).
Abuse complaints come to the IP address owner. If you have your own IP addresses, you don't need to worry about having your vendor terminate your account for abuse.
This is something I'd love to know, too. I like servers, infrastructure, and terminals, so doing something like this has been in the back of my head for a while now
Btw, Hetzner seems to have slightly cheaper offer for such small VPSs, and their disk i/o is much better than at OVH. (My own tests; I always compare the storage speed)
In their latest available annual report, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that in 2024 they brought in $185M in revenue/donations, of which they spent $178M. Of that $178M, $106M was spent on salaries and benefits, and $26M on awards and grants. So, that accounts for 75% of their spending. "Internet hosting" is listed at only $3M though there are other line items such as "Professional service expenses" at $13M that probably relate to running Wikipedia too.
Scroll down to the "Statement of activities (audited)" section:
I'm surprised no-air-conditioning datacenters aren't more common. It's a huge cost, and people love to complain about related water usage. I recall some Microsoft employees running a similar experiment years ago:
