It reminds me a bit of one of the reasons Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes didn't catch on. It's difficult to make rectangular furniture work efficiently in a non-rectangular space. Likewise, it's difficult to efficiently use a non-rectangular window on a rectangular monitor.

They're becoming more popular in Florida, as a poured concrete geodesic dome is basically immune to a hurricane.

I'm currently working on an app that needs offline support, and I wish I had something like this when I started.

One of our requirements though is to be able to completely host in our own infrastructure. I know this is open source, but it would be nice if there was a simple path to self hosting.

PR in progress!

https://github.com/instantdb/instant/pull/2495

I'm confused by the messaging that instantdb has been open source... but we haven't been able to host it? What's the story here, and what's the change happening here?

From skimming the linked PR it looks like it's all been open source, but has been tightly coupled to their deployed instance. The PR appears to be decoupling things completely by making all hard coded values configurable.

Always been able to host it! We’ve had docker compose instructions since open sourcing.

Instant has evolved quite a bit in the last 18 months. With all the new functionality self-hosting has become a bit more fiddly.

This PR is aimed at making the process for self-hosting even easier.

I gave up on inbox zero a long time ago, so it isn't the emails themselves that bother me as much as the notifications that I get through my phone and smartwatch.

I now run each notification through an LLM and give it instructions on what to filter out. I accidentally disabled it recently and was startled at the flood of notifications--like when you browse the internet without an ad blocker and forget how bad it is.

Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.

I saw a video of guy who became an Amazon bestseller in a book category pretty easily by buying his own book.

Through my professional / personal network, I know someone who advertises himself as being a “Best Selling Amazon Author in XYZ category.”

It is semi niche, but I did some ballpark math, and about 72 sales rapidly would put him in the top spot for that niche.

That number sounds about right when he’s mentioned the gross $ sales of his book.

Pretty common for authors to get people to pre-order their books so when they go on sale they top the chart for that day (the book's release day) in their category.

Not even just for their category. "NYT bestsellers" has been manipulated like this since inception.

NYT bestsellers is also not a sales volume chart, there is an editorial lens to it as well

Pentium marketing was next level. You could buy plushies of Intel workers in bunny suits. The first IMAX movie I went to was called "The Journey Inside", and it was basically a big ad for the Pentium.

I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.

I have a bunny suit plushie on my shelf to this day. The other Pentium marketing blitz I remember was in the 1998 Lost in Space which had a TV ad for a Pentium XXI or something. Also notable was the Silicon Graphics branding in that movie. Which I have always found amusing since SGI didn't have any consumer products and even for businesses the prices were "Call Us" which has always meant eye watering expensive.

These rules apply equally well to system architecture. I've been trying to talk our team out of premature optimization (redis cluster) and fancy algorithms (bloom filters) to compensate for poor data structures (database schema) before we know if performance is going to be a problem.

Even knowing with 100% certainty that performance will be subpar, requirements change often enough that it's often not worth the cost of adding architectural complexity too early.

> Even knowing with 100% certainty that performance will be subpar

I think there is value in attempting to do something the "wrong way" on purpose to some extent. I have walked into many situations where I was beyond convinced that the performance of something would suck only to be corrected harshly by the realities of modern computer systems.

Framing things as "yes, I know the performance is definitely not ideal in this iteration" puts that monkey in a proper cage until the next time around. If you don't frame it this way up front, you might be constantly baited into chasing the performance monkey around. Its taunts can be really difficult to ignore.

I owe much of my career to an SSD. I had a work laptop that I upgraded myself with an 80GB Intel SSD, which was pretty exotic at the time. It was so fast at grepping through code that I could answer colleagues’ questions about the code in nearly real time. It was like having a superpower.

I use it on MacOS, but it doesn't support tabs.

The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.

I found that writing rules was tricky when I didn't know exactly what content would be in a spam/promo notification. I ended up having claude code up a filter that asks an AI to review the notification first, which seems to be working well.

Thanks for making it open source. I've been wanting something like that for a while, but I'd been putting it off since I didn't want to learn the underpinnings of the notification service.