True and decent read. Holos is a generic runner underneath, and I'm not trying to compete on the curated-OS-image front; the assumption is you bring a cloud image and cloud-init does the rest.
Unattended installs for Linux work today through cloud-init (that's most of what the YAML drives). Windows/macOS would need a different path.. autounattend.xml injection for Windows, custom payload for macOS; I haven't built that. If there's interest, a provisioner: type block that picks the right unattend mechanism based on OS isn't crazy, but it's not on the near-term list.
Your path makes a ton of sense too! You get typed languages, state management, and the Incus team's work on the QEMU layer. The tradeoff I wasn't willing to make is the daemon + state store: Incus wants to own the VM lifecycle the way libvirtd does, and once you have that you're back to "two sources of truth" if you ever shell out. Holos is deliberately stateless on the host; Everything lives under one directory per project, rm -rf is a valid uninstall (though it will abandon the VMs if running). Different answer to the same frustration. Would genuinely like to see your thing when it's public.
This is exactly what I dislike about incus. But what I do like about incus is how I can easily spin up and configure VMs directly using the CLI, without preparing a config first (I hate yaml).
So would be nice if holos could replicate that docker/incus CLI functionality, like say "holos run -d --name db ubuntu:noble bash -c blah".
Docker does have both docker run and docker compose... Holos is compose-only right now. A holos run on top of the same VM machinery isn't a huge lift; mostly it's deciding what the sensible defaults are (image, cloud-init user, port, volume scope); Noted. it's not in 0.1 but I hear the ask.
> Incus wants to own the VM lifecycle the way libvirtd does, and once you have that you're back to "two sources of truth" if you ever shell out.
That's true. But I didn't want to reinvent what Incus or any hypervisor abstraction does. I simply wanted to add some sugar on top that allows me to easily declare infra using small abstractions, and to tie in the provisioning aspect along the way. I still use Incus directly, and can benefit from their work, as you say. State is also managed by Pulumi, so really, there are 3 places for it to exist. There are some challenges with this, of course, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.
Good luck with your project, I'll be keeping an eye on it. I'll probably make a Show HN post when I release mine. Cheers!
Thanks! Honest answer: nope. Holos talks to QEMU directly and skips libvirt entirely — that's deliberate (no XML, no daemon, state lives in a single directory per project), but I like the idea of being able to import vm's. I will try to find some time to add that feature.
Fair — the YAML shape is similar. The differences that matter to me: GPU passthrough works without fighting the provider plugin ecosystem, healthchecks gate depends_on instead of you sleeping in a provisioner, and there's no Ruby, no vagrant reload, no box format.
Honestly, if you just sold it as vagrant but with all the weird stuff fixed and actually made to play nice with the rest of the stack that I'd actually want to use, that would be a pretty compelling package to me
I did use an LLM to workshop my comms; I tend to go on and on so I put my my comments through a LLM to clean up my replies. the opinions and the project are mine, but the polish isn't. I'll knock it off for the rest of this thread.
This article is so one sided it is painful. it is almost like Sheldon Cooper wrote this article. As an engineer I am offended and hurt that we are referred to as “Tony Stark’s tailor”.
And now I know why so many fine artists can't find work unless it is purely original work (a highly volatile market). I am saddened deeply that even art has degraded to this. if you want a print, buy a print from a printing machine. You want an oil painting? Hire or barter with a local artist to do so. I can't even. I just can't even.
I would counsel a "friendly local fine artist" who feels threatened by the existence of $100 paint-by-photograph artworks produced in China to get better about their marketing, differentiation, and sales process rather than lamenting the decline of art. If they're selling something this substitutes for... that's a very unfortunate business decision.
(Too many of my creative friends, for all values of "creative", are socialized to believe that treating their profession like it is a business will somehow suck all the magic out of that. If you like friendly-local-fine-artist, you owe it to them to help counteract years of indoctrination on this score.)
A young lady at a Renaissance fair produced an artistic work heavily inspired by a photo of Ruriko and I at our wedding. (She, incidentally, undercharged and had to be tipped into accepting a reasonable wage, then attempted to convince me that I was overtipping. Art culture: GAH!) That work is certainly available for less than what she charged... somewhere over in China, where middle class RenFair participants who are primed to spend money are presently not wandering while considering "Hey I wonder if I could get a wedding photo done as human art?"
A really smart business decision she made was a) bringing several samples of high-saliency events done in her signature style (weddings/graduations/etc) and b) hiring a barker, whose only job was selling passerby on artwork when she was producing it on the spot. Another smart decision was working directly with clients on the spot: that was a definite value add versus uploading the JPG into a CRUD app then shipping it halfway around the world. The venue handles a lot of customer selection for you, too -- you can imagine that "homemade using the techniques of the ancients; not like that factory-produced nonsense you'd find at BigBox" carries a lot of weight with many of the people who willingly bust themselves back to the Middle Ages for part of a day. (I'd note that pitch was successful at selling several hundred dollars worth of soap in a ten minute period I observed the soap store. Having used $20 of it myself, I can reliably report that P&G ROFLstomps your typical artisan on soap quality, but then again they don't sell any soap called Dragon's Blood, so decisions decisions.)
Actually, artists here can find work. I have many friends who do commissions at a constant rate. Some of them are listed in the creative art marketplace: http://www.instapainting.com/artists. They also work in film, animation, video game companies.
It's true if you're just straight up copying a photo, you're going to have to compete with the Chinese commercial art industry. But they don't do creative work, so any amount of deviation from just copying a photo and you'll have a leg up.
Frankly artists here don't want to copy photos, and even the studio artists we interviewed in China don't want to do that either. But it's a steady source of income for them.
I'd suggest you talk to some artists here first and get their opinion, and then talk to some of the artists in China, because that's what I did.
I haven't been to China specifically, but I have been to Germany, Japan, Mexico, Canada, all over the USA, Poland, and France. I HAVE spoke with painters, not normally by choice lol (because my wife is one) and universally the pinch is felt. Reproduction work is the bread and butter of most fine artists to pay for their living and fund their original work.
Oh and the PAINT alone in the USA ranges from the crazy gonna like posion you cheap (~5 bucks/color US dollars) to expensive (80 bucks/color US dollars). That doesn't even cover canvas, brushes, or space to paint in. lets not forget about time. A persons' time is worth something too. Explain to me how an artist can survive with material costs like that on 50-400 a painting when it takes hours/days for one person to paint a reproduction.
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I forgot about gesso, that isn't cheap either.
You have to realize that if they're being pinched, then they're being pinched by competition from Chinese artists and globalization.
Like I said, if you want to be explained how the Chinese artists are surviving, then ask one in China. Dafen is a huge tourist destination and is not actually a secret "village."
no they are being pinched by the artificial devaluation of a currency in comparison to other currencies set by a foreign government. If all other things were held true and this was global market, this wouldn't work. My argument holds true historically as nations 'grow up'. This is exploitation, pure and simple.
An artists consumes food and housing and produces art. Chinese artists can barter enough food and housing for their art for the equation to work out, but American artists cannot.
Our default assumption would be that cost of goods are equal in US and China. This seems to be true for the output, but not the input. So the reason that artists in America cannot make it is that housing and food is more expensive than in China.
Why is it cheaper to live in China then the USA? Because China has a huge import/export deficit and artificial devaluation of currency. It does not play part to the global economy like others do through deliberate manipulation. It remains true that this is simple exploitation on a national scale.
There might be some currency manipulation, but it is not the 600% difference that would be required, plus we probably get an equal amount of benefit by being the reserve currency.
It's cheaper to live in China than the USA because Americans expect that they will have a salary + medical benefits that will allow them to afford a 3 bedroom house of their own in the suburbs built to rather more exacting construction standards than China, 2 cars which they drive 20k miles/year, a family vacation every year, medical prices that cover the cost of doctors purchase insurance to protect against litigious Americans' expensive lawsuits, and pay taxes that support large social programs and one of the world's largest standing Armies. Prices for American workers and goods reflect these expectations.
It's a lot easier to live cheaply when your expectations of housing are a concrete room (shared by a number of friends if you are single), no car, no overseas vacations via plane, medical care provided by the state, and a system where doctors are not at risk of multi-million dollar court cases if they get something wrong.
I think you're forgetting the most important part of the equation: China is still a developing country. In fact 50 years ago, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. As amazing as it's total GDP output is (by some measures more than the U.S. now) it has 5x the people. While yes there is some artificial currency devaluation, that is nowhere close to being the reason it's cheaper to live in China.
If food is more expensive in USA than in China, why do they sell it in China rather than sell it in USA? 1. Cost of freight 2. Import tariffs.
Why is housing more expensive? 1. More expensive land (more desirable place to live) 2. More expensive to build house. a) Higher labour costs (can't just import cheap chinese labour because of visas) b) Stricter building codes.
With all of the conservatives crying foul over "hyperinflation" as the US pushes QE just a little bit to get us over the financial crisis... we will virtually never have a political environment that will explicitly devalue currency to encourage job growth here in America.
Just saying, not enough support to do what you want to do.
Aside from respecting geopolitical borders and nationalistic allegiance, why should I value a local artist any more than an artist in China? Is the Chinese artist somehow lesser than the local artist?
>why should I value a local artist any more than an artist in China? //
As I see it part of the function of art is to reflect on the culture the artist is in or a part of. This can't be done authentically from afar.
Another element of this is that artists should be expanding our minds, making us think is one purpose of many artistic creations (some would say that's what makes it art). Partly, I feel, for a society to continue to develop effectively it needs to patronise elements on its philosophical fringes that can move beyond the norms of groupthink, beyond the acceptable establishment paths of thought and then present the ideas experienced in a way that makes others question their position and the progress of that culture.
If we take away the bread and butter work of burgeoning artists then in order to have artists in our local culture that can serve this function in society we need to create some other means to support them.
A foreign artist can't honestly reflect on a culture they haven't experienced, an immigrant artist who comes to experience a new culture can create art that serves both their native culture and the culture they newly experience however - but you can't do that [in the same way] from a room half-way around the globe IMO.
I've spent some time thinking about what you wrote. I think you bring up some very good points.
>Another element of this is that artists should be expanding our minds
I would agree, but I would disagree that art from the Chinese artists in question can't accomplish this. If you saw a painting that came from there, but didn't know its provenance, could it not accomplish this? Would learning where it came from change how you felt about it? One might say these artists are simply copying photographs people send them, and they are, but they are still human reproductions and there is inevitably some element of interpretation on the part of these artists in producing the paintings. As I see it, that is art, and it is no less intrinsically valuable, kitschy as it may be.
Are you really saying that people buying these pictures are buying it for the wrong reason? That their point of buying it is wrong?
It sounds an awful lot like you are trying to project your values on to others. If people agreed with you, they wouldn't buy these paintings. And yet they do, in great numbers.
Some people just want a painting to decorate a wall somewhere, not to tell a story. And doing that, I wouldn't care one bit where it was painted or how many other copies were made.
Yeah, I kinda figured that would actually be the most common use case (gag gift for a funny picture).
At my office, people have been using fiver in a similar way - to order gag custom written songs for different people. We basically have theme songs for all our regular meetings now.
I cooked for a little over a decade all said and told. Eight of those ten years I made less then $10 bucks/hour. Food is a difficult thing to make money on in the USA. Without margin, wages cannot increase. Last time I checked margin in the food business was less then 3% of total revenue. let me say that again, 3%. It MAY be worse now. Mass production is the ONLY way to stay afloat for a food business. Thus employees that are not a part of the service portion of the business, feel the squeeze.
To fix the problem, look no further then COGS.
1. Smaller menus (less margin in the trash)
2. Aggressively seasonal selections (cheaper then any other food)
3. Be a part of the community you are serving (intangible but sticky customer base)
4. Pair down customer capacity (smaller team = more hours per employee)
5. Salaries instead of hourly (cheaper, longer term employees)
6. Add the frickin 5% to that $30 plate of food
7. Consider limited hours (staying open 16 hours is stupid and wasteful)
I think that to open a restaurant you either have to be naive or incredibly passionate. Most restaurants fail, and many of those that "succeed" are just getting by. That seems a pretty clear signal that the market does not want me to open a restaurant, and I'm happy to oblige.
To think that I could succeed without doing something fundamentally different than those who have failed before me would certainly be naive, unless I am truly a culinary prodigy.
Food carts are a perfect example of COGS in action. Coffee places are also an example (SBUX, stumptown, etc). Highly specialized businesses selling items at the best balance of COGS and quality.
Food carts and small specialized brick and mortar businnesses are succeeding because their COGS are far lower then your average place.
Most resturants fail because of their initial COGS at startup and because their food/service/merketing research generally sucks for where they are. Remove the service aspect, specialize, reduce cogs, make a living wage.
it is happening again. Apple (aka macintosh) is trying to squeeze blood from a rock. Three rocks actually. They didn't learn the first time. Innovation has died yet again at Apple. This time though they have an cash cow (iTunes) on hand to keep them going while they pump out junk for the next x decades. Microshaft 2.0 has hit the shelves.
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