Hi, OP here. I wanted to share a few additional points about Latudio's approach:
Latudio is designed with a specific focus - like a Unix tool, it does one thing and aims to do it well. That one thing is improving your listening comprehension. Although we do not have dedicated exercises for grammar (though you'll naturally pick grammar up along the way), we have tools to enlarge and explore your vocabulary as well as practice writing and speaking.
Latudio works best if you already have some basic vocabulary and grammar understanding. While not for complete beginners, you don't need to be advanced either - if you can understand simple sentences in your target language, you're ready to start.
On the technical/privacy side: I made a conscious decision to build Latudio without any trackers or analytics beyond the bare minimum needed for functionality. We use Plausible for website visits tracking, but that's about it. This makes marketing more challenging - our marketing team keeps telling me how much easier their job would be with more user data, if we could target our ads better... But I value user's (and mine) privacy highly and so I don't want to do to others what I don't like being done to me, even if it means growing more slowly.
Yes, sounds like, but it isn't. There is no logic inside html templates apart from wicket-specific component binding tags and everything happens in Java.
> because the built-in password manager in Firefox is too good
If only they could add labels to the name/password combination. I have several accounts stored for a website, with generated gibberish logins that I cannot change and sometimes it takes me multiple tries to get to the correct account.
Also, sometimes a site has two password fields - two secret codes - and for this usecase the password manager doesn't work very well either and remembers only one field.
Other than that, I love how it just works, you add a password on one device and have it seamlessly available on the other with a very little setup. It's a nice experience.
Well, it depends. There are companies or individuals with tight budgets. And if you set something like that yourself, from my experience it needs very little maintenance, if done right. My servers run without interruptions and interventions for months now. YMMV.
It's not like cloud providers don't have outages either. And for disasters you should always have backups and a migration plan, even if you are in the cloud, no?
I'm not preaching against cloud, just saying that there are some cases where going bare metal is a better option instead of using cloud by default "because everyone does it".
I'm not arguing for or against cloud, but there are more costs to running bare metal than it would seem.
I'm a sysadmin and have run schools on bare metal and on cloud. There are things like drive failures, hardware failures, connectivity issues, networking, user access, and all of those things that are much easier in the cloud. Much easier to spin up or down if you no longer need them.
If you're running networked storage, then that needs to have both a fail-over node and backup solution. You probably need to run extra hardware, cabling, etc. Cloud trivializes this.
If you're saving 15k in terms of hard cost, but spending 55k/yr for a sysadmin on-prem to maintain, then you're not saving money at all.
A disaster can be as simple as a failed disk, or overheated server because you're not a sysadmin and you put the server in a cabinet (I've run into this, dealing with faculty). Dead computer, no lessons for the week - lost time for the school and the professor in question.
Every place is different; you have to do a cost analysis and it's not as simple as "I saved 10x!"
Just to be clear, I was not talking about on-prem bare metal, but more like hosted bare metal by providers like Hetzner or OVH. Like the guy in the article has. Speaking of drive failures, cables and other hardware failures - provider takes care of that and replaces failed parts.
> Much easier to spin up or down if you no longer need them.
It takes 5 minutes to set up a Docker Swarm Mode cluster. It takes maybe 15 minutes for k3s or microk8s. After that, auto-scaling is dead simple, and no MORE complex than some shitty vendor locked-in cloud solution.
> that needs to have both a fail-over node and backup solution
ZFS pool replication, Ceph, GlusterFS, etc. Lots of options here. These are long-solved problems.
> A disaster can be as simple as a failed disk
Right, which is why you design your on-prem cluster with N+2 redundancy in the first place, and with a locked cabinet with spare parts. Cattle not pets, and all that. Do you think your EBS storage never fails? You'd need to do exactly the same thing in the cloud, anyway.
> but spending 55k/yr for a sysadmin on-prem to maintain
First, if you're paying only 55k for sysadmins, you should be planning to fail anyway. Competence is compensated quite a bit north of there.
Second, assuming the context is small business, you're going to have role crossover anyway, it's inevitable - chances are that your developer(s) is(are) administering this. Not every business is Facebook.
> If you’re running a commercial site that sells products and it goes down… that translates to money lost.
True! It's also true that if you control your own servers, then you can fix the problem yourself instead of waiting until some provider somewhere gets around to it.
Well, the nice thing about having borders is that you can allow those borders to disappear every now and then. Feels like something special for the kid!
Religion only takes a day a week (and maybe only an hour or two of that day). If time spent on task is where you find the most meaning, then work has to be first. Certainly that's the way it's been for me, and it is quite depressing, but for reasons that are specific to me, I need my health insurance more than most, and like most I also need to eat and have a place to live and all that mundane stuff.
Shameless plug: try Latudio - https://www.latudio.com/ - we have a listening-only approach, but you can pause sentence anytime and tap on words to see the translation. I'd say give it a try and let me know if that works for you, I'd be happy to hear.
> 3. Generating different sizes as you mentioned can be useful.
For years now I use nginx's image filter [1] which handles file resizing quite nicely. Resized images are cached by nginx. For some usecases it works very vell and I no longer need to specify sizes beforehand, you just ask for the size by crafting your url properly.
Latudio is designed with a specific focus - like a Unix tool, it does one thing and aims to do it well. That one thing is improving your listening comprehension. Although we do not have dedicated exercises for grammar (though you'll naturally pick grammar up along the way), we have tools to enlarge and explore your vocabulary as well as practice writing and speaking.
Latudio works best if you already have some basic vocabulary and grammar understanding. While not for complete beginners, you don't need to be advanced either - if you can understand simple sentences in your target language, you're ready to start.
On the technical/privacy side: I made a conscious decision to build Latudio without any trackers or analytics beyond the bare minimum needed for functionality. We use Plausible for website visits tracking, but that's about it. This makes marketing more challenging - our marketing team keeps telling me how much easier their job would be with more user data, if we could target our ads better... But I value user's (and mine) privacy highly and so I don't want to do to others what I don't like being done to me, even if it means growing more slowly.
Happy to answer any questions!