And misses others you didn’t think about.

Digital Ocean basically lets you run something called a droplet in the cloud. It’s a general purpose server more or less. Put nginx on it, start the server process, configure the DNS rules, and congrats you have a site that says hello world.

A droplet is similar to an EC2 on Amazon Web Services. I found DOCN to be cheaper than AWS when I hosted my site there. I was going to also suggest proton and DOCN might work for your use case. You get the redundancy and uptime without needing to use your own hardware, electricity, or bandwidth.

Regex should generally be avoided wherever possible.

I looked at kagi but I don’t want to pay for it because I’m a cheap bastard.

I am moving to Germany next year. Even though I was born there and my mother taught me some, and I learned it in high school, and I also studied in college in the USA, I cannot speak it worth shit. I’m hoping I pick up some more when I move, but if not maybe my kids can teach me.

I find that I’m just trying to pick up things through osmosis. I watch German youtubers and try to watch a German movie or two every now and then. And then sometimes when I’m talking I try to directly translate what I’m saying in my head, and assuming I know the words, I usually fuck up the order, article, or tense.

I say all that to say that my current workflow is already overwhelming and I’m on a bit of a time crunch. I do really need to surround myself with native speakers and listen to them more. I will reach out. Thanks!

I use perplexity.ai more than google now. I still don’t love it and it’s more of a testament to how far google has fallen than the usefulness of AI, but I do find myself using it to get a start on basic searches. It is, dare I say, good at calorie counting and language learning things. Helps calculate calorie to gram ratios and the math is usually correct. It also helps me with German, since it’s good at finding patterns and how German people typically say what I am trying to say, instead of just running it through a translator which may or not have the correct context.

I do miss the days where I could ask AI to talk like Obama while he’s taking a shit during an earthquake. ChatGPT would let you go off the rails when it first came out. That was a lot of fun and I laughed pretty hard at the stupid scenarios I could come up with. I’m probably the reason the guardrails got added.