If you don't want to run your machine 24/7 (whether for electrical consumption, environmental, noise, etc reasons), I wrote an ssh proxy [1] that will send WOL packets to a target machine and hold your connection until its alive.
I then configured debian-autoshutdown [2] to turn the machine off if there's no traffic on ssh after 15 minutes.
This way I just ssh into my machine (whether via antigravity on my laptop or termius on my phone) and within 30 or so seconds its awake, no physical button presses needed. I documented the whole flow in more detail on my blog [3].
I'm now working on an improvement called machine on proxy (or mop) that will allow me to start Proxmox VMs instead of physical machines, so I can let gemini-cli run wild and if it decides to wipe the entire hard drive I can restore from a snapshot.
I do the same. I can SSH into my router at home (which is on 24/7), then issue a WOL request to my dev machine to turn it on.
You don't even have to fully shut down you dev machine, you can allow it to go into stand-by. For that it needs to be wired by cable to LAN, and configured to leave the NIC powered on on stand-by. You can then wake up the device remotely via a WOL magic packet. Maybe this is possible with WLAN too, but I have never tried.
Also, you don't need a Tailscale or other VPN account. You can just use SSH + tunneling, or enable a VPN on your router (and usually enjoy hardware acceleration too!). I happen to have a static IP at home, but you can use a dynamic DNS client on your router to achieve the same effect.
I run a lot of small form factor (SFF) machines including NUCs, Minisforums, and a Mac Studio.
At idle, they aren't loud or consuming much electricity compared to sleep/shutdown.
Fruit co devices in particular are extremely efficient; the Studio is rated at 6W idle, 145W max consumption (cf. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102027 )
I don't think WOL works over Wi-Fi and whether you can get WOL from a USB ethernet adapter.
My proxy doesn't attempt to handle security. Most folks use either Tailscale or some other VPN solution. In my case I use the wireguard server in my router to VPN into home which gives me access to the proxy and consequently to the machine.
Anecdotally, with two young children (5, 1), the savings add up and mean twenty more seconds with them or not being overwhelmed after they're asleep with the state of the house.
I was super interested in DBOS but I had to back out when I figured that the observability isn't self hostable yet :(, so I'm chuffed to hear its coming!
Whats the best way to hear about it when it does? Maybe newsletter I can register to or something.
A bit OT but I live on a very land constrained island with the highest population density in Europe (see Malta).
There has been major increase in demand for housing and supply cannot be built fast enough to match. Its turned most of the island into a construction site so rampant that I made an online tracker for urban planning permits so folks can get ahead on knowing whats going on around them.
Idk if you have any wisdom but there's no creative solutionising happening, just the rich able to buy whatever property they want causing prices to rise which is pricing out the middle class, causing a whole lot of grief and downstream issues (such as plummeting fertility rate because homes are too expensive).
Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality?
> Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality.
Creativity has been unlocked but it's not the magic kind, it's the rather mundane Robber Barron kind, where the robbers occupy the sources and hoard a bunch of goods to resell or rent at higher profits. It's true for housing, GPUs, RAM, etc. [1]
[1] Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'
Maybe Malta is just too small of a world for that magic toggle, since entrenched interests can basically just prevent the government from approving certain strategies, like building more large buildings with apartments like the Mercury Tower. But on the global stage, not even the biggest player(US) can dictate what China, India, the EU does, so if the US self-limits because of entrenched interests, that's just more juice for the squeeze for other players not aligned with the US.
Its definitely mostly entrenched interests that are the issue.
Funny you mention mercury tower. Thats a rich person's idea of what good housing is... which is way over the price any middle or even upper class person can afford. It isn't affordable housing, it's a parking lot for excess liquidity.
For what its worth it's the raising of property height limits that helped kick off a lot of the construction boom. One could argue the situation was better when the restrictions were bigger.
Not a question, but - Tatoeba could use your help! It is an open source (both code and data) dataset of parallel sentences and their Maltese data is very lacking. Also it’s pretty fun to just translate a bunch of random sentences into a language you speak. :-)
I don't have much personal experience in attempting to communicate with arabic speakers. From others I have heard Lebanese arabic is the closest and you can have a passable conversation.
Not sure which Tunisians are claiming this but they'd definitely need a lot more than minimum effort. Maltese split off from Arabic around 1k years ago. The two languages sound pretty different, and are written with different alphabets.
As an Algerian, I can confirm that Maltese is surprisingly easy to understand. I was genuinely shocked the first time I heard it because the similarities are so obvious. Many Arabic dialects are also written using the Latin alphabet, especially online and on social media, so the different writing systems aren’t really a barrier at all.
Calling BS on this one. I'll let ChatGPT handle it... it says it better than I could:
can arabic people understand maltese?
That’s a really interesting question — and the answer is: *partially, but not easily.*
Here’s why:
### Linguistic roots
Maltese is a *Semitic language*, and its *core grammar and basic vocabulary* come from *Arabic*, specifically from *Siculo-Arabic*, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta about 1,000 years ago. Because of that, *many Maltese words sound familiar* to Arabic speakers — especially from the *Maghrebi (North African)* or *Levantine* dialects.
For example:
| Maltese | Meaning | Similar in Arabic |
| ------- | ------- | ----------------- |
| Dar | house | دار (dar) |
| Kelb | dog | كلب (kalb) |
| Seba | seven | سبعة (sabʿa) |
| Xemx | sun | شمس (shams) |
### Influence from Italian and English
However, over the centuries, Maltese absorbed *a lot of Italian (especially Sicilian)* and *English* vocabulary — so modern Maltese is *a hybrid*. Roughly:
* 30–40% of its vocabulary is Semitic (Arabic origin),
* 40–50% is Romance (mostly Italian/Sicilian),
* and the rest is English and other sources.
That means Arabic speakers might *recognize some words and structures*, but they’ll *struggle to understand full sentences*, especially because:
* Pronunciation has changed,
* Grammar evolved differently,
* Many everyday words are not Arabic anymore.
### Summary
So:
* *Yes*, Maltese and Arabic share a deep connection — like cousins.
* *No*, they’re *not mutually intelligible* today.
An Arabic speaker might catch words here and there, but a real conversation would be hard without studying Maltese.
The above is exactly my experience with Arabic speakers by the way. Again, not surprising after 1k years of divergence.
Tunisian dialect must have split of at the same time, because it's as far from arabic as maltese is. most arabs don't understand our dialect (fortunately we also speak standard arabic which we learn at school). I read some research saying maltese/tunisian is a separate language called lingua franca
I recently discovered Maltese existed, and started learning it that day. I find it such an awesome language, and not just because of the letter Ħ
I do wonder what natives think and feel about the longevity of their language? What is taught in schools at what ages (assuming English is in the mix somewhere). Is there enough media in Maltese for Malti to go about the moderns at fully in Maltese? It’s shockingly hard to find any information on Maltese, and even harder to find content.
I’m not sure if’s dying out, or in danger thereof; if there are preservation efforts, or if there is no need.
Native Maltese speaker here. It is thought in schools alongside English, with both being official national languages. Most people locally, that are not foreign born or immigrants speak the language, and it is used in most households as the main language. But everyone grows up bilingual, as English is essential for most everything else that we do as a nation.
How are loan words viewed? Do businesses work in Maltese? Are monolingual speakers of the language regarded differently than those fluent in English? Do young people in Malta listen to Maltese music?
Maltese has been loaded with loan words since forever. 5 points if you can guess where bonġu, bravu and mappa come from. At some point there was some literary council for the language that decided that any new loan words should just be spelled phonetically. Computer became kompjuter.
Businesses do work in Maltese and English. Both are official languages. Its quite rare to encounter a business that deals near exclusively in Maltese. Many prefer Maltese but will fall back to english where necessary.
Regarding monolignual speakers, I think theres a lot of stereotypes for maltese only, english only and code switchers. I think its all a bit silly... So as long as communication can happen I don't fuss.
On Maltese music... There's a lot of low ish quality music then there's a few absolute gems. Look up The Travellers, Lapes, Jon Mallia on YouTube/Spotify.
Not sure if I should be get bonus points for that, but if mappa means map, the ultimate origin is still Semitic. Latin seem to have took the word maappa from a Canaanite language. The word mappa (and it's older version "manpa") is attested in Minshnaic Hebrew (meaning a napkin or a tablecloth), although you could say Hebrew "re-loaned" the cartographic meaning - which is much newer.
I can concur. All older words (think any word that was needed since the older generations), are Arabic based. All the numbers, all older verbs etc. 'Newer' words are latin based.
Interesting, but I get the impression that ubiquitous English loan words in seemingly every language is a lot different than loan word patterns of the past. Do you think? Maybe not?
I'm actually really curious about everyday usage of the language; is code switching between English and Maltese more common than Maltese on its own? I've seen a few online communities where the vocabulary switches between Maltese and English very often which is interesting but I wonder how much of that is just online / written versus everyday speech.
Depends on where you live and how you were brought up, but for the most part code switching is default.
There was a point about 7 years ago when the overton window shifted to "speak english to strangers first" because of a large influx of foreigners who did not know the language. Since then I've met foreigners who have better Maltese than some natives.
Older folks & geriatrics will sometimes be surprised when they assume someone is foreign and they turn out to be Maltese. "int Malti??" is a statement I get often because I don't look Mediterranean despite being born here.
How is "Marsaxlokk" really pronounced? I've heard that word a few times, but never from a native. Google translate can't help me here, as it doesn't seem to have Maltese text-to-speech.
From what I have heard, Lebanese Arabic is the closest, and still pretty far. Passable conversation is possible.
Maltese is definitely its own language. Arabic roots are there (theres a Semitic joke in there ) but it isn't arabic anymore. Its written left to right with a variant of the english alphabet.
Writing RTL or LTR and alphabet alone don't make a language different.
Hindi and Urdu are 90% the exact same language, and are mutually inteligible (Urdu speaker and Hindi speaker can have complete full conversation with each other) but each is written differently (one LTR the other RTL) and with different alphabets
See also Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. I also find Chinese to be interesting, e.g. Mandarin and (formal) Cantonese have a near identical written language, while the spoken language is completely different, views on whether or not those languages are different languages or dialects vary wildly.
In my books, the distinction between languages and dialects are so arbitrary that the best method is simply to ask the people that speak those languages/dialects. If they consider them to be different language (which Maltese speakers seemingly do) I call them different languages.
Mandarin-Cantonese is very interesting and a unique (to my knowledge) example where the same written language can be completely different to two different people.
I don't buy the argument of just asking the speakers. There are cultural, political, etc. reasons people may think things which don't conform with reality. Many Hindi-Urdu speakers get insulted by the reality that the languages are pretty much the same because they don't want to identify with people from another country their country is constantly at war with.
I know that the reverse understanding isn't too bad from chatting with a Saudi-born member of staff on holiday in Malta.
I don't think anyone would seriously consider it a dialect of Arabic though with its completely different alphabet and half the vocabulary and morphology coming from Italian languages/dialects, even if Malta hadn't spent the best part of a millennium trying very hard not to become part of the Arab world
I just listened to your episode on fafo.fm a few days ago and recognised your handle and already knew the link was worth clicking. Your stuff is awesome!
reply