No love for Star Wars? :(

Like you said, there’s a metric ton of steps involved in the overall process, and our understanding of each of these ‘levels’ of organization varies quite a bit. Closest to my personal expertise is the sub-cellular and cellular level, for which I would refer you books or papers in developmental biology, developmental genetics, and epigenetics. I can give you a couple bloopers to get you excited though:

When it comes to deciding where different organs will form (again, from a sub-cellular level), it essentially starts from a concentration gradient of certain proteins/chemicals inside the zygotic cell. This gradient then determines the level of activation of other proteins, each level then leading to different biochemical cascades which, once more cells have formed from the zygote, determine which organ systems will come from them. Messing around with this concentration gradient can, thus, dramatically affect an organism’s development, leading to, for example, a body with just ‘left’ organs on both halves, just ‘top’ organs on both halves, missing an entire organ system (like circulatory system and heart) and so on.

A more or less similar process occurs to determine the shape of organs. As a simple example, when some animals with regenerative capabilities (like axolotls) lose a limb, they are able to regrow the limb to the exact same length as before. Turns out, each cell on the periphery of their limb has a certain concentration of receptor proteins on its surface, which acts as a molecular ‘signature’ of that cell’s position in the limb. These signatures provide information on how far to grow the limb for regeneration, and some chemicals, lile retinol, can even override these signatures and fool the organism’s body into regrowing the limb from scratch on top of the place of regeneration.

I hope these examples give you an introduction to the mechanisms involved. There’s obviously a lot more involved, so I would again highly recommend textbooks and research papers if you’re interested.

Last I checked (which was some time ago), pandoc-bin doesn’t require the haskell dependencies. I saved quite some installation time (and screen space during installation) by switching.

Chemists are just bags of chemicals talking about chemicals

For Meet, I’d also suggest Jitsi. For Drive, I’d recommend giving cryptpad.fr a shot; that seems to be the closest to Drive’s file editing capabilities.

Not exactly what you wanted, but njalla is a privacy-focussed domain registrar that basically buys domains on your behalf under their own name and gives you all the access to it that you need

That’s fair too. I was just trying to get some use out of my old device, but I think it’ll be better if I simply use to run some CLI tools via SSH that I don’t want running on my main device :P

Going for a RasPi might be a bigger hassle for me due to the market, but I suppose I can try the rest on my laptop as easily. Thanks!

Ah now it makes a lot more sense. I’ll have to stick with things like overlay network simply because my ISP is super unreliable (for example, I’m out of wifi right now because of mildly incovenient weather lmao)

Haha I think it’s best if I stop running towards just getting my own server up and actually learn this stuff instead, regardless of how long it takes. I’ll try to follow through on this, thanks again for all the help :D

That’s super cool, I’ll check it out. Thanks a lot!

Oh I’ve never heard about openwrt, but it sounds interesting. I’ll check it out, thanks!

Understood. Guess I’ll figure out setting up all the services before I get to figuring out putting them beyond my local network. Thanks!

I’ve been putting off learning docker for a while now, guess it’s finally time to dive right into it. Thanks for the info about freshrss, I’d been looking for ways to get more into cybersecurity and this might be it

Welp, port-forwarding seems to be the major issue then, since I’m soon going to shift to an institutional wifi where I may (not) have access to the router. But you’re right, I should try getting familiar with what I have first lol. Thanks!

I did try launching a website on my local network, but widening it to the public network is what I was confused about, like you said. But the idea of overlay network sounds interesting, I’ll give it a shot. Thanks!

This is what I was planning to go with, until I read a couple posts/comments here about privacy issues with this approach (something something cloudflare has to read every incoming request to stop spam). By VPN, you mean I just connect the server to a VPN and put the VPN’s address as my server’s address?

Wait, does Docker work without me setting me the IP address and all that stuff too? Coz that’s the stuff I’m more confused about. At least in my head, setting up docker is just launching the service and, optionally, setting reverse proxy. But wouldn’t that work solely on my own device instead of the internet?

Oh interesting (now, if only I can recall this the next time I need it)

Holy shit dude, that was actually very helpful! I’ll need a few more go-throughs to fully grasp every piece here, but thanks a ton for writing it so precisely.

Based on this though, is there no way to have port-forwarding except setting it up explicitly in my router? I ask this because 1) in my personal setup, I’ll be switching between wifi and mobile data quite often, and 2) I may end up on an institutional wifi after some time, in which case I won’t have access to the router