As the warm weather gives way to a frigid autumn, my time is being turned inward towards personal projects again. One immediate change has been a migration off my domain registrar’s DNS servers and onto Cloudflare’s Free Tier, something I’ve put off for years because of a vehement disgust with Cloudflare’s defense of fascists and nazis under the guise of free speech, and their associated ignorance of the paradox of tolerance.

Things have since changed, both with me and the world in general.

My disgust remains, but I’m also becoming more pragmatic about using the tools available to me. Cloudflare may defend some truly reprehensible elements that would see their destruction as soon as practicable, but the company is also making those same tools available to minority and persecuted groups as well - like the queer circles I love dearly and identify with. I’d be a damn fool to turn away free defense tools, and thus Cloudflare will be hosting my DNS and some security tooling going forward.

What this means for my readers is that those of you relying on Agents are likely going to encounter more misery as I crank up the defenses against them, and those of you wary about analytics should take steps to anonymize your data. I still do not care about analytics and have turned them off on the server itself, but Cloudflare collects them automatically in a way I cannot disable without also disabling security tooling. I write for other sentient creatures, not for matrix multipliers or clout, and while I want to respect everyone’s privacy in what they read and how they choose to read it, I still need to take better care of my digital estate in these uncertain times.

It’s under this season of change that I’m also re-evaluating my hosting decisions. PikaPods has been a great host and will continue to serve my site as long as I have credit on hand, but I’ve begun evaluating alternatives that are more personally scalable, lighter in load than Ghost, and let me have more granular control over the experience. Caddy has been my go-to reverse proxy and certificate tool for my homelab for over a year now, and I’m considering moving the webhost on-premises with Cloudflare handling CDNs at some point in the future. This would be as much about control as it would demonstrating to others that you can in fact self-host a website even in this RAM-insane world, and eventually be part of a panel I’d like to host at conventions going forward for the tech-adjacent to liberate themselves from closed social media ecosystems.

Ground Control to Major Tom…

Let’s talk comms for a moment. With age verification laws giving cover to widespread identity verification, I’ve been looking at simple, lightweight alternatives that thread the needle of these laws by allowing friends to communicate and not get tied down to a specific identity. It’s in that context that I’ve been tinkering with an IRC server daemon and some IRCv3 clients for the past few months, in the hopes of parlaying that into a queer-focused IRC server for my friend circles (and another potential panel topic). It’s been a fun experiment, and I’m incredibly pleased with how lightweight IRC actually is on modern hardware relative to identity-focused alternatives like Matrix.

It’s also been nice to be able to /disconnect again. No permanent online presence, no infinite log of activity, no arbitrary limits on sharing media or changing identities. It’s been a breath of fresh air in an internet that demands constant connectivity, availability, and surveillance.

The Work Continues

This is a thin update because so much is in flux, and also because real life work has been occupying so much of my time. I’ve been building startup infrastructure from the ground up and having an absolute blast doing so, to the point my energy and time for personal projects waned while I threw myself into professional work. Now that the automations have begun grinding away, I find myself with time again to indulge in personal projects - at least until things ramp up with growth.

In terms of personal projects I have shortlisted this year, here are some highlights I’m looking forward to:

A home AI hub, for personal/private LLM use without cloud connectivity. The immediate goal is to have some sort of local inference capacity on an isolated and private network with a harness like Hermes, then gradually give it read-only access to personal data sets for analysis (like health data). The end goal is to eventually give it access to tooling and run a Mixture of Agents on it for more complicated project work, as a way of remaining in touch with how the LLM field continues to evolve.
Automating media archiving and collecting. Physical media rips are easy and sparse enough to do manually, but an increasing amount of media isn’t available via physical mediums or purchases - like music videos, or the glut of art destroyed by Zaslav or the fascist goons at Skydance. The same goes with my collection of retro and PC games: I’d like to make these all more accessible to my friends and family while they’re on my local network, and I’ve got the excess compute and storage to make that happen. Scripting out the automations needed to keep this organized and up-to-date will be a challenge, but could take a huge load off my shoulders if successful.
A streaming ”cable TV” channel. This is something I really want to focus on doing right, in the similar vein to how music videos work: the video plays, and a bug in the lower corner tells you the title, artist, album, release date, record label, etc. I’d like to do this for my glut of older/out-of-air content, but with an additional QR code bug to link back to the rights holder’s website. Something fun, but respectful of IP. Likely it’d be something streaming within my home network boundaries only, but I’d like to use it as an opportunity to learn about multicasting and streaming programmatic video content.
Finishing Home Assistant v1.0. Right now I have a handful of dashboards, widgets, and overviews that have too much information, across a variety of devices that don’t work consistently well with it (looking at you, Hue Zigbee string lights and switches). After seeing this gorgeous illustration dashboard, I’d like to nail down the technical back end so I can commission an artist to make something similar for the apartment, as well as making it more usable to other household members and visitors on dedicated terminals.
Finishing v1.5 of my VRChat avatar. I have the base done, but still need to add clothes and accessories to it - a learning experience in Unity and Blender to be sure. It’s been incredible looking down at me in VRChat though, and with my Steam Frame reservation pending, I’d like to get this done so I can enjoy it on arrival.

There are many more projects sitting in my notebooks, but that’s the highlights of what I’m looking forward to touching on this season.

Top of Mind…

My downtime this summer has been spent largely in personal thought, working through larger concerns including some that I might want to dedicate a blog post to. Things like negative property (abandonware, IP protected but not available for sale, uncapitalized patents, etc), hyperspecialization, technology centralization, and how the Linux protestors in college were ultimately right about, well, kinda everything.

South Park’s Randy Marsh, rolling down his window and yelling “We didn’t listen!” to other drivers. From episode S09E08, “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow”.

All of this recontextualizing was done as I entered the stride of midlife, milestones not met but with plenty of unique wisdom to share with others willing to listen. Lots of rubber ducking with friends and colleagues, having assumptions challenged and viewpoints refined. Biologically I am not a young person anymore, yet mentally I feel as if I’d just entered university and am rife for all sorts of new experiences, learning, and challenges.

It’s strange, to be sure.

Some of these will end up as blog posts. Most will remain jovial discourse among friends. Others still will end up impacting my daily life in some way, changing how I behave as a person.

One nugget I’ll end this on is a realization I had in my new role, having spent more time looking at and studying financial markets than at any prior point in my career thus far:

Financial markets are themselves barometers for the collective human psyche in that overwhelmingly, more people across the world are betting that tomorrow will be better than today. It is when those bets turn, when they suggest tomorrow will in fact be worse than today, that one should worry.