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600 million a year. Ridiculous.

bblbon Every invoice in Brazil's economy runs on SOAP 1.2

Maybe it's a solved problem and SOAP 1.2 is good enough for that particular job.

We _still_ use TCP/IP and it's v4 is from 1981.

edit: I once looked deep into Remote PowerShell. How it's actually built. Dear. God. XML enveloped inside XML inside another XML wrapped around HTTP. Add some certificate based encryption for the HTTP envelope and some more encryption for the Kerberos messaging inside the serialized XML wrapped in envelopes and wrappings. Now THAT'S a communication protocol. :D

bblbon Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent

After the release of Qwen 3.8 I've been dabbling with my "Agent Computer". That is, a secondary GPU on my home computer. Intel B70 with enough VRAM to run Q6 and some context on llama.cpp, plus a ComfyUI instance. Total yolo mode with full access to my PC, --tools=all and sudo NOPASSWD.

It can do file organizing and wrangling when needed, it has simple web access with the curl tool, it can analyze media file contents. It's analyzed my local data and written several little tools (cli, TUI, GUI) to manage it automatically or give comprehensive reports. I can create new media through ComfyUI and Krita AI.

Sure, it can't book a flight or organize the family calendar for the next month, but I don't have any need for those.

edit: llama.cpp LLM model and ComfyUI image/video models can't live in the VRAM at the same time, but I let it code a little KDE widget with two buttons: one unloads the llama.cpp model and another one unloads the ComfyUI models.

bblbon Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare

It doesn't need to store the payloads itself. It stores the metadata of connections and probably the fingerprints of the content passing through the Internet. "The headers of the whole Internet" could be physically stored in a single datacenter.

bblbon Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes

Why do anything. Why even do the AI version of this.

Probably curiosity.

If there's an AI version of code golfing, I'd be curious to see it. Maybe they golf worse or much better than us meat bags.

bblbon Creating backup storage sucks

One thing I would add to a modern backup strategy: a deferred offline copy

Sure it's bothersome to use the sneakernet once a month (manually copy data to USB stick and stash it somewhere), but when that ransomware hits (can happen on personal devices also), it literally can't access the offline copy, and try to encrypt that one also.

Immutable backup solutions are code and thus eventually defeatable from the remote attackers point of view. Offline requires physical access, and maybe a big enough wrench to get the USB stick's disk encryption PIN out of you.

bblbon The August 17 outage

I play modded Starfield. There's been a clear increase in mods lately. Some of them are from self-proclaimed non-programmers who are using the LLM's to reverse engineer the game or other abandoned mods, and they've started to create new cool mods or they've fixed various engine limitations. Can confirm that these actually work and I can finally have my 1000+ modlist.

There was a huge exodus of existing programmers/modders ~two years ago, due to paid mods and what not. The gamers took over with their LLM tools.

bblbon The August 17 outage

"I know nothing about the subject, but I would _guess_ that the power consumption is bigger concern than the reported and studied water usage."

That's the whole 21 minute 59 second video in a nutshell.

A loud and hectic quick cut rambling video essay. Millions of views, naturally.

bblbon I don't enjoy the Internet any more

Absorb and consume only some of the things.

Although now that I think of it, stopping absorbing everything, or, _absorbing nothing_, might be a good mindfulness practice.

bblbon I don't enjoy the Internet any more

Stop absorbing everything. Limit yourself.

bblbon Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things

Me machine, no human. Why waste token.

Do fast, deliver.

bblbon Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data

If you had zero copies, then you'd have no data.

The 3-2-1 includes the production data itself.

You have one copy of data (the data that needs to be backed up), and you have two additional copies of that data (the "3" in the strategy), where one of the backup copies is stored offsite (the "1" part), which naturally follows that it satisfies the middle "2" also.

For over a decade we used 4-3-2 strategy, but it got expensive fast and due to ever evolving budget cuts, our (local gov) customers weren't ready to pay the extra.

There's also 3-2-1-1-0, but that's just a fancy way of saying you _really_ should be doing those restore tests you never seem to have the time, because ransomware can and _will_ corrupt your backup copies.

edit: the absolute minimal setup that still satisfies the 3-2-1 rule: 1) you have your data in production directory on local NVMe stick inside your computer, 2) you copy the original production data to another directory inside the very same NVMe, 3) you occasionally manually copy the production directory data to USB and store that USB inside the shed in your backyard. - That's it. Now your home data is covered by the coveted "3-2-1" enterprise ready backup strategy.

bblbon The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

Closed-garden mobile-first tech feudalism lobotimized the Internet. I remember trying out the Freenets, I2Ps, and whatnot in the 90's. Too cumbersome nerdy tools to use for anything actually worthwhile. It was born in the idealized world village of the 90's Internet. Maybe real life doesn't work like that, and the lobotimized centralized tech will eventually win.

bblbon Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

[Internet facing router with up to date firmware] --> HTTPS --> [separate VLAN DMZ] --> [my hardcore IndieWeb VM/k8s/bare-metal whatever] --> [x No outbound access / paranoid local firewall inside the VM x]

[My home computer] --> SSH --> [my hardcore IndieWeb local cloud]

That's about it. Safe enough.

bblbon Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

Also the Always Free Oracle Cloud tier is pretty generous. You can spin up a VM or two with it.

bblbon Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

The article was a lot of words just to say that.

It's sad that we need this new concept of "IndieWeb", as the whole Internet evolved into a monstrosity hosted and guardrailed by a handful of megacorporations. Hosting files became a privilege, when it should've been a (human) right all along.

edit: The tech to host yourself is obviously still there, but the _mindset_ changed to cloud only.

bblbon Show HN: Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem

Writing code by your own hands is an esoteric hobby. We are past the slop era. This is coding now. If you're 1x, you're not a dev.

I would assume by now most of the code published on Github is hand-built with LLM prompts and armies of AI agents.

bblbon Show HN: Osint tool that finds exposed files on domains

I need to protect against the malicious good guys, the shodans of the world. Peeping inside your windows and trying your front door handles. Querying every string imaginable and port pinging all 65536 of them.

And I need to protect against the actual criminals already inside my house looking for something to steal. Scouting out the easy target to setup their ransomwares.

bblbon Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

I got B70 few days ago. Running on CachyOS. 9070XT on PCIe x16 and B70 on the x4.

ROCm nightly was pretty easy to setup and get up running. The 9070XT has been a decent card for my use cases.

But the SYCL ecosystem versions. Absolutely horrendous and everything is hundred commits behind. Vulkan is probably the only way forward with this card.

bblbon There are no instances in ATProto

> They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.

Interesting. I'm an architect by title because my employer doesn't have the career path of a "senior specialist who really knows their stuff and wants to keep going at it". No. We have only two paths: either Manager (not interested in the slightest), or the almighty Architect. Every time I'm forced to architect something, that bit about the bottom line comes to my mind.

bblbon Write for One Person

Streaming sites and shopping carts are used by millions of people, but casually after work, maybe twice a day.

LoBs are used intensively for hours on end in a busy work day, and most people's livelihoods depend on them either directly or indirectly. You grow into them. Muscle memory used to be an actual UI design goal, back when TUI's were the most common LoB interface. Not so much anymore when everything is web app and you click through the horrid UI slowly with your mouse pointer, and repeat this identical task 200 times in a day.

edit: We naturally develop a muscle memory even for the worst LoB. But they are not designed with this in mind. If they were, they wouldn't move that one critical pixel around in a mouse driven app.

bblbon Love systemd timers

My epiphany a month ago was that I can use

   Environment = MULTIPLE=environment VARIABLES="in single line"

bblbon The Website Specification

The full spec in single page is like a poster boy for the current AI slop webdev.

    https://specification.website/llms-full.txt

bblbon Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country

Interesting stats to look at.

Is "Telecommunications" the only tech that's actually been steadily automating it's workforce since 2000:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051700001

edit: or is "Telecommunications" the old school landlines and such, and this is just the effect of the Internet

bblbon Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training

I'm Finnish and dear god I hate the default overtly friendly tones of LLMs. Always the first thing to tune in system prompt.

You're a machine, stop anthropomorphizing yourself and pretending to be my best friend, and just give me the damn answer and nothing else. :D

bblbon Greg Brockman interview [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JoUcQ1qmAc

    00:00:00 Introduction
    00:00:49 Meeting Sam Altman and Starting OpenAI
    00:02:40 Building the Founding Team
    00:04:25 DeepMind's Lead Over OpenAI
    00:04:54 The Change from a Pure Non-Profit
    00:06:05 Breakthrough Moments at OpenAI
    00:08:22 What Dota 2 Meant for OpenAI
    00:10:04 Reasoning Versus Prediction
    00:11:59 Tensions Grow at OpenAI
    00:15:44 Sam Altman's Firing
    00:17:49 Greg Quits OpenAI
    00:19:56 Sam Explores Deal with Microsoft's Satya
    00:20:28 OpenAI Employees Sign Petition for Altman's Return
    00:23:43 Ilya Sutskever Leaves OpenAI
    00:24:59 Lessons Learned in Leadership after Sam Ousting
    00:28:22 The Thing Ilya Said that Greg Can't Forget
    00:32:22 Is AI Going Parabolic?
    00:33:24 How Much of OpenAI's Code is Written by AI?
    00:36:21 Are AI Chatbots Just Telling Us What We Want to Hear?
    00:38:06 The Global AI Race to Reach AGI
    00:38:40 What Happens if US Doesn't Reach AGI First?
    00:39:49 Are Competing Countries Stealing AI Advancements from U.S?
    00:40:38 Why ChatGPT No Longer Shows Reasoning
    00:41:47 The Finite Constraints of Compute
    00:43:38 On Investing Early in Data Centers
    00:46:31 The Future of Data Center Specialization
    00:47:52 How OpenAI Will Decide Whose Queries to Serve
    00:49:08 OpenAI on Consumer vs Enterprise Models
    00:53:05 Data Centers in Space?
    01:00:56 What Should AI Regulation Look Like?
    01:04:33 The Future of AI-Powered Entrepreneurship
    01:04:44 AI and Job Loss
    01:07:15 The Skills Young People Should Invest In
    01:11:30 What Does Success Look Like For You?

bblbon Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

Interesting. And now this not-AI-generated-actually-real-cropped-Monet-AI-joke has been sold to an AI art collector for 40k. https://x.com/SHL0MS/status/2055281312697647223

bblbon Halt and Catch Fire

I'm not a slave to my computer. Stop using bad services that are designed to manipulate your behaviour. There's still the good old Internet out there with genuinely interesting content.

IPv8 and it's (eventually mandatory) device-attestation-auth-at-protocol-level will end all of this pseudoanonymous free thinking information exchange. It was good while it lasted.

bblbon Whohas – Command-line utility for cross-distro, cross-repository package search

Sure. But then I would have to use my brain to actually write code. I thought we were past that already. Also, if it's an agent that keeps scouring the net autonomously for more distros, then I wouldn't have to update the sources manually on my 100 line script.

bblbon Whohas – Command-line utility for cross-distro, cross-repository package search

This kind of busy work should suit an AI agent:

Go and find me all the repolists and package/software metadata for any distro and OS ever released. Write the results to a local SQLite. Incrementally update, but don't hammer the sources to death. Provide a web UI and CLI.