Thoughts on society, programming and democracy
why I try not to use the cloud for my personal files - and I really like to have information as files, as opposed to opaque databases. Files are great! I know exactly where they are, I can inspect them, back them up, and open them with any tool I choose ten years from now. Cloud services are convenient, yes, but they lock you in and cost money. .vcf , .mp3 , .jpeg and .png files - these will still…
Claude confinement I don't trust Claude Code, and especially myself, to not inadvertently upload any or all of my private data to Anthropic's servers and thus be immortalized in logs. That's why Claude lives in a dedicated lxc container on my machine. If need be, I can mount shared volumes, or forward ports to/from the host, but I find that's rarely necessary. Here's how I've set things up.…
After a lot of back and forth with agentic coding, I've landed on a system that works for me, and it's based on dividing my workload into things that interest me and those I offload to (the ever increasingly capable) AI agents. Right off the bat, all content on this site is written by me, edited by me and reflect my own thoughts and my own journey. In projects I'm working on, I try to make the…
Using chezmoi init in combination with a radicle remote, e.g. chezmoi init rad://z3NeeQp2CXTkNRGba6gni1C8s4nSx doesn't work. Chezmoi runs a plain git clone through the helper - this seems to set up fetching correctly but fails for push: error: no public key given as a remote namespace, perhaps you are attempting to push to restricted refs The issue is that rad clone sets a separate pushurl that…
It was my first year at FOSDEM this year and it was quite the experience. Part of the motivation for my going was to look for a job - and I quickly figured out that this was not the place. Instead, this was a place for me to discover and learn about a lot of interesting open source projects that I might want to use or contribute to. What follows are some of my thoughts about the two days. Very…
There are moments when working with Claude Code or Openai Codex feels absolutely magical . Features get implemented faster than I could ever hope to accomplish. I see my project take shape with just the occasional prodding of my AI worker bees. I envision, we plan, they implement. I dream, we strategize, they toil. 2FA? BAM! Database migration? BAM! Scraping of a relevant API? BAM! Building a user…
I use AI generously in my life. My recent projects are vibe-coded with Claude Code and OpenAI codex, and I frequently ask Claude to play editor for my blog. There are many excellent discussions about what Large Language Models mean for the future of my chosen profession, but I think most miss the point. Eventually, LLMs — or some future architecture — will become good at maths and science. Once…
Why bother? I've previously written about the current state of privacy. To recap, I'm genuinely freaked out by how AI and mass data collection by companies and governments are converging. My "uh oh" moment came when I read about the EU's latest Chat Control proposal. This thing has been resurrected in various forms for 20 years. What struck me: the people pushing surveillance have infinite…
To get started, I followed Casey's excellent post . I experienced a moment of wonder when things almost just worked. In total it took me about 30 minutes until my Personal Data Store was running on my own server. That's really a testament to the ATproto developers' dedication. Thank you! There were a couple of things I needed to tweak further, but for completeness' sake, I'll start from the…
We live in a time where ubiquitous data collection meets LLMs, resulting in massively powerful tools to understand each and every one of us - yes, every single human on the planet - individually and intimately. This post is my attempt to organize my thoughts on how personal privacy is eroding - to the point of being non-existent, why this is a problem and what we can do about it. Privacy in the…
I spent a few hours this weekend collecting together the remnants of past blogs - dating back 20 years - and migrated them to a fresh Hugo blog. This very one, in fact! It's hosted on a VPS and I don't want to spend too much time setting it up and maintaining it. Pre-requisites Just a couple of things to do before setting up the server itself: DNS and a service email. You'll want to point your DNS…
Two years ago, I bought a Kindle Touch. At the time, I couldn’t find a case that was cheap, light and durable, so I decided to make my own. I settled on leather as the main material, due to its durability and workability. The design is simple and consists of three parts a 35cm x 12cm ‘cover’ that wraps around the height of the Kindle. This part also includes the brace holding the bottom of the…
When cycling, I regularly use my smartphone to check whether I’m still going in the right direction. The frequent GPS-usage has the downside that my phone runs out of juice very quickly. This problem is exasperated on longer trips, where finding a power outlet isn’t always guaranteed. Hence, I needed a way to recharge my phone on the fly or at least to reduce the discharge rate of its battery. The…