What I built, what broke, and the evidence that changed the next decision.
No spam. No marketing. Just the writing.
Docker labels look like annotations until something starts making decisions from them. A reverse proxy discovers routes. An update tool selects eligible containers. A backup job identifies volumes by a naming convention. A monitoring process groups workloads into a view. Each consumer may read a ...
Making another copy feels responsible. Storage is cheap, schedules are obedient, and a successful backup job offers a tidy little moment of relief. I know the feeling well. I also know how easily it lets me postpone the harder question: what, exactly, am I promising myself I can recover?
A small network can be rebuilt badly with remarkable speed. There may be one router, one switch, a few access points, and a short list of local services. That looks simple enough to recreate from memory. Then the replacement comes up with a different address pool, half the names point at old dest...
Configuration gets harder to trust as the distance grows between a service and the facts required to run it. The distance isn't measured only in directories. It shows up in extra repositories, dashboard-only settings, shell history, copied environment files, and instructions that say “remember to...
A listening port is a wonderfully low bar. It proves that something accepted responsibility for an address. In local model infrastructure, that can happen well before the system is capable of doing the job that brought a caller there.
The first thing to fail in a homelab usually isn't the newest service. It's the assumption that the service is standing on something simple.
CEOs say AI isn't moving the needle on productivity. I've been running AI in production for months. Here's why they're both right and wrong — and what the actual measurement problem is.
A post about autonomous AI agents hit the top of HN this morning. I actually run them. Here's what I've learned about where they work, where they fail, and the 6 rules I've settled on.
Moonshine AI posted their open-weights speech-to-text toolkit on Hacker News this morning. 252 points in 13 hours. The top-line claim: higher accuracy than Whisper Large V3,
r/selfhosted just banned AI-vibe-coded projects except on Fridays. After running 100+ containers in production and building two SaaS products with AI assistance, here's where I actually land.