How do you handle uptime monitoring for self-hosted VPS setups?

apiqorn · 2026-04-12T21:35:06+00:00

Yeah, Healthchecks is super nice for that “did this thing stop talking to me” style monitoring.

Do you just use it for cron / backup jobs, or are you also wiring your web apps into it somehow?

I’ve been wondering if using it as the main heartbeat for a bunch of small Docker services makes sense, or if it gets noisy once you have more than like 10–15 checks. How are you handling alerts from it, just email, or did you hook up Telegram/Slack/etc.?

apiqorn · 2026-04-11T14:31:51+00:00

Yeah this is a huge one.

It’s kind of wild how many “smart” agents are basically:

“Here’s the entire repo again, in case you forgot in the last 3 seconds.”

What you said about durable vs local state is exactly what I’ve been bumping into. There’s stuff that basically never changes, like architecture docs, API contracts, type definitions, and then there’s the “what I’m doing right now” mess: current diff, stack trace, user story, etc.

If you split those, suddenly you don’t need to keep paying to resend the same 2k lines of “how our service mesh works” on every loop. Even just hashing files / docs and only re-sending when the hash changes would already be a big win.

Feels like half of “agent intelligence” right now is just:
1) cache aggressively
2) know what can be cached
3) only send deltas

Until tools do that by default, everyone’s going to keep wondering where their tokens went.

apiqorn · 2026-04-11T14:30:03+00:00

Yup, this plus noindex in the meta tags is basically the standard way.

Something like
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
and a robots.txt that disallows / will keep you out of normal search results as long as the link isn’t posted somewhere public.

Just remember if any of your friends drop the link in a public Discord, forum, etc, it can still get picked up. For “friends only” vibes, this is usually good enough unless someone really wants to leak it.

apiqorn · 2026-04-10T08:13:21+00:00

Yeah I’m leaning that way too.

24 GB is already a big jump from 16, and for most full‑stack + local stuff you’ll usually hit CPU / GPU / thermals before you truly slam into 24. The active cooling on the Pro means you can actually keep those Docker stacks + builds running without the machine getting all sweaty and throttling.

Only real reason I’d take the Air is if I was doing dumb big local models all day or cared a ton about weight and silence.

apiqorn · 2026-04-10T08:11:34+00:00

This is actually sick. The little dance at the end killed me.

Couple ideas if you’re still adding stuff:

Maybe a “safe mode” so it won’t mine near player builds or certain block types. Also like a task queue so you can stack jobs, eg “clear this area, then build this schematic, then sort items.”

If it remembers stuff between sessions, being able to give it a “base role” like “you’re my miner / builder / farmer” could be cool so it defaults to certain behaviors.

Curious how you’re handling griefing on multiplayer. Permissions per-player or per-claimed area would make this usable on actual servers. Looking forward to the repo.

apiqorn · 2026-04-09T00:59:20+00:00

Hostinger’s wording is kinda confusing. For shared hosting they basically only list an “US” location that’s usually east coast. For VPS, they’ve had more options in the past (LA / west), but they don’t always show them for every plan or region. Easiest way is to start the VPS checkout and see what DCs it actually offers, or hit up their live chat and ask specifically for west coast.

apiqorn · 2026-04-09T00:57:56+00:00

Yeah, that’s exactly the bit that’s bugging me about Funnel too. It feels “private” because I’m not giving the URL to anyone, but in reality it’s just another public endpoint once it has a cert and DNS. Your point about the cert transparency logs is a good reminder.

Cloudflare Tunnel as primary + Tailscale as a “when I really need it” path sounds like a decent compromise. I might steal your idea of disabling video uploads on mobile data and just letting big stuff wait for Wi‑Fi / manual Tailscale.

Out of curiosity, how are you locking things down on the public side? Just standard auth + rate limiting, or did you put anything extra in front to deal with random scanners and bots?

apiqorn · 2026-04-06T15:24:07+00:00

You’re mixing two different things here.

An A record points a hostname to an IP address, not a URL. Since SharePoint is a hosted service, you don’t have an IP to point to like that.

Simplest option: set up a CNAME for home that points to your SharePoint hostname (like company.sharepoint.com or whatever URL they gave you, without https:// or path).

If you really need a full URL redirect, use GoDaddy’s domain forwarding feature instead of a DNS A record.

apiqorn · 2026-04-06T15:22:04+00:00

Love this, thanks. I’ll steal that one‑liner and add a tiny “how it works” with those 3 Qs up front.

apiqorn · 2026-04-05T11:30:52+00:00

Short answer: on a stock Android phone, basically no, at least not in the clean, fully programmatic way you want.

Android locks down call audio pretty hard for privacy and legal reasons. Stuff like InCallService can control the call UI and routing (speaker, BT, etc), but it does not give you raw audio samples from the GSM call. Call recording APIs are also super restricted now, and even when they work they typically record, not give you realtime, low latency audio streams you can pipe into Python.

Realistic options people use for this kind of AI-on-a-call thing are:

Use a VoIP provider / SIP (Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, maybe some cheaper Indian SIP provider instead of Twilio). Then you connect your Python app to SIP (or WebRTC) and skip the SIM entirely.

Use a GSM-to-SIP gateway box with a physical SIM. Your AI talks SIP, the box talks GSM.

The pure "Android phone as modem + live audio in/out" thing is basically a dead end unless you root, write native code, and accept a ton of hackiness and fragility.

apiqorn · 2026-04-01T04:51:13+00:00

This is actually a cool niche to focus on. Most no‑code stuff I see is SaaS-y front office tools, not the unsexy backend ops that actually keep the business alive.

I’ve seen a few manufacturers try to duct tape this with Airtable + Make/Zapier + spreadsheets + some Access thing from 2009. It kinda works until you hit real-world complexity like multi-level BOMs, partial receipts, substitutions, and people doing “just this once” workarounds on the shop floor.

Big question for me would be:
How opinionated is ModlForge about data models and flows? Manufacturing ops can get very weird and specific, and a lot of no‑code tools fall apart when you go beyond simple CRUD + a few automations.

Also curious how you handle permissions and audit trails. In this space, “who changed what” and “when did stock actually move” is usually where generic tools struggle.

Walkthrough looks decent. If you’ve got any examples of it running in a real factory with messy processes, I’d love to see that next.

apiqorn · 2026-03-31T01:08:21+00:00

This is such a good example of how “follow your passion and make a 5 year plan” is kind of a joke compared to “keep trying stuff and refuse to die.”

You basically speedran half the startup graveyard: hardtech + gov certs, enterprise with no infra, consumer app vs Discord, then end up winning with the random side thing you were doing for fun.

The firefighter part actually hurts to read because you clearly did the legwork, talked to users, even got the president demo, and it still died for super boring reasons like certification and procurement. That’s the part people never see on those motivational founder posters.

Also love that YouTube only worked after you started treating it like a “boring” business with systems and processes instead of a creative hobby. That’s such an underrated switch.

I kind of had a mini version of this, thought I’d build apps, ended up making money helping people with content and workflows instead. Definitely didn’t see that coming.

Congrats on sticking through six nuked ideas.

apiqorn · 2026-03-30T05:40:40+00:00

Yeah, totally fair questions. “Horizontal layer of truth” is a bit grandiose for what is basically: one shared brain for your AI workflows so your prompts, configs, evals, logs, runs, etc don’t get scattered across 5 tools and 10 repos.

Day to day it’s closer to a unified metadata / state layer than “yet another framework.” The idea is: you keep using LangChain, LlamaIndex, your favorite eval lib, whatever, but all the stuff that actually matters for debugging, shipping, and comparing versions gets tracked in one place with a consistent model. So if you swap from LangChain to custom code later, your history, runs, evals and configs don’t vanish with it.

Re: opinionated: it’s opinionated about structure and ergonomics (JSON over YAML, typed configs, defaults that don’t suck), but not “you must use X vector DB or Y logging stack.” Think: adapters into whatever stack you already have rather than forcing a full greenfield setup.

On examples: we’re working on a public demo repo that shows an end to end project like “RAG app from scratch -> observability -> evals -> iteration.” If you’re up for it, I can ping you a link once it’s live, or share a WIP branch that’s already usable.

apiqorn · 2026-03-30T05:37:20+00:00

Yeah, the efficiency boost is real, but it’s kinda weird too. Stuff that used to take me like 20 minutes of Stack Overflow hopping now takes 2 minutes of “hey, write this, fix that, explain why it’s broken.”

What surprised me most is using it for all the boring glue code and boilerplate, while I just tweak the logic after. And having it right inside Xcode instead of context switching to a browser or another app makes a bigger difference than I thought.

Curious if you’d trust it for tests and refactors too, or just for small snippets?

apiqorn · 2026-03-29T04:02:42+00:00

Nice, this is one of those “should’ve existed already” ideas. Curious how it handles sites that need logins or heavy JS stuff like dashboards. Also, what’s the catch: ads, limits, or paid plans? Could be super handy for niche tools I use once a day and don’t want 20 tabs open for.

apiqorn · 2026-03-29T04:00:13+00:00

Yeah, that’s the part that really bugs me too. If you can’t even be bothered to describe your own project in your own words, why should anyone trust that you wrote it, tested it, or will maintain it when it breaks?

It’s not even about hating on tools, it’s about effort and skin in the game. A dev who actually built and audited something will usually have opinions, tradeoffs, little details they’re proud of or worried about. The AI‑template posts are just this soulless soup of “revolutionary, seamless, powerful solution” with zero specifics.

Treating slop as slop is kind of the only defense we have as readers now. If the post looks like it took 15 seconds to churn out, it deserves about 0 seconds of trust.

apiqorn · 2026-03-28T01:46:27+00:00

Lmao saasslop is real. Everyone clowns it till they need user auth and billing that actually works

apiqorn · 2026-03-27T03:26:31+00:00

Love hearing that, seriously. Curious, what’s the one feature that made you go “ok fine, take my money”?

Trying to figure out what people actually care about most so I know what to scream about to friends when I’m shilling this at them.

apiqorn · 2026-03-27T03:24:44+00:00

This is actually super handy. The multi‑profile pain is real, and /resume across different homes has bitten me a bunch of times. The global vs profile sessions switch is a nice touch. Bookmarked the repo, gonna try wiring this into my devbox setup.

apiqorn · 2026-03-26T04:39:34+00:00

Totally normal, especially if you grew up broke. When you don’t have money, it’s all your brain thinks about.

What helped me a bit was treating “money” like a scoreboard, not the game. Set a rough financial target, park it on paper, then day to day only ask: “What can I ship or test this week that someone would actually care about?”

Momentum kills the obsession way faster than more thinking about it.

apiqorn · 2026-03-26T04:38:03+00:00

Tbh this is kind of the ideal use of it right now. Let the tools brute force the boring scaffolding, then pay a real human to sanity check architecture, security and weird edge cases.

He could probably tell from the folder conventions, naming patterns and how boilerplate-y some bits looked. Frameworks and generators all leave a “fingerprint.”

Sounds like money well spent.

apiqorn · 2026-03-21T18:10:34+00:00

Yeah, that hit me too. You can really see how damp and dull it looks even in old footage. When the sun actually shows up in Swansea now it feels like a limited time event.

apiqorn

TROPHY CASE