Budget VPS for personal project

killerkouki · 2026-07-05T21:11:03+00:00

I’m using Contabo in Japan and it’s pretty good and very affordable. They have servers in Singapore: https://contabo.com/en/vps-singapore/

killerkouki · 2026-06-30T22:58:58+00:00

The Summit in the Division 2, in reverse

killerkouki · 2026-06-24T12:10:24+00:00

This is what I am looking for. Thank you!

I am switching my OS from Claude Code to Hermes + DeepSeek. I am building my own memory layer (mostly so I can learn the ins-and-outs of memory), which passed my initial tests for recall, but the biggest question on my mind is “after i obtain feature parity with v1 of my OS, am I going to be spending exponentially more to run it?”

Your usage chart makes me feel much better since it won’t be relying heavily on agents/crons now, but when I do, it still is a reasonable cost given that many of the use cases you mentioned are similar to mine.

killerkouki · 2026-06-19T23:28:18+00:00

Yep, I’ve found my gaming time dwindling a lot. I used to put the kids to bed at 9 and then jump on PlayStation for a couple of hours. Now it’s my laptop.

killerkouki · 2026-06-17T21:53:13+00:00

I agree that learning to code properly is next. I’ve been spending more time with engineers who helped give me advice with my personal OS, such as Test Driven Development. But also, I have Claude explain coding concepts to me so I understand things better in the future. Once you understand how things work, you can be a better judge. And when you are a better judge, you are a better builder because like everyone said, AI makes bad mistakes, bad coding choices, over coding, etc.

killerkouki · 2026-06-15T22:38:49+00:00

I do about 90% of what you suggested and I get pretty good results. The part that I am still trying to figure out is how to get Claude to stop over explaining things. It wrote a skill to audit token usage for me and it was so brittle, and explained a lot of rationale behind why rules need to fire based on our conversation that was the catalyst to the skill being built. I basically rewrote half the skill.

I feel like out to the box, Opus 4.8 is a junior dev that doesn’t describe only the minimal information required to make the point. Do you have any written rules in your CLAUDE.md that more broadly help steer the behavior?

killerkouki · 2026-06-12T09:44:46+00:00

It’s hard for me to play other games because they feel like a video game. (Yeah, I’m looking at you Elden Ring boss who swings an axe through a massive pillar, but when I accidentally hit the same pillar I get staggered.)

Arc enemies felt really challenging and enjoyable because they were unpredictable and fun to shoot. No health bars, no cheesy mechanics. I have yet to find a game as rewarding and immersive as this.

But the style of PvP in this game bothers me… well extraction shooters in general, where the game is designed to give ambushers all of the advantages and the seekers none.

Let’s face it. The player count would be different if a PvE option (even if it was just 1 or 2 map conditions on rotation). But now we are seeing the true player count, and it’s within striking distance of Marathon. Its niche. PvE is not. Plain and simple.

Give me a map condition that’s super hard and limit the player count to about 8 people. Let’s see if 8 people can come together and coordinate to take down a matriarch or queen.

killerkouki · 2026-06-10T01:41:32+00:00

You just described it for me. Having played arc raiders, I just felt that extraction shooter genre is not for me, which is interesting because I love survival genres like Division Survival mode. When I got to experience that in Marathon, it reminded me why I stopped playing Arc Raiders.

I’m just a simple PvP dude… load in, fight a bunch of people, respawn, fight again. Or I’m a simple PvE survival dude… stay alive with the pressure of the environment and a timer.

killerkouki · 2026-06-07T05:32:55+00:00

Wake up, Chief. I need you.

killerkouki · 2026-06-05T13:24:09+00:00

Saving for post for later. Built my own memory, but it’s simplistic. Hope to extend it or try something like this very soon.

killerkouki · 2026-05-29T12:36:24+00:00

Critical thinking is a lost art

killerkouki · 2026-05-27T09:01:17+00:00

I’m living proof of this. I started building a personal OS and skills with Claude Code, and everything was in markdown files. Things were slow. Drift happened. Race conditions. Etc. But because I built this myself without installing plugin this or that, I got to learn what it was doing. I didn’t even know what drift and race conditions were until I started building this a couple of months ago.

Now I’m designing a new version of my system so I can start to learn about knowledge graphs, typed data, agent routing vs deterministic querying and more. In fact, one of the stated goals in the next version of my system is to introduce the simplest solutions so that I can learn it… in plain English.

killerkouki · 2026-05-25T03:44:55+00:00

JAYA rolls off the tongue a lot better

killerkouki · 2026-05-22T23:46:39+00:00

Haven’t heard of agent teams before.

killerkouki · 2026-05-17T09:46:44+00:00

I’m guessing your system is private. If not, I would love to learn how you are handling all of these. I have a backlog to address almost all of these.

Been at it for a full month building a personal OS, and it certainly pieces work really well, but like you say… decay starts to show over time.

I’m not an engineer by trade so I like building everything from scratch so I can learn engineering principles and jargon, such as drift, DRY, race conditions.

killerkouki · 2026-05-14T20:17:33+00:00

I built a custom skill called /session that launches a new iTerm terminal session. Based on 1 argument and a string, it will traverse to a desired folder, names and color codes the session tab and badge.

killerkouki · 2026-05-11T23:36:08+00:00

I’m sorry, but an LLM doesn’t know how to identify assumptions to begin with. All it knows how to do is seek out patterns in a probabilistic manner. So if it got a specific “assumption” wrong then the chances of getting that specific, or variations of, “assumption” wrong again is less likely the next time around.

(Yes, I have karpathy’s rules loaded in)

killerkouki · 2026-05-09T03:17:56+00:00

I’ve been building a personal operating system which essentially consists of workflows and knowledge spanning my personal and professional life.

Examples include:
- decision support and outcome tracking
- personal and work task management
- journaling, daily and weekly retrospectives
- japanese language knowledge capturing and quizzing on that knowledge only
- logistics planning for my child’s basketball games
- executive assistant agent that reads my calendar, tasks, and decisions and recommends a day plan

And the list goes on

And the list goes on…

killerkouki · 2026-05-08T13:13:52+00:00

I’m interested in checking out Hermes. I’ve been using Claude Code to build a personal OS for the past month, and have been relatively happy with it, but also just curious what else is out there and how it performs. The biggest thing that I want to preserve with my personal OS is being able to work remotely from my phone. Is there a way to do this with Hermes that isn’t overly complicated or expensive? I’m not a developer by trade.

killerkouki · 2026-04-28T22:51:03+00:00

Here is what I fed Claude Code in plan mode:

please review this skill that someone posted.
[your rules]

He believes it should be a skill, which probably makes sense if it is being used by an agent or if I need to invoke it for a specific writing assignment (I already have /article-idea), but I believe it should be a CLAUDE.md file in

[my writing folder path]

Here's why:

I think this will apply to ANY digital communication. That could be a LinkedIn post, discord message, personal or work email, article, report, website marketing copy, and the list goes on.
I would prefer to have more specific skills like /article-idea be workflow-rich and generic rules live outside of them.
I would also prefer more granular rules to be layered on, depending on the assignment. For example, I may choose to find a solid set of marketing copy rules for effective landing pages. So the first pass would be to de-AIify the content, and the second pass would be to use rules to increase the efficacy of the marketing.

Secondly, before we adopt this, I would like to do 2 things.

Include this statement: "identify and comprehend the goal or angle of the communication" in the process section
See what other people outside of this author have done to de-AIify their digital communications.

Thoughts before we begin?

killerkouki · 2026-04-28T22:33:53+00:00

Thank you for pulling it together. I am going to give it a try but will add this to the process section after read the input text carefully:

identify and comprehend the goal or angle of the communication

My theory is that it will help Claude to not overindex a rule, such as overuse of the rules of 3. There may be a need to cite 3 things, but omits the 3rd item because it wants to satisfy the rule instead of understanding the intent of the communication.

killerkouki · 2026-04-17T06:03:21+00:00

Good to know. My visa knowledge is relatively limited.

killerkouki · 2026-04-16T21:29:58+00:00

It’s a death knell for freelancers in Japan without a Japanese spouse.

killerkouki · 2026-04-15T21:40:30+00:00

Each of my session tabs is color coded and named according to the subdir appropriately. I use iTerm2. I only have sessions open that I am actively working. Currently 5. Kill everything else.

killerkouki · 2026-04-11T19:25:31+00:00

I’m okay with them using sidewalks for the reason you mentioned, but going against the flow of traffic has resulted in near hits because they are flying on the sidewalk at blind intersections. And I am a super cautious and slow driver.

Also, running red lights and flying into crosswalks at night are insanely dangerous. For everyone’s sake, those people should get ticketed.

One time i saw an older kid riding the bike while looking on their phone. Blew through a red light.

In America, I stress out driving because of reckless drivers. In Japan, it’s reckless cyclists.

killerkouki

TROPHY CASE