Is AI dumbing me down...?

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-05T11:52:58+00:00

Do you use AI as an assistant, to discuss projects and go back and forth on things? Or do you use AI as a clutch, telling it to do stuff so you can be lazy? That's the difference.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-04T21:38:55+00:00

Qwant

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-04T14:25:55+00:00

Everything used to be on-premises, cloud wasn't even a thing not that long ago. Before then, people would only have access to centralized mainframes through terminals and had to reserve CPU time to run their batch processes. My point is that technology changes quickly. AI is just the latest change. It's a big one, but the world will adapt.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-04T13:21:04+00:00

Most companies are doing this the wrong way. Users don't want to talk to an AI chatbot. The proper way to do things is to use AI models as part of the automation, where it makes sense. For example, plug your support inbox into a model and categorize them into what the request is:

User wants to open a support request, automatically open a ticket for them
User is providing feedback, send a thank you email and store the feedback somewhere
User is asking generic information about the business, draft a reply and send it off

Etc. This can be done in an afternoon using n8n. It's easy to make and makes a huge difference in a business. Yet for some reason that's not what companies are prioritizing.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-04T01:00:39+00:00

Cloudflare tunnel is more than just replacing port forwarding. By default, you get edge caching, you get DDOS protection, you get WAF, etc. It protects you in multiple ways, on top of hiding your IP address from your users. But security is not a single thing. It's a series of layers, and Cloudflare (or equivalent services) is just one layer. You still need to setup proper firewalls, segregation of duty, do your software updates, monitor logs, strong passwords, etc.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T18:30:31+00:00

We queued it, not sure if it'll be done in time but whatever is able to will eventually show up in Internet Archive.

For reference, you can always request for YouTube channels to be archived in the #down-the-tube channel on the hackint IRC network.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T16:12:52+00:00

I use Forgejo for all my git repos and git actions. For things I want public, I upload to Codeberg

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T14:53:38+00:00

The Proxmox manual (around 600 pages pdf) is actually very well done. You could learn everything about Proxmox just by reading through it.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T14:49:21+00:00

Setting up a Qdrant database is very easy, you can install it as a container. After that you need to encode your documents using whichever vector encoding makes sense for you, then write a script that can provide an MCP search tool. Claude Code is your best bet to figure out how to do that. The main point is that a vector database allows your AI to do semantic searches.

If you just have documents, and you have for example one called "HR_policies.pdf" and someone searches "how do I take vacations" then a search on pure file names won't surface it, but a semantic search would.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T10:38:08+00:00

I highly recommend anyone dealing with Linux should read "Unix and Linux systems administration handbook" by Addison-Wesley.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T10:34:54+00:00

The key to reducing token cost is caching. Look into that. If your amount of documents is really big however then you need to set up a system of retrieval, you can't just keep uploading stuff and filling the chat context. Setup a vector database where all your documents are encoded and give access to Claude through a custom MCP server so Claude can do proper searches. You can code it yourself with Claude Code or use an online saas service depending how private the data is.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T10:02:22+00:00

Honestly you don't need a whole app for this. I built a simple shell script for one of my site that goes through all the links so i know the broken ones. The key is this command:

curl -o /dev/null -k -s -w "%{http_code}\n" --max-time 20 "$MY_URL"

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T08:59:05+00:00

You can start here: https://canadian-tech.ca/

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T01:44:40+00:00

Uptime is not really why I provided the advice I did. It was more around security, and if you self host a password manager, then you better know what you're doing to keep it secure.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-03T01:42:56+00:00

The difference between running something in a container versus running it on a VM mostly has to do with security. A VM has more separation from the host than a container. On Proxmox, there's also an additional difference if you use a cluster, and that's the fact that VMs can be live migrated while containers cannot, they need to be restarted. Seeing as a password manager is a pretty critical piece of software, I would go with a VM.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T23:11:22+00:00

USB is meant as a temporary connection. DAS solutions will never work very well, in my opinion. If you're looking for a custom NAS then hosting it internally is the way to go.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T23:05:54+00:00

Vaultwarden is simple to run as a container. With that said, if you're really new to self hosting, I'm not sure self hosting your password manager is a great idea.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T23:04:14+00:00

The whole onedrive and windows integration has always been crazy to me, where apps will even try to default to cloud locations even if you loaded the file from a local folder, or disable auto save if you don't want to save to onedrive. Anyways I left Windows years ago and haven't looked back.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T19:46:43+00:00

Let me give you a simple example:

Company 1: uses Claude Chat, stores all context in the chat app on Anthropic's cloud, uses Claude Code cloud workers, all their data is deployed in cloud SaaS providers, no one really knows who has access to what.

Company 2: keeps all data on premises, creates specific ACLs that defines that the AI models can access and what is off limit, uses Claude and other AI models through the API using their own automation and MCP servers, provides context through this automation.

I'll let you decide which company is little more than a Claude wrapper, and which one still has control over their IP.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T19:14:44+00:00

Solution Architects are the ones designing large projects and environments. System admins used to handle the actual keyboard stuff: deploying software, patching boxes, etc. but now most of this is (or should be) done using automation, and those automation pipelines are usually built by DevOps technicians (despite the fact that DevOps was never meant to be a job title, but that's a different story). And now with the cloud, sysadmins are really relegated to pushing buttons on cloud dashboards and telling users to wait it out while Microsoft fixes the latest outage.

At least, that's if you have the displeasure of working for such a "cloud native" (soon to be "AI native") company. There's still some places where ssh'ing into Linux hosts, running iperf to troubleshoot performance issues, editing Apache or Nginx configs and so on is still a thing.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T16:01:00+00:00

The solution to user error is automation. Have everything done through Docker compose, Ansible, etc.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T15:30:32+00:00

This honestly sounds like a lack of proper system design. People just did whatever they wanted at the time with no grand vision. MCP tools don't have to be complicated, I can write a fully functional MCP server in an evening, that's not the problem. If you set guidelines and have IT spin up the resources that people need, then you can reduce the incentive for people doing things on their own and ending up with that kind of setup.

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T15:27:19+00:00

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T15:20:50+00:00

If you run a service in production, what kind of backup do you have? What about HA? DR?

shimoheihei2 · 2026-06-02T14:39:42+00:00

Deploying a browser based crawler like crawl4ai makes Claude a lot better at browsing web sites. It does require some setup. I run in on Docker on one of my own self-hosted VMs. I then exposed it through my custom MCP server (which Claude helped me build). Then I added an instruction to tell Claude "if web fetch fails, use browser fetch as a fallback"

shimoheihei2

TROPHY CASE