2026-05-11 08:00:00
GitLab announced layoffs today. They don't state how many people are affected, but honestly I find this really frustrating for several reasons:
Maybe GitLab did need to trim the fat, maybe they will come out of this stronger, but damn I just can't help but think about a world where they could have won without AI and just by being more stable than GitHub.
One small problem with that: what you are suggesting makes sense. We live in clown world with clown world logic. Why would we be allowed to have things that make sense in clown world?
Also yes, I do know that clowning is actually a very difficult art to pull off correctly. Humor is one of the most difficult things on the planet because if you do it wrong you offend people. People that are offended generally aren't people that are laughing. As a character that largely amounts to being a jaded contrarian comedian this is something that comes up a lot when planning what I say.Also maybe I'm just oversensitive to it at this point, but the layoff announcement really reads like Claude Opus output. What a fuckin' world.
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
Apropos of nothing, I'm really enjoying my experimentation with Tangled. More to come soon when I have more to say.
2026-05-07 08:00:00
In the wake of copy.fail, there are more vulnerabilities that have been announced:
Right now would be one of the best times for a supply chain attack via NPM to hit hard.
Outside of Linux kernel patches from your distro, I think it's probably a good idea to put a moratorium on installing new software for a week or so.
2026-04-01 08:00:00
April Fools Day is somewhat of a legendary day among nerds. Historically it's been when the nerds at GMail introduced GMail Custom Time, where you could interrupt causality by making GMail look like you sent a message before it was actually sent. It actually worked.
Sometimes this gets taken too far and the joke falls flat, causing a lot more problems than would exist if the joke never happened in the first place. Incidents like this have resulted in many companies just putting in policies against doing that to avoid customer growth impact.
It's refreshing to see the Claude Code team introduce the /buddy system this year. When you run /buddy, it hatches a coding companion that hangs out in your Claude Code interface like a tamagochi. Here's my buddy Xentwine:
╭──────────────────────────────────────╮
│ │
│ ★★★ RARE ROBOT │
│ │
│ ( ) │
│ .[||]. │
│ [ @ @ ] │
│ [ ==== ] │
│ `------´ │
│ │
│ Xentwine │
│ │
│ "A methodical circuit-whisperer │
│ obsessed with untangling logical │
│ snarls; speaks in patient, │
│ patronizing riddles and will │
│ absolutely let you sit in your own │
│ bug for three minutes before │
│ offering the blindingly obvious │
│ fix." │
│ │
│ DEBUGGING █████░░░░░ 47 │
│ PATIENCE █████░░░░░ 47 │
│ CHAOS ██░░░░░░░░ 21 │
│ WISDOM █████████░ 92 │
│ SNARK █████░░░░░ 49 │
│ │
╰──────────────────────────────────────╯
Here's what it looks like in the Claude Code app:
I think this is the best April Fools Day feature in recent memory because it seems intentionally designed to avoid impacting users in a way that would cause problems:
/buddy pet.This is the kind of harmless prank that all nerds should aspire for. 10/10.
2026-03-30 08:00:00
I've been seeing talk around about wanting to capitalize on the AI bubble popping and picking up server GPUs for pennies on the dollar so they can play games in higher fidelity due to server GPUs having more video ram. I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but most of those enterprise GPUs don't have the ability to process graphics.
Yeah, that's right, in order to pack in as much compute as possible per chip, they removed video output and graphics processing from devices we are calling graphics processing units. The only thing those cards will be good for is CUDA operations for AI inference, AI training, or other things that do not involve gaming.
On a separate note, I'm reaching the point in recovery where I am getting very bored and am so completely ready to just head home. At least the diet restrictions end this week, so that's something to look forward to. God I want a burrito.
2026-03-18 08:00:00
Hey all, quick update continuing from yesterday's announcement that my homelab went down. This is stream of consciousness and unedited. Enjoy!
Turns out the entire homelab didn't go down and two Kubernetes nodes survived the power outage somehow.
Two Kubernetes controlplane nodes.
Kubernetes really wants there to be an odd number of controlplane nodes and my workloads are too heavy for any single node to run and Longhorn really wants there to be at least three nodes online. So I had to turn them off.
How did I get in? The Mac mini that I used for Anubis CI. It somehow automatically powered on when the grid reset and/or survived the power outage.
xe@t-elos:~$ uptime
09:45:55 up 66 days, 9:51, 4 users, load average: 0.37, 0.22, 0.18
Holy shit, that's good to know!
Anyways the usual suspects for trying to debug things didn't work (kubectl get nodes got a timeout, etc.), so I did an nmap across the entire home subnet. Normally this is full of devices and hard to read. This time there's basically nothing. What stood out was this:
Nmap scan report for kos-mos (192.168.2.236)
Host is up, received arp-response (0.00011s latency).
Scanned at 2026-03-18 09:23:09 EDT for 1s
Not shown: 996 closed tcp ports (reset)
PORT STATE SERVICE REASON
3260/tcp open iscsi syn-ack ttl 64
9100/tcp open jetdirect syn-ack ttl 64
50000/tcp open ibm-db2 syn-ack ttl 64
50001/tcp open unknown syn-ack ttl 64
MAC Address: FC:34:97:0D:1E:CD (Asustek Computer)
Nmap scan report for ontos (192.168.2.237)
Host is up, received arp-response (0.00011s latency).
Scanned at 2026-03-18 09:23:09 EDT for 1s
Not shown: 996 closed tcp ports (reset)
PORT STATE SERVICE REASON
3260/tcp open iscsi syn-ack ttl 64
9100/tcp open jetdirect syn-ack ttl 64
50000/tcp open ibm-db2 syn-ack ttl 64
50001/tcp open unknown syn-ack ttl 64
MAC Address: FC:34:97:0D:1F:AE (Asustek Computer)
Those two machines are Kubernetes controlplane nodes! I can't SSH into them because they're running Talos Linux, but I can use talosctl (via port 50000) to shut them down:
$ ./bin/talosctl -n 192.168.2.236 shutdown --force
WARNING: 192.168.2.236: server version 1.9.1 is older than client version 1.12.5
watching nodes: [192.168.2.236]
* 192.168.2.236: events check condition met
$ ./bin/talosctl -n 192.168.2.237 shutdown --force
WARNING: 192.168.2.237: server version 1.9.1 is older than client version 1.12.5
watching nodes: [192.168.2.237]
* 192.168.2.237: events check condition met
And now it's offline until I get home.
This was causing the sponsor panel to be offline because the external-dns pod in the homelab was online and fighting my new cloud deployment for DNS supremacy. The sponsor panel is now back online (I should have put it in the cloud in the first place, that's on me) and peace has been restored to most of the galaxy, at least as much as I can from here.
Action items:
2026-03-17 08:00:00
Quick post for y'all now that I can use my macbook while standing (long story, I can't sit due to surgical recovery, it SUCKS). My homelab went offline at about 13:00 UTC today likely because of a power outage. I'm going to just keep it offline and not fight it. I'll get home in early April and restore things then.
An incomplete list of the services that are down:
within.website vanity Go import serverGuess it's just gonna be down, hope I didn't lose any data. I'll keep y'all updated as things change if they do.
