The always-on laptop running my home network kernel panicked on Ubuntu, and I took the crash as the excuse I'd been waiting for. Here's the security-first Proxmox server I rebuilt in its place, and why the last machine in the house running on someone else's defaults doesn't anymore.
Why I pulled my applets out of the COSMIC store and went to hosting them myself. The short version: they bolted an AI gate onto a repo a maintainer admitted didn't need one, and I'd rather hold my own keys than depend on a gatekeeper's mood.
I'm sixty-nine, and most of the men I'm about to name are dead, killed by a country that wouldn't say the word while they died. They're running the same machine now on trans kids and drag queens. So let me say their names.
Flathub had a real slop problem and aimed at the wrong target. The line was never AI or no-AI. It's whether the person shipping the code can read it and stand behind it.
Expertise matters more with AI in the room, not less. I argued that and I stand by it. What I missed is a piece of what expertise around AI means. The argument I made was about expertise on the output side. Knowing what to look for in code you didn&
Some developers reject AI-generated code outright. Some embrace it uncritically. Both are missing the point. I've recently audited two applications posted in Linux communities. Both had critical security flaws and carried the fingerprint of AI generation, and neither developer understood what they'd shipped. When I flagged
The code was broken, but that's not the real problem. The developers copied code they didn't understand, didn't review, and if they did, they didn't or couldn't understand what they were reviewing. That is the problem.
Before this law, your operating system had no idea how old you were. That data relationship did not exist. Once you've built that pipe, you don't get to unscrew it.
My System76 RMA Experience
My career in backend development taught me how systems work from the inside out, but I spent those years using systems other people built. Now I get to ask what if we did it differently, and actually find out
I'm 69 years old and most of my friends are gone. Not from age, but from AIDS. This is the story behind the blog, the Arch install, and a lifetime of building my own things because nobody was going to build them for me.
I loved Pop!_OS and ran 22.04 for years. System76 built something special with that distro, and when they announced they were writing a new desktop environment from scratch in Rust, I was all in. Three years of alphas and betas later, COSMIC shipped in December 2025 and it&
software
I've Spent 43 Years Securing Systems. Here's Why I Don't Trust Software That Can't Say No.
Privacy
You didn't get hacked. You just bought a bunch of devices that were designed to spy on you. Time to take your network back.
I retired in March 2024 after 40 years of writing software. A decade at Salesforce, and before that a long trail of jobs going back to the early 80s. I was done with sprints and Jira tickets and getting paged at 2 AM, it was time to relax. I don&
wayland
The arguments against Wayland are frozen in 2020. The technology moved on.
github
Microsoft is training AI on your code without consent. I moved to Codeberg.
linux
A year of bad decisions, documented for your entertainment.