Hacker News: alaudet

New comment by alaudet in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

alaudet — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:35:23 +0000

I've been building a retirement income optimizer much like you see financial analysts use to optimize different sources of income to minimize taxes during retirement and ensure you don't run out of money. It also runs Monte Carlo simulations based on market returns and spending going forward to predict your chances of not meeting your goals. Just writing it for myself as most applications along this line are all proprietary and accessible through financial advisors only.

New comment by alaudet in "S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic"

alaudet — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:25:59 +0000

It's amazing how many intelligent people don't understand this. People on the internet just like to complain. Not one single person is being denied anything, each and everyone one of us can go fill up on all the high valuation unproven companies we want to, directly or through an ETF that tracks some index that is making exceptions.

New comment by alaudet in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"

alaudet — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:25:17 +0000

I had a conversation with Claude yesterday about this very topic. The AI was pretty candid about the issue and said many of the same things the author said. Now I am not sure if I went in with an unintended bias and it just went into full sycophant mode, I tried to be neutral in my prompts, along the lines of the implications of integrating AI into processes when the true cost is not being charged. But it was obvious that even moderate usage is a loss leader, so heavy users with agentic workloads are in a risky situation and should think long and hard about their business model if costs slowly trickle up in the triple, quadruple etc etc range.

I will continue to use it as an assistant that does the menial stuff quicker than I ever could, but it's just too early to let it do stuff that would hurt if it disappeared. Enjoy it while it lasts.

New comment by alaudet in "I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe"

alaudet — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:57:44 +0000

Looks solid, I had never even heard of them.

New comment by alaudet in "I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe"

alaudet — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:44:08 +0000

I am not running a company, just a household but this article speaks to me. I have given this topic plenty of thought in the past year as I have a growing unease with large American tech firms and how they use data. These are some of my setups (in the spirit of the article)

I have also rid myself of Google Analytics for a personal website. Replaced with a local solution that parses logs and builds reports that give me quite a bit of information. Its a more ethical type of analytics leaving no cookies behind and no trackers at all. All info is from the web server logs, you can grok quite a bit of insight from this alone.

Email is the biggest challenge, I have mapped out the entire migration steps for Google Workspace to Proton but have not yet pulled the trigger. The main thing is coordination with the rest of my family who use the domain for their email as well, they don't share my obsession with "digital sovereignty" so there is some negotiation around time tables :-) The Proton family plan will cut the bill in about half.

Password management --> KeepassXC with db on local nas. For personal use I feel you can't beat self hosted for password management.

Compute, Digital Ocean I continue to use and has servers in Toronto which works for me geographically. It's very low down my list of migration plans, they just work and they have treated me pretty good over the years.

Storage all self hosted (ownCloud and Openmediavault). Are they the best options, maybe not but they just work. No cloud based storage at all (Google/Apple etc etc). If I ever throw something out there it is gpg encrypted).

Offsite backups, two local copies to seperate drives (dejadup) on my NAS and offsite storage.

There are still some other services I need to consider. I do have Claude Pro. I run local LLM's for a lot of stuff with OpenwebUI but its not a full replacement.

CDN - Also use Cloudflare free tier. Have to give it more thought, it just works so well.

DNS is fully self hosted using dns-crypt-proxy / dnssec to Quad9 and Mullvad DNS. Works great. I actually blackhole any hits to google dns at the router, media and iot devices love to ignore your dns settings.

Github for code hosting. I know, Microsoft, but it works and is not a hill I am willing to die on just yet.

Photos self hosted with Immich on Proxmox. It's been pretty solid.

VPN, Wireguard to the home and have also integrated Tailscale for some things, which has been handy for extending connectivity and supporting my dad in a different city. Apparently they are based in Canada so that is a bonus. I use the free tier for now but am considering the paid version just to support them.

Router and wireless access points all on the latest Openwrt with consumer grade equipment, some of which I picked up used for like 20 bucks. Allows me to have home, guest, media and iot vlans for proper network segregation. Is it overkill? 10 years ago maybe but today I would not run any other way.

Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.

New comment by alaudet in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

alaudet — Sat, 09 May 2026 15:32:56 +0000

Excellent thanks

New comment by alaudet in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

alaudet — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:18:28 +0000

Great info, thanks

New comment by alaudet in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

alaudet — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:14:35 +0000

You got me really interested here, I ran my own mailserver years ago and eventually just gave it up. I am getting rid of Google Workspace and have been planning a migration to Proton for two domains. But this sounds like a fun project. Any advice? I am going to check out Mox and Stalwart.

What providers are good hosting candidates, I have a website on DO, but from my understanding their entire ranges are blacklisted heavily.

New comment by alaudet in "AI slop is killing online communities"

alaudet — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:38:27 +0000

Scaling is a problem. But my mind keeps running in circles as to how you could do this. Maybe organically through a "web of trust" like gpg. Bob trusts Alice --> Alice trusts John, so Bob automatically trusts John. But then the complexity would kill it just like gpg and you would be sitting alone in your group chat.

Maybe if Alice gets out of line and starts trusting obvious bot accounts you can untrust her and automatically would remove any replies from the people she trusts.

Just having fun here.

New comment by alaudet in "AI slop is killing online communities"

alaudet — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:12:33 +0000

Some definitely enjoy the dopamine hits and get addicted to the doom scrolling. Maybe I am just too old to understand it and the internet is passing me by. Some of us still like conversations like this. Real conversation in a respectful manner even when we question each others viewpoints. The old internet is still there in some places and I'll continue hanging out there as long as it does. While I have great friends in real life, not that many of them are old tech nerds, so the internet is really the only place to talk to like minded people.

New comment by alaudet in "AI slop is killing online communities"

alaudet — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:31:16 +0000

The balance is so far out of whack with LLM's now in online communities. People crave human interaction with like minded individuals, and whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful. Maybe small communities need to come back, where you build credibility slowly. Why does every site have to be a monstrosity that wants to build a hundred million users to IPO. It just attracts the worst. I was active on Reddit for years under the same username I have here. I have pretty much abandoned it.

New comment by alaudet in "When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing"

alaudet — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:06:05 +0000

I'm talking about your personal knowledge base and your processes for getting stuff done, you take that with you when you leave and it belongs to you. Of course what you create belongs to your employer.

New comment by alaudet in "When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing"

alaudet — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:23:48 +0000

I sadly have to agree with this. In a collaborative "give and take" world sharing is good. In an environment that takes only, all you have left is your own intellectual property. It is your own most vital asset worth protecting. Shouldn't be like this, but it is.

New comment by alaudet in "When everyone has AI and the company still learns nothing"

alaudet — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:11:43 +0000

As a 3 year retired Systems Analyst I feel bad for my younger colleagues. In 2023 I was one of the first in my team to use AI to untangle some legacy code that did something mission critical with Perl and whose original author had long ago left and apparently didn't understand anything about actually commenting code or documentation. We were all in awe of this new technology that got us out of a bind. But more and more it looks less like a tool that is available to you instead of something that is being _done_ to you. Nobody asked for this.

At what point is inspiration and thought just devalued and worthless in the name of doing things instantly. The work has no soul.

New comment by alaudet in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

alaudet — Sun, 03 May 2026 12:59:50 +0000

Have you considered Linux on bare metal and a Windows VM for your coding? Two monitor setup and you can have Windows on one side when working then all your other daily stuff is in Linux. Shared drives and clipboards make things pretty easy.

Also just debloat the Windows install, why are you suffering with Co-Pilot? I have a VM running on Proxmox and I rdp to it from Linux when needed, but daily use, no way and honestly there really is no reason to put all your eggs in the Windows basket in this day and age.

New comment by alaudet in "'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet"

alaudet — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:14:10 +0000

I think smart policy would be a good start. I just made a comment on the sign of our times. I could have worded my one line reply better. I do think it will be difficult to regulate as I don't see a political appetite to do so. Maybe some countries will get it right.

New comment by alaudet in "'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet"

alaudet — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:00:54 +0000

I didn't say that, you said that.

New comment by alaudet in "'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet"

alaudet — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:34:31 +0000

The problem is that the genie is out of the bottle, even if you try to regulate it away it pops up in offshore jurisdictions and uses crypto. The ease with which polymarket can be manipulated is infinite because there are so many different random things you can bet on. It's a sign of our times and I don't think there is much that can be done about it by anyone.

New comment by alaudet in "Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan?"

alaudet — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:10:53 +0000

The enshitification stage came quick.

New comment by alaudet in "AI chatbots could be making you stupider"

alaudet — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:29:48 +0000

It might be making some people lazier but not more stupid, it's not like you are literally losing brain cells by using it.