https://chroniclesofgeorge.com

I eventually added proper css, bolted on https, and updated the html to something a little more modern and standards-compliant, but the site is still hand-coded, and looks pretty much the same as it has for a quarter-century.

Not yet, but you're absolutely right. Once a tool like this stops being front of mind, it'll fall right out of my head. It's a bit like driving somewhere versus being driven—I'm a lot more likely to remember how to get to a place if I have to actively navigate to it. If I'm in the passenger seat, all bets are off!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885136

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

When you decide to make up your own definition of determinism, you can win any argument. Good job.

Why?

In a way, LLMs are heavily exploitative of human linguistic abilities and expectations. We're wired so hard to actively engage and seek meaning in conversational exchanges that we tend to "helpfully" supply that meaning even when it's absent. We are "vulnerable" to LLMs because they supply all the "I'm talking to a person" linguistic cues, but without any form of underlying mind.

Folks like your wife aren't necessarily "bad" at LLM prompting—they're simply responding to the signals they get. The LLM "seems smart." It seems like it "knows" things, so many folks engage with them naturally, as they would with another person, without painstakingly feeding in context and precisely defining all the edges. If anything, it speaks to just how good LLMs are at being LLMs.

Friend, you have literally described a nondeterministic system. LLM output is nondeterministic. Identical input conditions result in variable output conditions. Even if those variable output conditions cluster around similar ideas or methods, they are not identical.

One less setup step in the runbook, one less thing to remember. But I agree, it doesn't hurt! It just doesn't really help, either.

Enlightenment here comes when you realize others are doing the exact same thing with the exact same justification, and everyone's pain/reward threshold is different. The argument you are making justifies their usage as well as yours.

I've been email self-hosting for a decade, and unfortunately, self-hosting your email will not help with this point nearly as much as it seems on first glance.

The reason is that as soon as you exchange emails with anyone using one of the major email services like gmail or o365, you're once again participating in the data collection/AI training machine. They'll get you coming or they'll get you going, but you will be got.

The way I've put this into practice is that instead of letting claude loose on production files and services, i keep a local repo containing copies of all my service config files with a CLAUDE.md file explaining what each is for, the actual host each file/service lives on, and other important details. If I want to experiment with something ("Let's finally get around to planning out and setting up kea-dhcp6!"), Claude makes its suggestions and changes in my local repo, and then I manually copy the config files to the right places, restart services, and watch to see if anything explodes.

Not sure I'd ever be at the point of trusting agentic AI to directly modify in-place config files on prod systems (even for homelab values of "prod").

It's worth an assessment of what you _think_ running ssh on a nonstandard port protects you against, and what it's actually doing. It won't stop anything other than the lightest and most casual script-based shotgun attacks, and it won't help you if someone is attempting to exploit an actual-for-real vuln in the ssh authentication or login process. And although I'm aware the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," it sure as hell didn't reduce the volume of login attempts.

Public key-only auth + strict allowlists will do a lot more for your security posture. If you feel like ssh is using enough CPU rejecting bad login attempts to actually make you notice, stick it behind wireguard or set up port-knocking.

And sure, put it on a nonstandard port, if it makes you feel better. But it doesn't really do much, and anyone hitting your host up with censys.io or any other assessment tool will see your nonstandard ssh port instantly.

Would you like to debate the reality of anthropogenic climate change next? This will be another area where any links you dig up will only point to a single conclusion.