zamubafoo (u/zamubafoo)

zamubafoo commented on One Server. Small Business chodounsky.com/2026/02/14... · Posted by u/jakubgarfield

k310 · 25 days ago

This looks like a "send-only" server.

> sudo ufw default deny incoming

Seriously, what does one do when accepting connections, given the onslaught of data-hungry bots out there?

I wouldn't want to deal with that in any upcoming planned servers and services.

zamubafoo · 25 days ago

You put your reverse proxy on a publicly available machine then through strict firewalls only accept communication to your back end from the reverse proxy; effective leverage VPCs to make your backend not be on the public Internet. That should allow you to filter out malicious users without affecting your actual application and it's trivial to scale your reverse proxy horizontally or reach for a WAF if you have the need/desire.

zamubafoo commented on Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures? · Posted by u/vessenes

inimino · a year ago

I have a paper coming up that I modestly hope will clarify some of this.

The short answer should be that it's obvious LLM training and inference are both ridiculously inefficient and biologically implausible, and therefore there has to be some big optimization wins still on the table.

zamubafoo · a year ago

Honest question: Given that the only wide consensus of anything approaching general intelligence are humans and that humans are biological systems that have evolved in physical reality, is there any arguments that better efficiency is even possible without relying on leveraging the nature of reality?

For example, analog computers can differentiate near instantly by leveraging the nature of electromagnetism and you can do very basic analogs of complex equations by just connecting containers of water together in certain (very specific) configurations. Are we sure that these optimizations to get us to AGI are possible without abusing the physical nature of the world? This is without even touching the hot mess that is quantum mechanics and its role in chemistry which in turn affects biology. I wouldn't put it past evolution to have stumbled upon some quantum mechanic that allowed for the emergence of general intelligence.

I'm super interested in anything discussing this but have very limited exposure to the literature in this space.

zamubafoo commented on EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games github.com/electronicarts... · Posted by u/Klaster_1

zamubafoo · a year ago

Shame they'll never do it for Warcraft 3 with the remaster still around.

zamubafoo commented on Pi-hole v6 pi-hole.net/blog/2025/02/... · Posted by u/tkuraku

unsnap_biceps · a year ago

Does anyone know if pihole is ever going to add DoH or similar support natively? I've had such troubles with cloudflared awhile back that I gave up on DoH, but would love to encrypt those queries.

zamubafoo · a year ago

I've been using https://github.com/DNSCrypt/doh-server for serving my DNS server via DOH for at least 2 years. Only had two issues with it and both were due to lack of maintenance on my part (ie. not updating the binary for one and then not re-configuring it after I changed configurations for the upstream DNS).

zamubafoo commented on Httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program github.com/monasticacadem... · Posted by u/alexflint

freedomben · a year ago

Inside most production environments. I could use this today inside a Pod that isn't allowed root privs.

zamubafoo · a year ago

In production environments that won't give you root access, you won't be exec'ing inside of a pod if you aren't an operator or sysadmin.

zamubafoo commented on Writing a Rust compiler in C notgull.net/announcing-do... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

bluGill · 2 years ago

Wind power existed for hundreds of years before we started drilling for oil. I doubt you can make useful solar cells, but you can make useful windmills, rechargeable batteries, light bulbs (incandescent), and motors.

However just the above list needs a large list of industry to pull off. Can you make a wire? What about a ball bearing - they are made by the millions of insane levels of precision and are cheap. All those little details are why you can't pull it off. Sure if given all the parts you can pull off the next step, but there are so many steps you can't do it.

zamubafoo · 2 years ago

I've thought a lot about these problems and you eventually hit the need for stronger than natural magnets. Without electricity it's a hard challenge, but without magnets creating electricity in a simple bench scale is a lot harder.

I ended up thinking that you'd need to do a chemical battery to bootstrap electricity and then with electricity generate the electromagnet to create stronger magnets and then iterate from there.

Your next stumbling block from there would be optics as everything else can be made with horrible tolerances. Even lathes and similar machinery can be made with pretty good tolerances without optics. But when you start needing time keeping or miniaturizing components for improved efficiencies, it becomes a blocking issue.

You also need to discover photo-reactive elements to do lithography, but that's a lot easier since it's just silver nitrate and you'd already have the components when you are working towards the initiate bootstrap battery.

zamubafoo commented on Surfer: Centralize all your personal data from online platforms github.com/CEREBRUS-MAXIM... · Posted by u/swyx

zamubafoo · 2 years ago

I made something like this since I was tired of the asymmetric nature of data collection that happens on the Internet. Still not where I would like to be, but it's been really nice being able to treat my browsing history as any old log that I can query over. Tools like dogsheep are nice, but they tend to rely on data being allowed to be removed from the platform. This bypasses those limits by just doing it on the client.

This lets me create dashboards to see usage for certain topics. For example, I have a "Dev Browser" which tracks the latest sites I've visited that are related to development topics [1]. I similarly have a few for all the online reading I do. One for blogs, one for fanfiction, and one for webfiction in general.

I've talked about my first iteration before on here [2].

My second iteration ended up with a userscript which sends the data on the sites I visit to a Vector instance (no affiliation; [3]). Vector is in there because for certain sites (ie. those behind draconian Cloudflare configuration), I want to save a local copy of the site. So Vector can pop that field save it to a local minio instance and at the same time push the rest of the record to something like Grafana Loki and Postgres while being very fast.

I've started looking into a third iteration utilizing MITMproxy. It helps a lot with saving local copies since it's happening outside of the browser, so I don't feel the hitch when a page is inordinately heavy for whatever reason. It also is very nice that it'd work with all browsers just by setting a proxy which means I could set it up for my phone both as a normal proxy or as a wireguard "transparent" proxy. Only need to set up certificates for it work.

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[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zamu-flowerpot/zamu-flower... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31429221 [3] http://vector.dev

zamubafoo commented on Surfer: Centralize all your personal data from online platforms github.com/CEREBRUS-MAXIM... · Posted by u/swyx

hi-v-rocknroll · 2 years ago

The answers to online platforms trafficking in personal data and metadata is two parallel and concurrent efforts:

1. Much tougher data privacy regulations (needed per country)

2. A central trusted, international nonprofit clearinghouse and privacy grants/permissions repository that centralizes basic personal details and provides a central way to update name, address(es), email, etc. that are then used on-demand only by companies (no storage)

By doing these, it simplifies things greatly for people and allows someone to audit and see what every company knows about them, can know about, and can remove allowances for companies they don't agree to. One of the worst cases is the US where personal information is not owned by the individual and there is almost zero control unless it's health related, and can be traded for profit.

zamubafoo · 2 years ago

Or it just all happens on the client side before it even hits the Internet. I would love if Firefox allowed users to use Postgres instead of sqlite to store their places.sqlite database.

zamubafoo commented on Make Firefox Private Again make-firefox-private-agai... · Posted by u/eloy

LunaSea · 2 years ago

> The moderation probably plays a role in it, but that's also easily decoupled from big money.

Do you believe that users are going to pay to get access to HN?

zamubafoo · 2 years ago

No, but I also believe that it's not so expensive that someone couldn't cover it if it was their hobby. This is doubly true if it's something like HN where it's not trying to scale to infinity.

zamubafoo commented on I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it switowski.com/blog/i-have... · Posted by u/switowski

101008 · 2 years ago

Once people notice AI is responding they will skip it and will request to talk to a human. AI will look the same as FAQs or Chatbots, people don't want to interact with them, they want a human being that is able to understand their problem exactly as it is.

zamubafoo · 2 years ago

The right pattern is to put them directly in a queue to talk to a person, but have an system (AI or otherwise) in the queue to gather the minimal information. Like having the person explain the problem (and have something transcribe it) and have the system transfer them to the appropriate team after parsing their problem.

Or for really common cases (ie. turn it on and off, you're affected by an outage, etc), redirect them to an prerecorded message and then let them know that they are still in the queue and can wait for a person. 9/10 it'll solve everything, but also reduce friction of simple things that might be answered.