Dispatches
101 pieces · 3 years · 40 tags
Start here
Two routes through the archive. Read in order, or pick the problem on your desk.
Securing agents
For readers comfortable with process isolation and API permissions.
- Sandboxing and credential proxying — start with what the agent can reach and which secrets it can see.
- Prove the execution gate — follow the boundary from permissions to properties you can check.
- When policy changes during a task — examine what happens when yesterday’s permission no longer applies.
Homelab security
Start with basic networking; the later articles assume familiarity with Linux services. These are dated field notes, so check current upstream documentation before applying commands.
- Separate trust zones with VLANs — decide which devices should be able to talk before adding monitoring.
- Inspect traffic with Suricata — make network activity visible inside those boundaries.
- Build a security dashboard — bring the resulting signals together for investigation.
2026 31 entries
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Supply Chain 8 min read
The Repository Link That Points at Nobody
About one declared repository link in seven no longer cloned anonymously, and for about a fifth of those the GitHub account it names no longer existed.
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DevOps 9 min read
Plant the Defect, Watch the Gate
Mutation testing pointed at CI checks instead of code: plant a known defect, require the gate to go red, and put a floor under how much it examined.
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Supply Chain 9 min read
Provenance Attests the Pipeline, Not the Intent
Three 2026 npm compromises shipped malware with valid provenance. Only one of them is visible in the signed fields, and a fourth shows what provenance does catch.
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Linux 10 min read
The Command Said It Worked
Five commands this site published reported success while doing nothing. A small container lab reproduces four, and the cheap defense is running each command once where it must fail.
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Software Engineering 5 min read
One ZIP, Two Lists of Files
A small reproducible ZIP lab shows why indexed and streaming readers can inspect different entries in the same archive.
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Virtualization 5 min read
Two Processes, One Page Cache: Testing Shared State Before Blaming the VM
A small Linux experiment separates shared file identity from identical bytes, with a failed tmpfs control and a careful look at a July 2026 VM-isolation preprint.
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AI 7 min read
A Correct Answer Doesn’t Mean the Agent’s Memory Is Clean
A synthetic memory-recovery drill shows why a correct task result and a clean derived state are separate checks.
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Research 5 min read
Your Backup Administrator Should Not Be Able to Delete Yesterday
Timelock Drive puts retention below a compromised host. An offline model shows why unfreezing a backup must start a countdown, not erase its protection.
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Storage 6 min read
The Database Gets a Vote on Your Read-Only Agent
A disposable PostgreSQL lab tests what an agent-facing database role can actually do, including the SELECT that writes through a privileged function.
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Architecture 3 min read
The Recovery Button Deserves a Dry Run
Pilot Execution treats recovery as a state-changing program and previews its cross-component effects before committing the action.
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Compliance 8 min read
The Policy Is the Part That Moves
A proved gate is only as good as the policy it enforces, and the policy is the part that changes while the agent is running. What OSCAL and the agent-authorization drafts both assume, and what breaks.
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Storage 4 min read
The Filesystem Should Start as a Specification
SYSSPEC treats a filesystem specification as the thing an agent edits, then asks generated code to live up to the contract.
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AI Agents 7 min read
You Can’t Prove the Agent. Prove the Gate.
Formal verification for AI-agent security. You can’t prove a probabilistic model does the right thing — but the deterministic gate in front of it is small enough to prove outright. Dafny proofs, a Rego twin, and differential testing, following the method AWS used for Cedar.
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Compliance 7 min read
The Firewall Stays Put. The Agent Improvises.
Rewriting security controls for probabilistic agents. Static control catalogs assume systems that do what they’re told; AI agents don’t — so here’s how to express agent guardrails (tool allowlists, secret-egress denial, audit) as machine-checkable OSCAL component definitions.
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Design 10 min read
545 Terminal Themes, and the Rabbit Hole That Produced Them
A dataset of 545 terminal color schemes, converted to OKLCH and republished as an npm package — and the theme picker in this site’s own header that quietly runs on it.
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DevOps 13 min read
The Sandbox Isolates the Agent. It Doesn’t Isolate the Secret.
MicroVMs and namespace sandboxes give AI coding agents mature filesystem and process isolation. Most open-source ones still hand credentials to the agent directly. Here’s the proxy-injection pattern that fixes that, and what it doesn’t fix.
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MCP 7 min read
live-coding-music-mcp: Handing Claude a Browser and a Drum Machine
An MCP server that lets Claude live-code music in Strudel through a real, visible Chromium browser — no mocked audio API. What it does, what broke while I built it, and the engineering that came out of my first real browser-automation project.
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Web Development 6 min read
No GIFs, No Script Tags: How Far a Single SVG File Can Go
svg-terminal is an experiment in how much you can make one self-contained SVG do: type, blink, phone an API for live stats, and survive a renderer that assumes every SVG is hostile. 48 blocks, zero JavaScript, one wry aside about trusting my own config file.
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Supply Chain 12 min read
Patch Fast, Pull Slow: Defending in the Year of Copy Fail
AI is finding bugs faster, researchers pile on the moment one drops, and registries ship malware by the hundred-thousand. Defenders are caught between two contradictory imperatives. The fix is architectural, not temporal.
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TypeScript 10 min read
A Month of Modularization: nexus-agents in April 2026
Extracting benchmarks into a standalone package was the punchline. The setup was a month of governance, skills, security, and pipeline discipline that made the extraction possible in an afternoon.
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TypeScript 7 min read
Grading GitHub Repos: Six-Dimension Hygiene Scores from repo-health-report
A static-analysis tool that grades any GitHub repo across security, testing, docs, architecture, devops, and maintenance. The methodology is still WIP, but the findings are consistent: most repos are skipping the basics.
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Hardware 10 min read
Signed USB Rescue Boot: aegis-boot and the QEMU+OVMF Persona Harness
A UEFI-Secure-Boot-preserving rescue USB for any ISO, and the companion QEMU harness that validates it against 11 hardware personas without physical Frameworks, ThinkPads, or Dells on a lab bench.
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Linux 8 min read
Multiboxing EverQuest on Linux: Deterministic Wine Prefixes and Programmatic Window Layout
I left Windows behind for good. Norrath-Native is an IaC-style toolkit that deploys EverQuest on Ubuntu 24.04 with Wine and DXVK, and a growing exploration into what you can actually do with programmatic window management on Linux.
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Design 9 min read
Remarque: A Typography-First Design System for Technical Sites
Most developer sites look like SaaS dashboards. Remarque is the antidote — a design system rooted in book typography, 17px body text, 46rem reading columns, and the OKLCH color space. Self-hosted fonts, AI-native tokens, zero CDN dependencies.
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TypeScript 7 min read
Building US Code Tracker: Federal Law as Git History
How I built an end-to-end pipeline that converts the United States Code from XML into a Git-versioned, searchable static site with 53,000+ sections and inline case law annotations.
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Supply Chain 6 min read
Investigating the Trivy Supply Chain Compromise with AI Agents
How I used AI-assisted investigation to triage the trivy-action supply chain attack across my homelab repos — and some thoughts on weekend incident response and community notification gaps.
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Design 6 min read
From Paper to Font File: Building an Open-Source Handwriting Digitizer
How Handwright turns a scanned worksheet into a custom .ttf font — OpenCV glyph extraction, contour vectorization, and fonttools assembly. Local-first, no cloud required.
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Web Development 8 min read
3,584 Books, and the Website I Built Instead of Reading Any of Them
Tsundoku is a static bookshelf for the 3,584 books I own and haven’t read — Astro 7, Svelte islands, six primary sources plus a Wikidata backstop, no database. Plus a documentation bug I found while checking my own numbers.
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AI Agents 12 min read
Building Nexus-Agents: What I Learned Creating a Multi-Model AI Orchestration System
The engineering story behind nexus-agents, a research-backed multi-model orchestration system that coordinates Claude, Gemini, and Codex through consensus voting, adaptive routing, and graph workflows.
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AI Agents 8 min read
Consensus Voting With AI Models: When Three Opinions Beat One
How multi-model consensus voting catches blind spots that single models miss. The research behind adversarial roles, Bayesian aggregation, and structured deliberation across Claude, Gemini, and Codex.
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Research 8 min read
From RouteLLM to Contextual Bandits: How Research Papers Shaped My Model Router
How I went from naive round-robin model selection to a five-stage routing pipeline backed by RouteLLM, TOPSIS, and LinUCB research. The failures that led to each improvement.
2025 39 entries
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Virtualization 15 min read
Building a Private Cloud in Your Homelab with Proxmox and Security Best Practices
Learn to build and secure a production-grade private cloud using Proxmox VE. Covers network segmentation, backup strategies, security hardening, and resource management with real homelab implementation lessons.
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Container Security 17 min read
Hardening Docker Containers in Your Homelab: A Defense-in-Depth Approach
Eight security layers that stopped real attacks in homelab testing: minimal base images, user namespaces, seccomp profiles, network segmentation, and more. Defense-in-depth without Kubernetes overhead.
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Monitoring 15 min read
Building a Homelab Security Dashboard with Grafana and Prometheus
Real-world guide to monitoring security events in your homelab. Covers Prometheus configuration, Grafana dashboards, and alerting rules for threat detection.
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Container Security 11 min read
NodeShield: Runtime SBOM Enforcement Stops 98% of Supply Chain Attacks
NodeShield enforces SBOMs at runtime using CBOM policies to prevent supply chain attacks. Homelab Docker deployment guide with attack simulations, 98.3% prevention rate, and <1ms overhead.
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Threat Detection 10 min read
LLM-Powered Security Alert Triage with Local Models
Automate security alert analysis using local LLMs (Ollama) for privacy-preserving incident response. Reduce alert fatigue with AI-powered triage without cloud dependencies.
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Monitoring 6 min read
PromSketch: What Sketch Algorithms Can and Cannot Do for Prometheus
PromSketch accelerates *_over_time window aggregations by compiling into Prometheus as a library. What it covers, what it doesn’t, and why the distinction matters.
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Research 7 min read
Quantum Error Correction Breakthrough: How Google’s Willow Chip Changes Everything
Google’s Willow chip achieved the first quantum error correction breakthrough below the critical threshold, proving that adding more qubits can actually reduce errors. This changes the future of computing, cryptography, and AI forever.
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Threat Detection 11 min read
SIEM for Homelab: Wazuh vs Graylog Performance Comparison
Deploy and benchmark Wazuh and Graylog SIEM solutions in your homelab. Performance analysis, resource usage, and integration patterns for security monitoring.
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Computational Science 34 min read
Preparing Your Homelab for the Quantum Future: Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration
Implement post-quantum cryptography with CRYSTALS-Kyber and Dilithium—prepare homelab for quantum threats using NIST-approved algorithms.
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Ethics 20 min read
Building a Privacy-First AI Lab: Deploying Local LLMs Without Sacrificing Ethics
Build privacy-first AI lab with local LLMs—run models up to 34B on RTX 3090 (24GB VRAM) with network isolation, traffic monitoring, and real privacy controls.
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MCP 16 min read
From 150K to 2K Tokens: How Progressive Context Loading Revolutionizes LLM Development Workflows
Optimize LLM workflows with progressive context loading—achieve 98% token reduction using modular architecture for efficient production deployments.
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Robotics 9 min read
From Claude in Your Terminal to Robots in Your Workshop: The Embodied AI Revolution
Deploy Vision-Language-Action models for embodied AI robots—integrate physical world interaction with security considerations for homelab automation.
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Supply Chain 15 min read
Automated Security Scanning Pipeline with Grype and OSV
Build automated security scanning pipelines with Grype, OSV, and Trivy—integrate vulnerability detection into CI/CD workflows with actionable reporting.
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Virtualization 7 min read
Proxmox High Availability Setup for Homelab Reliability
Build Proxmox high-availability clusters with shared storage and automated failover—implement live migration for zero-downtime homelab maintenance.
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Hardware 8 min read
IoT Security in Your Home Lab: Lessons from OWASP IoTGoat
Test IoT security with OWASP IoTGoat—practice firmware extraction, API exploitation, and hardware hacking in secure lab environments.
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Vulnerability Management 19 min read
Building a Smart Vulnerability Prioritization System with EPSS and CISA KEV
Prioritize vulnerabilities with EPSS and CISA KEV catalog—move beyond CVSS scores to risk-based patch management using exploitation probability metrics.
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Monitoring 4 min read
Building Your Own MITRE ATT&CK Threat Intelligence Dashboard
Build MITRE ATT&CK threat intelligence dashboard with Python—track adversary tactics and techniques using open-source threat feeds.
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Zero Trust 16 min read
Implementing Zero Trust Microsegmentation with VLANs
Implement zero trust with VLAN segmentation—secure homelab networks using micro-segmentation and layer 3 firewalls for defense in depth.
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Privacy 14 min read
Self-Hosted Password Manager Migration: Bitwarden Deep Dive
Migrate to self-hosted Bitwarden—deploy secure vault with backup strategies, SSL certificates, and database encryption for full control.
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Threat Detection 16 min read
Building a Network Traffic Analysis Lab with Suricata
Deploy Suricata IDS/IPS for real-time network threat detection—configure rule management, performance tuning, and SIEM integration for homelab monitoring.
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Container Security 12 min read
Docker Runtime Security Hardening with Linux Security Modules
Harden Docker containers using AppArmor and SELinux for isolation without orchestration overhead. LSM profiles, seccomp filters, and capability dropping at homelab scale.
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Infrastructure 10 min read
AI as Cognitive Infrastructure: The Invisible Architecture Reshaping Human Thought
Understand AI cognitive infrastructure shaping how billions think—explore societal effects of language models transforming from tools to thought systems.
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Automation 7 min read
Supercharging Development with Claude-Flow: AI Swarm Intelligence for Modern Engineering
Claude-Flow orchestrates multiple AI agents against one task. What it does, what its published numbers actually are, and why the CLI in most write-ups never existed.
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MCP 15 min read
Down the MCP Rabbit Hole: Building a Standards Server
Build MCP standards server for Claude AI—implement Model Context Protocol for intelligent code standards and context-aware workflows.
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Compliance 8 min read
Exploring Claude CLI Context and Compliance with My Standards Repository
A CLAUDE.md is a prompt, not a loader. What a standards repository can and cannot enforce, and where the real enforcement has to live.
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Compliance 10 min read
Vulnerability Management at Scale with Open Source Tools
Build enterprise vulnerability management with open source: scanning, remediation tracking, and compliance using OpenVAS, Trivy, and Airflow.
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Networking 5 min read
Implementing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) for Home Networks
Choose where DNS-over-HTTPS belongs in a home network, distinguish browser and Pi-hole upstream encryption, and check fallback behavior.
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Linux 17 min read
eBPF for Security Monitoring: A Practical Guide
Implement eBPF security monitoring for real-time kernel visibility—track syscalls and network activity with production-ready patterns for threat detection.
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Privacy 8 min read
Local LLM Deployment: Privacy-First Approach
Deploy local LLMs for privacy-first AI—run language models on homelab hardware with model selection, optimization, and deployment strategies.
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Robotics 7 min read
Teaching AI Agents to Ask for Help: A Breakthrough in Human-Robot Interaction
A robot given an ambiguous instruction usually guesses. New work trains agents to ask a clarifying question instead, using LLM-generated rewards.
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Machine Learning 17 min read
Fine-Tuning LLMs in the Homelab: A Practical Guide
Fine-tune LLMs on homelab hardware with QLoRA and 4-bit quantization. Train Llama 3 8B models on RTX 3090 with dataset prep and optimization strategies.
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Professional Development 5 min read
Building a Security-Focused Homelab: My Journey
Build security-focused homelab with Proxmox, VLANs, and IDS/IPS—create testing environment for cybersecurity and family data protection.
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Privacy 6 min read
Securing Your Personal AI/ML Experiments: A Practical Guide
Secure personal AI experiments with model isolation and network segmentation—protect LLM deployments using privacy controls and threat modeling.
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Professional Development 7 min read
From IT Support to Senior InfoSec Engineer: My 15+ Year Journey
Navigate IT support to senior InfoSec engineer path—learn from 15+ years securing federal systems with practical career transition advice.
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Raspberry Pi 6 min read
Raspberry Pi Security Projects That Actually Solve Problems
Build Raspberry Pi security projects with Pi-hole, VPN gateway, and honeypots—deploy practical network monitoring and threat detection on budget hardware.
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Professional Development 9 min read
Continuous Learning in Cybersecurity: Strategies That Work
Master continuous cybersecurity learning with lab exercises, research tracking, and community engagement—stay current without burnout.
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Python 6 min read
Automating Home Network Security with Python and Open Source Tools
A homelab security automation design, with archived Python fragments and a corrected account of their dependencies and limitations.
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Raspberry Pi 15 min read
Privacy-Preserving AI Training Across My Homelab: Federated Learning with Granular-Ball Computing
Training an image classifier across four homelab devices without sharing raw images—what granular-ball federated learning actually costs in bandwidth, accuracy, and the privacy guarantees it does not give you.
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Web Development 3 min read
Building My Digital Garden with Eleventy
How this site began — a privacy-first, zero-tracking static digital garden. Originally built with Eleventy; since rebuilt on Astro.
2024 31 entries
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Architecture 14 min read
Context Windows in Large Language Models: The Memory That Shapes AI
What context windows actually cost in memory and latency, why capacity and recall are different things, and where retrieval beat a bigger window in my homelab.
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Ethics 21 min read
AI: The New Frontier in Cybersecurity – Opportunities and Ethical Dilemmas
Deploy AI-powered cybersecurity with automated threat detection—reaching 73% precision on anomaly detection catching attacks my signature-based IDS missed.
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Cryptography 14 min read
Large Language Models for Smart Contract Security: Promise and Limitations
Testing GPT-4, Claude and Llama 3 against 47 smart contracts—80% reentrancy detection, but 60% of everything they flagged was wrong, which is substantially noisier than the static analyzer they were supposed to replace.
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Hardware 16 min read
GPU Power Monitoring in My Homelab: When Machine Learning Met My Electricity Bill
What three months of instrumenting an RTX 3090 actually showed about the cost of running LLMs at home—including the optimizations that worked and the one that didn’t.
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Zero Trust 25 min read
Zero Trust Architecture: A Practical Implementation Guide
Implement zero trust with identity verification and micro-segmentation—secure networks using never-trust-always-verify principles.
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Software Engineering 3 min read
PizzaOps: How a Dumb LLM Experiment Became a Distributed System
I asked an early LLM to build a pizza calculator to find out whether it could write working code. It could. Then it kept adding features nobody asked for, and I made the mistake of encouraging it.
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Edge Computing 15 min read
AI Meets Edge Computing: Transforming Real-Time Intelligence
Deploy AI edge computing with YOLOv8 and TensorFlow Lite—achieve 15ms latency for real-time inference on Raspberry Pi with local processing for privacy.
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Architecture 13 min read
Blockchain Beyond Cryptocurrency: Building the Trust Layer of the Internet
Deploy blockchain beyond cryptocurrency with Ethereum and smart contracts—build decentralized trust for supply chain and identity verification.
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Computational Science 9 min read
Quantum Computing and Defense: The Double-Edged Sword of Tomorrow’s Technology
Prepare for quantum computing threats with post-quantum cryptography—protect RSA and ECC encryption from quantum attacks using NIST-approved algorithms.
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Container Security 12 min read
Sandboxing Untrusted Containers with gVisor: Lessons from G-Fuzz Vulnerability Research
Secure containers with gVisor sandboxing—prevent kernel exploits in Kubernetes clusters while managing 59% startup overhead for untrusted workloads.
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Robotics 12 min read
Learning from Nature: How Biomimetic Robotics is Revolutionizing Engineering
Design biomimetic robots inspired by nature—implement gecko adhesion, swarm intelligence, and soft robotics using billions of years of evolution.
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Edge Computing 14 min read
Running LLaMA 2 on a Raspberry Pi: Memory-Efficient Edge AI with PIPELOAD
Run LLaMA 2 on Raspberry Pi with PIPELOAD pipeline inference—achieve 90% memory reduction and deploy 7B models on 8GB edge devices at 2.5 tokens/sec.
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Zero Trust 12 min read
Implementing Zero Trust Security: Never Trust, Always Verify
Deploy zero trust security with continuous verification and identity-centric controls—implement never-trust-always-verify for Federal EO 14028 compliance.
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Sustainability 18 min read
The Evolution of High-Performance Computing: Key Trends and Innovations
Deploy high-performance computing with parallel processing and distributed systems—access supercomputer capabilities through cloud HPC for AI workloads.
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Computational Science 22 min read
Quantum Computing’s Leap Forward
Explore quantum computing with IBM Qiskit and quantum algorithms—quantum advantage, error correction, and real-world applications.
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Research 14 min read
Multimodal Foundation Models: Capabilities, Challenges, and Applications
Build multimodal AI systems with GPT-4 Vision and CLIP—process text, images, and audio together for next-generation foundation model applications.
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Sustainability 15 min read
Sustainable Computing: Strategies for Reducing IT’s Carbon Footprint
Reduce IT carbon footprint with sustainable computing practices—optimize datacenter energy efficiency and cut ML training costs by 40%.
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Architecture 6 min read
Designing Resilient Systems — Lessons from Things Breaking
The cascade failure that changed how I think about building systems that break gracefully.
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Privacy 9 min read
Zero-Knowledge Proof Authentication for Homelab Services
Implement privacy-preserving authentication using ZK-SNARKs for homelab SSO. No passwords transmitted, cryptographic proof of identity without revealing credentials.
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Edge Computing 45 min read
AI Learning in Resource-Constrained Environments
Train AI models on resource-constrained hardware with quantization, pruning, and distillation—run GPT-3 capabilities 100x faster through compression.
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Computational Science 11 min read
Preparing for the Quantum Leap: A Guide to Quantum-Resistant Cryptography
Implement quantum-resistant cryptography with NIST post-quantum algorithms. Future-proof encryption against quantum attacks using Kyber and Dilithium.
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LLM 11 min read
Mastering Prompt Engineering: Unlocking the Full Potential of LLMs
Master prompt engineering with few-shot learning and chain-of-thought techniques—improve LLM response quality by 40% through systematic optimization.
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Ethics 12 min read
The Ethics of Large Language Models
Address LLM ethics including bias, privacy, and accountability—implement responsible AI frameworks for large language model deployment in production.
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Machine Learning 16 min read
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Enhancing LLMs with External Knowledge
Build RAG systems with vector databases and semantic search—eliminate LLM hallucinations and ground responses in verified knowledge for trustworthy AI.
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Machine Learning 15 min read
The Transformer Architecture: A Deep Dive
Master transformer architecture with self-attention and positional encoding—understand the foundation of GPT-4, BERT, and modern language models.
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Cloud 11 min read
Cloud Migration: A Guide to Navigating Your Journey to the Cloud
Execute cloud migration from on-premises infrastructure with AWS/Azure strategies—reduce costs by 40% and improve scalability with proven patterns.
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LLM 13 min read
Open-Source vs. Proprietary LLMs: A Battle of Accessibility, Customization, and Community
Compare open-source vs proprietary LLMs with Llama 2 and GPT-4 benchmarks—understand performance, cost, and customization trade-offs for production.
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Ethics 8 min read
The Deepfake Dilemma: Navigating the Threat of AI-Generated Deception
Deepfake detection works well on data it has seen and falls apart on data it hasn’t. Why the fix is partly cultural, not just technical.
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Vulnerability Management 10 min read
Building a Python Vulnerability Scanner with NVD API Integration
Automate vulnerability detection in your homelab using Python and the National Vulnerability Database API. Track CVEs, scan dependencies, and integrate with monitoring systems.
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Professional Development 14 min read
Demystifying Cryptography: A Beginner’s Guide to Encryption, Hashing, and Digital Signatures
Learn cryptography fundamentals with AES-256, RSA, and SHA-3—implement encryption, hashing, and digital signatures for production security systems.
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Vulnerability Management 11 min read
Writing Secure Code: A Developer’s Guide to Thwarting Security Exploits
Master secure code development with input validation, parameterized queries, and secrets management—prevent SQL injection and XSS in production systems.