Red Hat 4.1 on the factory floor
In 1997 a guy in production handed me a CD with Red Hat 4.1. Two weeks later a quiet Linux box replaced our crashing NT 4 server. Thirty years on, I run zero Windows machines and have zero headaches.
Bitware Labs / Notebook
The Notebook
Working notes, written while the work is still fresh. Mostly infrastructure, security and long-running AI, the unglamorous middle of the job, which is where the interesting parts live.
All entries
§ 11 filed
Vibecoding is not AI-assisted development
A vibecoder says "add a button". A developer says which view, what it reads, what it writes, what happens when the call fails and who is allowed to click it. Same tool, same model, entirely different software.
What a self-improving AI actually asks for
Our agent has been modifying herself since March, and filing change requests against her own source since May. We kept the log. What she asks for is not what the frightening version of this story predicts.
15% was three bugs, not a ceiling
Our agent\'s memory scored 15% on LongMemEval against a field sitting at 64-71%. Fixing it took finding three silent bugs, discarding four confident improvements that made it worse, and catching a measurement error that nearly became the headline.
What eight months of agent decay actually looked like
We predicted that append-only memory drowns by month three. Then we measured. Almost nothing failed the way we expected, and none of it announced itself.
Four nginx defaults that quietly cost you
Soft 404s, add_header inheritance, ten-year cache headers on unversioned files, and a gzip_types line that is commented out in the shipped config. All four were live on this very domain.
Sending mail from PHP-FPM when AppArmor says no
The contact form on this site does not call mail(). It speaks SMTP to loopback by hand, because the php-fpm AppArmor profile will not exec sendmail, and that turned out to be the better design.
Why bwmem sleeps: consolidation in long-running agents
An agent that only appends is an agent that eventually drowns. Consolidation is the part everyone skips, and it is the part that decides whether the thing still works in month six.
A WireGuard mesh you can actually reason about
Ten peers, one address plan, no overlay control plane. What we run, what we deliberately left out, and the two mistakes that cost us an afternoon each.
Ranking fourteen polymers from what you can actually observe
Why Plastic Fantastic scores candidates instead of walking a decision tree, how the evidence is weighted, and why it will name PVC without ever asking you to set it on fire.
Why WordPress is not permitted on our machines
Not snobbery. A hosting policy is a security boundary, and the plugin model puts the boundary in the wrong place, on the other side of code we did not write and cannot audit.