Modern Linux Distribution Defaults Are Stuck in 2009
Modern Linux still ships with sysctl defaults that make no sense on real hardware. Before calling yourself an admin, learn what your kernel actually does, or enjoy debugging packet drops and half-baked TCP stacks the hard way.
What We Built Before the Cloud
A reflection on what the internet was before the cloud turned it into a subscription. We built our sites by hand, broke things to learn, and knew every log by name. This is not nostalgia, it is stewardship. Some of us still remember what it means to be root on our own systems.
From Navy Labs to Onion Layers: How Tor Slipped Its Leash
Tor was not built by rebels. It was born in a Navy lab, a government experiment in secrecy that escaped into the wild and became the Internet’s favorite act of irony.
Love’s License, Web’s Lost Soul
Sitting in that sterile hospital room, I realized how fragile love becomes when the system insists on paperwork to prove it. What started as a quiet moment of care turned into a reminder that even love, like the internet, has been licensed, metered, and sold.
The Great Cloud Exit: Taking Back the Internet, One Rack at a Time
The cloud was supposed to free us. Instead, it made us dependents. Here’s why developers, sysadmins, and builders are taking back the Internet, one rack at a time.
AWS and the Myth of Regional Independence
AWS has long sold the idea of regional independence, a cloud so resilient that no single outage could take it down. Reality keeps proving otherwise. Every time us-east-1 coughs, half the internet catches it. The truth is simple: AWS’s global control plane still lives in one place, and when it stumbles, everything feels it. This piece looks at why that happens, how “multi-region” isn’t what you think it is, and why real decentralization still isn’t in Amazon’s playbook.
Half the Internet Is Bots (and the Other Half Is Just Trying to Block Them)
Half the Internet isn’t people anymore. It’s bots, scanners, and digital junk chewing through global bandwidth like termites in a datacenter. Most of what your server sees isn’t traffic, it’s noise. This post takes a look at just how much of the web’s capacity is wasted on bad actors and why sysadmins have basically become the Internet’s immune system.
When Entropy Fails: The Hilarious (and Harmless) Zen 5 RNG Debacle
In October 2025, AMD quietly confirmed that its upcoming Zen 5 CPUs shipped with a broken hardware random number generator. The RDSEED instruction, designed to produce true entropy, was returning zeros while signaling success. AMD’s solution was to disable the feature entirely, turning it into a no-op. Fortunately, modern operating systems no longer depend on a CPU’s RNG alone, instead mixing multiple entropy sources through cryptographically secure algorithms. Zen 5’s RNG bug is embarrassing, but thanks to robust kernel design, it’s more of a punchline than a catastrophe.
The AI Wheelchair: From Crutch to Cage
AI is an incredible tool when used correctly, but somewhere along the line people stopped treating it like a calculator and started treating it like a compass. The result is a generation that can ship code without understanding it and make decisions without owning them. This piece explores why fundamentals, friction, and a bit of human stubbornness still matter in a world that keeps trying to automate thought itself.
Love in the Time of Root Access
I grew up reading BOFH stories like they were sacred scripture, tales of sysadmin vengeance and terminal justice that shaped my sense of humor, my ethics, and maybe my lack of both. Somewhere between the first sudo and the last rage ticket, I became the thing I once admired: the Bastard Operator From Hell. These days my love language is uptime, my poetry is a clean log, and my mischief lives in cron jobs. It is not cruelty, it is control. And honestly, it is beautiful.