goodroot

Love this blog, appreciate the author.

> This is probably the most difficult part. I had to remove all social media and streaming apps from my iPhone. I removed Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. When I started, I found myself picking up the phone and immediately noticing that something was missing, since the only things left to do were check the weather, read boring emails, or see my bank account.

These past few months, I have more resolve than ever to cut the chains. Willpower is a practice, and there have been successful steps towards the goal.

First, blocking the real sucks (X, Reddit). Then news (Canadian, won't bore you with the list). And then an innocuous yet sticky set of apps that I would bounce to often, for little benefit or reason: weather, server stats, stocks. A new wrinkle? Inane conversations with LLMs. Blocked!

HN still because, well brothers and the rare sister, it's lonely out there and this place cracks me up. And not much longer.

Now on to entire devices. Desktop, laptop, destined for a locked-down iPad. Lobotomized iPhone, got a watch, and now, slowly, more and more reading.

What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace. And yet, like a husk I cling to the teet of these manipulative networks and websites hoping for one last, satisfying drink.

It ain't comin'. Books, then. Like my mother.

I understand what it is. I'm just wondering why.

The code is also not immediately available, which makes claims towards any chain of trust somewhat dubious.

And I'm not sure what purist really means in this context, and how a rolling release is - or even implies - inherently "pure" Unix. If systemd is the hill to die on, Void is active and supported.

Usually I default to encouragement; I don't mean to put any water on OP's fire, yet there's a whole lot of grand words in these essays. And really not a lot of explaining why any of this would make me switch from, for example, Arch, or that explain which problems are being solved.

Something missing is you can absolutely host your own private instance.

The trigger happens when someone interacts with your code over a network, such as in the context of a SaaS product.

The line is when you try to profit off of someone else's work that it becomes "not free".

Also, not free simply means it needs to be in public.

This is so that any additive features that you construct can be taken back by the original maintainers. Thus, you have no competitive advantage.

If you wanted to, through marketing or similar, compete with them, you are more than welcome, but it would be with feature parity.

I'm not so sure this very fair compromise warrants your rhetoric.

The product is the stock.

It is very valuable when you have various bundles of services, such as satellites, AI, and so on, to keep pace with the majors so that you keep pace with their valuation.

These stacking valuations are not additive, they're multiplicative because you additionally market investors to the synergy between them.

Having the third best model statistically is extremely useful in this context.

Backend under AGPL prevents someone hosting it as a service. AGPL specifies that hosting _is_ distribution. Therefore, anyone hosting it must do so with public code. This provides a soft form of exclusivity to run their own Cloud.

A frontend, permitting customizability, white-labeling, and so on, makes more sense to be more permissive.

Grafana is a solid example to illustrate why.

Moved from Apache to AGPLv3 in 2021 specifically so cloud providers couldn't host modified versions without contributing back, while keeping plugins Apache-licensed.

Every time I visit the library it feels like I'm in New Caprica.

I'm a Canadian/German dual; a praire, hockey-playing, hard-O Canadian at that.

There is nothing German about me, apart from some family myths.

Every 8 or 9 years my passport renewal at the German embassy plays out like that scene in Inglorious Basterds, where Brad Pitt's character Aldo Rain tries to pose as Italian stunt-man Enzo Gorlami.

Long German pre-amble

"Err-ahh... err - nine."

Pause and stare

"Ok een Eenglish 'zen."

Thanks brother :) - this meat suit is a rental anyways.

There's more going on here than just the substance's effect.

There's a mind body connection that an altered state can throw into disarray.

Under the influence of cannabis, one may be a lot more aware of physical pain, dehydration, and so on. The key word is aware. Suddenly becoming aware of the fact that you are stressed out, you are carrying tension, can lead to something of a latent processing effect of some of these suppressed or physically felt emotions.

However, if you're generally not tense, ingesting cannabis itself does not always raise the heart rate. I can validate this myself right now, given I wear an Apple Watch and can vaporize cannabis. Looking at my historical data, there is no relationship, and my resting heart rate remains in the 40s.

It's anecdotal, but at the same time we need to be careful with something that acts on the physical, the mental, and dare I say it, the spiritual. If we focus too much on one dimension, we lose the important synergy from processing all dimensions.

That's interesting and probably an argument for pro-legalization.

Were I to pick a gateway drug into cocaine, it would be alcohol. It becomes a way to infuse more energy in a later night, which is usually one of alcoholic revelry.

When cannabis is just in a store and it's the only thing there, many potheads just stay in the pothead bubble.

Right, the rationale for why saunas and heat stress is good for you is specifically because it raises the heart rate.

There's a saying: don't throw stones if you live in a glass house. The same human mind that rationalizes the intake of substances is the same one that rationalizes social networks, junk food, eating meat, whatever it is. I wouldn't be so quick to condescend.

At some point in time, it's important to realize that not everyone optimizes for longevity, correctness, rationalism, and so on, and they just simply do what makes them feel good within the limited life that they have.

Nothing is intrinsically harmless. Cannabis can be devastating. But I was just sitting here doing work one day, got a hemorrhage in my eye, and lost half the sight in it. Otherwise, I'm supremely healthy. The cause: a gene.

In social systems or spiritual systems where cannabis is used, this is often called "going clear".

We (general West) have no overarching myth or support system to help people navigate this type of pure madness. We have a psychological framework, and anything that interferes with our capacity to construct an I, a me, an ego in real time is seen in the most ultimately negative terms. And the experience is terrifying, such to support these terms.

Though, if through meditation, through religious constructs, or similar, there is a learned capacity to sit with the experience, it is considered less of a breaking and more of a liberation.

Wouldn't recommend it, wouldn't prescribe it. Though this decoupling of self from experience isn't a universal ill.

I'm not so sure.

There's always been a pragmatic center on cannabis, especially if you're somewhere where it's legalized.

In Canada, we have legal cannabis.

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medica...

When it was legalized, there was a documentation push and clear presentation of the downsides. In fact, as above, the language is mostly presented in the negative.

This matches the general sentiment of the broad population.

And let's not conflate things. The article is discussing smoked cannabis. This does not invalidate the essential substance and benefit of the experience. If we remove the ingestion method from the basket of effects, it's a different discussion.

Not all positive, yet smoking is clearly not good for you.

Full stop, no matter what it is.

I have this same challenge!

Also, moved all of my lovely oxygenating plants like lillies out of the room because they are toxic to kitty.

Yep -

`gemma4-26b-a4b-it-qat.gguf`

https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it...

It is really great to use. As the poster above mentioned, my setup with Sear is the following, all through `llama.cpp`, which has a built-in webui with an MCP client:

* SearXNG in Docker — enable the JSON API (`search.formats: [html, json]`; off by default).

* `searxng-mcp` (FastMCP, native streamable-HTTP): `TRANSPORT=streamable-http HOST=127.0.0.1 PORT=8100` `SEARXNG_URL=http://localhost:8888 uvx --from searxng-mcp --with fastmcp searxng-mcp`

* `llama-server` with `--webui-mcp-proxy`, then add the server in the webui.

Some gotchas:

* `searxng-mcp` forgets to declare its own dep → `--with fastmcp`.

* Endpoint is `/mcp`, not the `/searxng-mcp/mcp` the docs claim.

* `--webui-mcp-proxy` only enables the CORS proxy; each MCP server entry still needs its "Use llama-server proxy" checkbox ticked, or the browser fetches direct and CORS-fails.

* Terminal clients (OpenCode etc.) skip the proxy — point them straight at `:8100/mcp`.

A couple interesting tidbits:

* There are temporal issues with search-related tool calls. The model trips out. 2026 results read to it a "future-dated hallucination" because it doesn't know the date. There's an additional `--tools get_datetime` function that will allow it to ground via the real date.

* Snippets-only is enough for most "what's current" questions and keeps context tiny.

Let me know if you have any questions!

That's fun! 90, generational talent - if only! Hah.

Interesting to see this and SearXNG on the front page at the same time. The latter replaced the former for me, and I've enjoyed primarily searching through a local model.

This appears to be a key tool for providing search to local models.

I'm curious what setups folks use to provide this functionality.

Since the quantized 24B parameter Gemma model came out, I've had good luck with tool calling on a 4070 Ti Super.

Successful tool calling is what finally made the local experience useful.

I should note this is for the general and not coding specific context.

Kicked dairy about a decade ago. I'm grateful for oat milk.

Also, one of the very, very many examples of strong, necessary, and useful collaboration between Canada and the United States.

Happy Fourth of July, neighbours down south. I'm eager to be buds again.

Yes, crucial omission - and that was 1996!

Agreed.

It's a fair point, but there's definitely more to the history.

Ten years earlier, let's look at 1997:

- Final Fantasy VII

- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

- GoldenEye 007

- Banjo-Kazooie

- Fallout

- Age of Empires

- Diablo

- Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

- Grand Theft Auto

- Planescape: Torment

And crucially... It was 2000 when we received Counter-Strike. This game undoubtedly started the competitive gaming scene, and opened up new avenues for expansion and profitability, with the potential of vast sportlike eyeballs and sponsorships.

Love the post. It brought me back.

The layer of builders and hackers is still there.

But now the vast majority of people have their own hyper lanes on the Worldwide Information Superhighway.

And geez, isn't that a noisy highway? We're somewhere way under that thing.

Not quite donate tokens directly (technically and practically weird), but donation -> compute has been out for a couple months on opub.dev (disclaimer, built it). So his prediction was somewhat correct if not late!

Trying to get https://opub.dev off the ground to solve this in a more open way.

If you have more than 100 stars, you can get $50 in starter credit.

Ideally organizations, more so than people, provide the bulk of future donations.

As for this program, ehh... Sceptical in general of any frontier program that ends at some time.

Once you're embedded, and all that...

Starting making hyprwhspr because no other stt library was quite there for performance and model availability.

After that I started writing opub.dev because even minimal success in recent oss showed me just how much has changed, and I’m worried about how expensive everything will get for maintainers.

So, now I’m trying to GIVE people compute so they can start building a helpful filter layer above their projects.

Yikes. Good thing you didn't wind up there.

The furthest I've gone in these jazz style culture interviews is asking people what they do outside of work for fun. This was for fully remote async positions. And it was important to know you had other stuff going on because the mental/personal health risk in failing at remote work is massive and life altering.

If, through wherever that discussion went, I wasn't 100% sure that you could stand on your own feet and wouldn't sink into the abyss, it was impossible to move forward. It was a tough line to walk sometimes because you don't want to pry personally. But that doesn't appear to be a universal opinion, it turns out.