xrmagnum

I built TunnelBuddy (tunnnelbuddy.net) just for this. I am the same: citizen of one country and resident of another. I have multiple friends and family where I am from. I get them to open tunnelbuddy (nobody needs to sign up), to share a one-off password (like TeamViewer) and I get to access the internet as if I was at their place.

Underneath, it uses WebRTC (the same tech as Google Meet). It is free to use, I just built to fix this problem that I have... I am quite surprised expats only get by using a traditional VPN whose IPs are known by online services...

Hosting your VPN is a fair bit of work. Plus, you need residential IP too which you don't really have if you host on any Cloud Provider. I had the same issue and decided to build TunnelBuddy.net so that a friend can share their internet connection with me or vice versa. It is entirely P2P and requires no sign up, no credit card. You download the app, share a code and that's it. It is like TeamViewer, but instead of sharing your screen you share your Internet Connection.

Fair point!

- With a TURN/relay, you’re introducing a single, purpose-built box that: - sees all the tunnel metadata for many users (IP pairs, timing, volume), - is easy to log at or subpoena/compel, - and becomes a natural central chokepoint if someone wants to block the system.

- Without that relay, your traffic still crosses random ISPs/routers, but: - those hops are *generic Internet infrastructure*, not “the TunnelBuddy relay”, - there’s no extra entity whose whole job is to see everyone’s flows.

I ended up building something in this space recently (TunnelBuddy – https://www.tunnelbuddy.net I’m the author) that lets you use a friend’s machine as an exit node over WebRTC.

One of the design decisions I made was P2P or nothing: there’s a small signalling service, but no TURN/relay servers. If the peers can’t establish a direct connection, the tunnel just doesn’t come up.

The trade-off is fewer successful connections in weird NAT setups, but in return you know your traffic never transits a third-party relay – it goes straight from your client to your friend’s endpoint.

I’m definitely open to open-sourcing it, just not immediately. I’d like to stabilise it, run a beta, and fix the most obvious flaws first.

It's striking how much of the AI conversation focuses on new use cases, while overlooking one of the most serious non-financial costs: privacy.

I try to be mindful of what I share with ChatGPT, but even then, asking it to describe my family produced a response that was unsettling in its accuracy and depth.

Worse, after attempting to delete all chats and disable memory, I noticed that some information still seemed to persist. That left me deeply concerned—not just about this moment, but about where things are headed.

The real question isn't just "what can AI do?"—it's "who is keeping the record of what it does?" And just as importantly: "who watches the watcher?" If the answer is "no one," then maybe we shouldn't have a watcher at all.

I find it problematic that this article recommends disabling DoH, which leaves users with unencrypted DNS — still centralized (e.g. to Google’s 8.8.8.8 or an ISP) and now vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Replacing one form of centralization with another while giving up encryption doesn’t improve privacy — it worsens it.

If the goal is to reduce centralization, a better approach would be to use encrypted DNS (DoH or DoT) with resolver rotation or randomization. That way, users retain privacy from local networks and ISPs without concentrating all DNS traffic in a single provider’s hands.

Thanks for taking a look! Don't hesitate to ask should you have any questions or recommendations!

We recently had to move away from Amplify unfortunately.

Here are some examples of problems we faced:

* Building Issues

we consistently have release problems that ends up taking a lot of of our time. eg: a CLI update would end up breaking our CI [1].

* Overall instability

we regularly have problems that we need to work-around ourselves, sometimes in a really not elegant manner because we have not a lot of control. [2]

* Data Layer

DynamoDB is the DB of choice for Amplify. We do not understand this choice technically. It may make sense from a sales pitch perspective to use a serverless database along with other serverless technologies (API Gateway, AWS Lambda). Technologically speaking though:

  - DynamoDB is a great, high performance NoSQL DB. To quote Rick Houlihan: "Not a flexible database but a really efficient DB to use at scale". You need to know your access patterns to query the DB in a efficient way. 

  - Amplify is aimed to bootstrap an application in no-time, letting front end developers focus on building. When doing so, the product is rarely defined upfront, let alone its access patterns. At this stage, data needs to change shape & format to adapt to new use-cases. In other words, data needs to be migrated. To this date though, the Amplify team does not provide a way to migrate data [3]

This disconnection between the initial business cases of DynamoDB and Amplify can even be seen within the AWS teams themselves. [4] We don't believe any of them are to blame. The solo Front End Engineer bootstrapping a quick Amplify app for a PoC feels like a way different use case than a team of highly trained data engineers working on their Single Table Design for their micro-service. Amplify rightfully tries to offer an easy way to deal with storing data. And so it follows a standard SQL design with DynamoDB. This though leads to bad performance (original selling point of DynamoDB) or other limitations hard to anticipate.

Overall it is pretty clear and fine that Amplify focuses on PoC projects rather than production ones (with features like Geo-tagging [5] but no way to migrate data). However, when starting to get traction, it is a shame we need to completely eject instead of being able to extend because of lack of (boring but necessary) fundamentals.

[1] https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-cli/issues/10164

[2] https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-category-api/issues/3...

[3] https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-cli/issues/1407

[4] https://twitter.com/houlihan_rick/status/1513137762895110147

Energy & emissions are complex to account for. I don’t know too much about the US but in France we had quite good results in term of reductions.

But where do they come from? From the optimisation of our energy consumption? Or from the relocation of some of our companies abroad?

Is your hostname added to /etc/hosts?

More than a decade ago, the EU forced Microsoft to let people choose their browser on a Windows machine with a fresh install. Not only that but the list of choices was randomly sorted so that IE would not be the first listed.

> Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible?

Of course if you were Apple, you would not want to do it. But, that’s what antitrust laws are for. As a consumer they are valuable: how long have people been waiting to use Spotify their Apple Watch?

This reminded me of Sheldon hacking a GPS (The Big Bang Theory) https://youtu.be/WreaEJDyk7M?t=50s

Learning Meditation is related to this, not because it brings new Schemas or modify existing ones but rather, because it trains to be more detached from them. After all, the very goal of the practice is to identify those schemas forming and letting them go.

I don't see many people criticising here quite frankly.

As per your comment, you are right: if there is a kernel bug and you'd rather restart your computer to quickly get back to what you were doing and avoid distraction, all good.

If you are part of a kernel engineering team and you quickly restart your computer and pretend it never happened then maybe you didn't give your best shot.

There's no doubt Power Cycling helps. But I would argue it helps for people who 'consume' products. It is anything but a help for Engineers, for people who design products.

There's so many examples I could provide: you are a software engineer, the program you develop works well for a day and then crashes. You can either investigate the problem, find there's a memory leak and fix it or Power Cycle your program.

-> If you design a product, don't go for the easy stuff, don't power cycle just to get back to a well known scenario. Investigate and fix.