Like today, just better? It’s likely still going to power most of the servers, 70% of smartphones, a lot of the embedded devices… And maybe desktop marketshare is going to rise a bit above the current 4%.

Yeah. Maybe it’s time to adopt some new rule in the selfhosted community. Mandating disclosure. Because we got several AI coded projects in the last few days or weeks.

I just want some say in what I install on my computer. And not be fooled by someone into using their software.

I mean I know why people deliberately hide it, and say “I built …” when they didn’t. Because otherwise there’s an immediate shitstorm coming in. But deceiving people about the nature of the projects isn’t a proper solution either. And it doesn’t align well with the traditional core values of Free Software. I think a lot of value is lost if honesty (and transparency) isn’t held up anymore within our community.

Did you build it, though, or did Claude code it?

Yes. I think determinism a misunderstood concept. In computing, it means exact same input leads to always the same output. Could be entirely wrong, though. As long as it stays the same. There’s some benefit in introducing randomness to AI. But it can be run in an entirely deterministic way as well. Just depends on the settings. (It’s called “temperature”.)

Yeah, and I’d say it’s a bit questionable whether California even has jurisdiction over revelations from God himself.

Also, I don’t think it does networking and app stores 😄

Interesting. Thanks for the info. I’ll re-think whether I recommend it to random people around the world, then.

In Germany it’s great. I’ve been using it for many years now. But we have some good/strong hacker organizations, digital sovereignty and privacy groups, nonprofits and some generous IT companies. Maybe it’s random private individuals in other countries and they’re not as reliable.

Seems right now there’s something going wrong anyway. I don’t think the amount of “offline” servers is normal. And a good amount of them isn’t even offline, but still answer my DNS queries.

After a few “Delete junk” commits, “Broken”, “PATCH: Hope this fixes it”, and “Basic Reverse-Proxy”, it’s now at version 1.0.1-alpha.1.
Don’t know what they did to Git. But their “minor commit” touches almost the entire code in their repo. Rest of it (and the general confusion and the edgy commit messages) look to me like something done by OpenClaw.

100% wouldn’t use it.

I think the Tiers work the other way around. But I keep forgetting how DNS and recursive lookup works and I might be wrong.
I don’t think you’re supposed to query Tier 1 servers as a client. The Tier 2 servers would be what people connect to and who do the heavy lifting. The Tier 1 just do the root, authoritative stuff and their custom TLDs for the following network. So we’re not worried about where those are located.

Isn’t it a global effort? According to what I see, they list a bunch of servers in all Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, …Japan?!

I did one DNS query and it took 22 msec with the nearest OpenNIC server and 24 msec with Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1
So dunno… roughly same responsiveness? Maybe OpenNIC is a tad faster? For a proper answer we’d need to do more measurements, though. And with OpenNIC you definitely need to pick a good server, not just any random one. They’ll have different locations, different policies and they’re in widely different datacenters.

Even if you control your router/modem, they still control the other end, it connects to. And some more infrastructure along the path. So i think it depends a bit where you’re going with this. If you’re worried about them doing packet inspection, or logging IP numbers you connect to, I don’t think there’s a big difference. They could do it anywhere. And they’ll likely do it in some datacenter.

A router interfaces with your local network, though. So in theory a router can be used to connect to your internal devices and computers and maybe you have an open network share without password protection or something like that. But we’re talking violating your constitutional rights here. It’s highly illegal in most jurisdictions to enter your home and go through your stuff.

I’ll buy my own router because I can then configure it to my liking. And my ISP charges way too much for renting one. And what I also do is not use my ISP’s DNS service. That’d just send every domain name I open to their logfiles. Instead I use one from OpenNIC

I’d go with the Debian package. That’s tied into the system. You get nice updates, there’s more eyes on what the upstream developers do, sometimes the Debian maintainers disable things like tracking, fix vulnerabilities in libraries. It’s smaller, less permission issues… It’s just safer and more convenient…

I’ll go for Flatpak once there’s some benefit. For example the sandboxing which is great to have for proprietary software. Or if the package isn’t available in the Debian repositories, and the alternative would be some third-party repo or deb file downloaded from a random website. And in rare cases when I need a specific version and the Debian maintainers are stuck with an old release.

And I feel a large contributing factor is the entire situation we’re in. It’s not like I can decide to use GPT 4 as a coding assistant and that’s it. I’m also aware that half the internet turned to shit with all the fake reviews, comparison sites. Microsoft pushes some Clippy 4.0 on me whether I want that or not, most customer support is unbearable now, thanks to AI. So all of that goes into the mix, not just usefulness. And I think romantic companions and legal advise is a bit due to negative media coverage.

Depends. Sometimes you’ll get a PC magazine or blog cover an upcoming laptop and test Linux compatibility. Or someone writes a long Reddit post after they got it, or updates the Arch Wiki. There definitely are ways to learn about Linux-compatibility with new models. We used to have Amazon comments and reviews…Just be super cautious with all the AI bots and fake comparison sites out there.

And it’s a bit more complicated with gaming stuff. Sometimes they’ll add a weird webcam, or unsupported RGB LED controller, or have weird quirks in the firmware. Some other model lines like a business laptop from Dell or Lenovo tend to be just fine and you’ll get 100% Linux compatibility. There’s no guarantee, but any way, after a few Linux nerds blogged about it you should be fine.

Yes. My question is just, how do you participate in modern life with that? For example if you commute by train, you need a ticket. And the Deutsche Bahn tries to get rid of paper tickets. Their monthly subscription is an App now, available for Android and Apple. Do you install Waydroid and whip out your laptop once the conductor asks for your ticket? Do you also pull it out of your backpack 3 times on the platform to look up all the delays, changed platforms, trains you have to transfer to? What’s with the pkpass file for the concert, cinema, exhibition? I mean we can still print the QR codes. I do that, I have a printer at home and sometimes do the extra effort. I can’t take my laptops and tablets to concerts. And some other things will get more complicated as well. For example Shop & Go is almost impossible without a phone. You’re guaranteed to wait in line at the few cash registers left and waste an extra 10min… You’ll have to apply for a chip card to charge your EV, can’t update some of your electronic gadgets any more… And if you drive by car, how do you listen to Music and Podcasts? With an USB stick or a 12xCD changer in the trunk like in the early 2000s?

Yeah, probably jump ship to a life without a mobile phone, online banking and train tickets. 🙁

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Thanks for the link! As a short aside for the other people here: Try not to spam developers. That usually achieves the opposite and makes them miserable, when we want them to not burn out, and write good software for us. A thumbs-up emoji is the correct reaction for the average person. Or for the pros - a code-review highlighting specific issues within the code.

Uh. I’d really prefer if people experimented with new technology a bit more cautiously and not directly jump to “the biggest release […] ever done”.

I feel Anti-DDOS and Cloudflare as a web application firewall has traditionally been a lot of snake-oil as well. Sure there’s applications for it. Especially for the paid plans with all the enterprise functions. And all the way at the other end of the spectrum, where it serves as a means to circumvent NAT and replace DynDNS. But there’s a lot in-between where I (personally) don’t think it’s needed in any way. Especially before AI.

From my own experience, personal blogs, websites of your local club, church, random smaller projects, small businesses… rarely need professional DDoS protection. I’ve been fine hotsing it myself for decades now. And I’m not sure if people know what they’re paying with. I mean everytime we get a Cloudflare hiccup (or AWS…) we can see how the internet has become very centralised. Half of it just goes down for an hour or so, because we all rely on the same few, big tech services. And if you’re terminating SSL there, or use it to look inside of the packets to prevent attacks, you’re giving away all information about you and your audience/customers. They don’t just get all metadata, but also read all the transferred content/data.

It all changed a bit with the AI crawlers. We definitely need countermeasures these days. I’m still fine without Anubis or Cloudflare. I block their IP ranges and that seems to do most of the job. I think we need to pay a bit more attention to what’s really happening. Which tools we have, instead of always going with the market leader with the biggest marketing budget. Which problems we’re faced with in the first place and what tools are effective. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution. And you can’t just roll out random things without analyzing the situation properly. Maybe the correct answer is Cloudflare, but there’s also other way less intrusive and very effective means available. And maybe you’re not even the target of script kiddies or annoyed users. And maybe your your convoluted Wordpress setup isn’t even safe with the standard web application firewall in front.

Anubis is an entirely different story. It’s okay concerning privacy and centralisation. It doesn’t come without downsides, though. I personally hate if that thing pops up instead of the page I requested. I don’t like how JavaScript is mandatory now to do anything on the web. And certain kinds of crawler protection contribute to the situation how we can’t google anything anymore. With all the people locking down everything and constructing walled gardens, the internet becomes way less useful and almost impossible to navigate. That’s all direct consequences of how we decide to do things.