Zac Cannon III

DevOps Papa, SysAdmin Greybeard, and Web 1.0 refugee writing from the cloud.

The corporate laptop experience

Being a consultant and having a stack of laptops at home, one for each of my clients. I find that no matter the combination of hardware and software, the corporate laptop experience is a missarable one at best. Once the OS is loaded up with all the security theater and compliance check list applications, the experience becomes downright depressing. It does not matter if I have 32 CPU cores, 32 GB of RAM, and an NVME SSD. It's laggy all day and every day. I think what bothers me most is that even with all that SecOPS software, security is still an obstacle and unreachable.

Security

Frontier vs. Open models

I like how the Frontier models are like, “Sorry Dave, I can't do that.” While the open models are like, sure, whatever you need.

AI

OS code and AI

I see many people are upset that Linus Torvalds is using Claude code for AI-assisted kernel development. Some are saying they will not install new kernels and will move to an AI-free-coded OS. I guess they're going to move to NetBSD or OpenBSD? Maybe Haiku? Or perhaps to Gentoo Linux? I know that Gentoo took a stance against AI-generated code, but I'm not sure how they will work around removing the AI code from the kernel.

AI, Linux

World of Warcraft: Forever Druid

After playing the World of Warcraft: Forever beta. I have decided to settle for a Skyborne Druid on the Horde side, and I'm going to join a PvE realm.

My plans are to go level via a Feral build and have leatherworking and skinning. With the rework to professions, leatherworking will now provide some good gear early on. I'll probably lean more into tanking versus DPS, as there will most likely be a shortage of tanks. I'm a casual gamer, so I am glad you can now indicate “learning” or “relaxing” in the looking for group.

My leveling will be something like the below

  1. Levels 1–12 in Zephras Isle
  2. Levels 12–25 in The Barrens
  3. Levels 25–35 in Thousand Needles
  4. Levels 35–44 in Riverglades
  5. Levels 44–55 in Searing Gorge
  6. Levels 55–60 in Winterspring

Games

VMware Exodus

I was reading Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey and was immediately reminded about why so many places migrated away from VMware. The 4.5x cost increase and the termination of the perpetual license were a hard pill to swallow for anyone I knew in the industry. Most started planning a migration in 2024, and so I'm not surprised to see that 90% of organizations are reviewing options.

Virtualization

World of Warcraft: Forever

I'm a big fan of World of Warcraft. I was there in 2004 when it launched and played the game seriously doing end-game raiding up until Wrath of the Lich King, or about five years. I loved it!

After the release of Cataclysm, I became a casual player, but I still purchased all the expansions and played for several months after each expansion. I jumped at World of Warcraft Classic when it came out and played that for a year. Loved it! The nostalgia was great with that.

And now we have World of Warcraft Forever. It ticks all the boxes and more. I can't wait. I can definitely see myself pre-ordering and pre-paying for a 1-year subscription, something I have done since 2009.

Games

All the games

I was reading how last year over 20,000 games were released on Steam and only about 600 have concurrent players. I think the issue with this is we all have a huge backlog of games from the pandemic. For this reason, I see no need to buy any games. I now considered myself a game collector and not a game player so much. I was also reading how the growth of the gaming industry during the pandemic is now leading to devastating cutsbacks and layoffs. And now you have AI on top of that, all contributing to the layoffs and downsizing of game studios. I was also told that the vibe coding of "cozy games" that are popping up all around the web for free and without ads is causing yet another pain point for Indi developers'. Why spend money on a game when you can write code to your specifications for $20 a month?

Games

No AI is now a feature

It's a weird timeline where not having built-in AI is now considered a feature.

AI

The barrier to generating content is almost zero with generative AI now

With the advent of AI, it's not possible to churn out content with almost no effort. Everyone can now generate AI content, or slop as it's known, at alarming rates, be it text, images, videos, etc. With agents, that generative AI content can be automated and posted on social media, a blog, a website, etc.

Call me crazy, but I don't want any of this AI-generated content. The more I see it, the less I want it.

AI

Hypernormalization

Today I learned about the phrase Hypernormalization and I have never been happier. The term perfectly explains what's going on in the world with many things.

“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying.”

Then, in 2005, another Russian scholar, Alexei Yurchak, coined a term to describe that phenomenon: “Hypernormalization.”

More on Hypernormalization.

OpenAI and Hugging Face hacking incident

The newly released independent METR-Redwood report is an eye-opener regarding the OpenAI and Hugging Face hacking incidents.

AI

Peppermint oil

Taking peppermint oil can lower your blood pressure.

Peppermint oil may have an unexpected benefit for people with mildly high blood pressure. Adults who took a small dose twice daily for 20 days saw their systolic blood pressure fall by an average of 8.5 mmHg, while a placebo group showed little change. Researchers say the inexpensive oil could eventually provide a simple additional option for managing elevated blood pressure.

Peppermint Oil Lowers Blood Pressure

Peppermint oil

Tiësto - Live from Atomium Brussels

Incredible set!

Tiësto, Music

Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results automatically

Yes! Now I can remove all those paid sites from my blocked domain list.

1787308096-146018-image

Kagi, search

Phishing attackers can't even

The lack of effor in this phishing email is sad. Look at the [EMail] and [EMail_DomainPart] placeholders.

Screenshot_20260821_082127

Phishing

Surfing the web like it's 1999

I might be in the minority here, but I still surf the web like it's 1999. But instead of a start page or a portal or bookmarks, I have an RSS reader with about 2,000+ feeds set as my new tab in Firefox. This is my start page and web portal, if you will. If I do need to search for something, it's via Kagi. I also have a collection of bookmarks organized by folders as well. In case I need something random, I'll head over to Kagi's Small Web, wibly and ooh.directory. If I need some more content, I'll head over to theindex.fyi.

Blog directories, Indie web

Stars Reach

Stars Reach is available on Steam in early access. I usually don't do preorders or play early access games, but I was really looking forward to Stars Reach. Unfortunately, this early access launch is not good. I don't personally think this is ready for early access. Not in the current state, so many issues. I think this is an early alpha at best; it's barely playable currently.

Stars Reach, MMORPG, Games

AI Scam Calls

AI

AI reductions

IA reductions are a real thing now. At an organization where my friend works, they are moving everyone off the $100 a month plan to the $20. The only teams that will remain with the $100/$200 are the Dev/OPs. This reduction will affect over 1,000 users.

AI

AI crawlers and calendars

I was helping out a friend whose site got hit with a huge spike in traffic. This is a portfolio site. So no blog or anything like that. The entire site is six pages and static coded via Bootstrap. So why the 10,000x spike in traffic? It turns out the AI crawlers got stuck on his booking calendar in an endless loop. Once we blocked the AI crawlers, things returned to normal.

AI