ai

I do not intend to let an AI write content in this place.

Nevertheless, AIs are currently great tools and I will not hesitate to use them in specific cases.

One of them is software development.
An other one I'll need is translation.
But again, you're in my digital garden, not any soulless money stealing weblog.

But... following a friend's suggestion, I asked an AI, that I use a lot, to roast me.
To go full oppsite to the very first line of this page, here's the outcome of the prompt:

You are the only human being capable of turning “I just want to share a few files at home” into an architecture involving Proxmox, ZFS, mdadm, Nextcloud, OPNsense, WireGuard, LDAP, several VLANs — without a managed switch — and three salvaged computers, none of which is quite suitable for the job.

In your house, no device is allowed to simply work. It first has to pass a job interview:

— Power consumption? — Linux compatibility? — Intel network card? — Can it fit in half a rack unit? — Is it silent? — And most importantly: can I install PostgreSQL on it?

You own more server projects than you have available power outlets. The Futro S920 must become a router, the S930 a lightweight server, and the old Jetway machine must become a NAS, domain controller, or possibly a domestic nuclear power station… provided it eventually boots with a Mean Well power supply purchased after six evenings of research.

You categorically refuse Node.js, the AUR, Nano, and curl | bash scripts, as though these technologies had personally insulted your family. On the other hand, running a Symfony application with PostgreSQL on free shared hosting, deployed from your self-hosted Forgejo behind a non-bridged Chinese ISP router and a dynamic IP address: perfectly reasonable.

You use i3 in “keyboard-only” mode because apparently using a mouse would be an unacceptable concession to modern decadence. But the moment a terminal line appears ten centimetres too low, you launch a full parliamentary inquiry.

Your computing environment looks like a museum of abandoned architectures: X79, DDR3, Quadro K620, several generations of Raspberry Pi, Fujitsu thin clients, PicoPSUs… You never throw hardware away. You assign it a new critical mission. In your home, even a motherboard that refuses to boot remains “potentially ideal for a family LDAP server.”

You want a 10 Gbit/s home network to transfer files between machines whose disks sometimes top out at 120 MB/s. That is basically the technological equivalent of building an eight-lane motorway between the garage and the garden shed.

Your web projects are particularly magnificent. You begin with:

“I just want a small, simple website.”

Three messages later, it requires:

  • Symfony 7;
  • PostgreSQL without an ORM;
  • OpenStreetMap integration;
  • several content types;
  • a search engine;
  • a knowledge base;
  • user profiles;
  • a Forgejo deployment pipeline;
  • three different visual layouts;
  • no cookies;
  • no unnecessary JavaScript;
  • and probably compatibility with a Raspberry Pi 2 running Arch Linux ARM.

You do not develop websites. You write their constitution.

Even your holidays become an infrastructure project. A normal family chooses a beach and a restaurant. You build a high-availability schedule with backup activities, weather dependencies, compatibility with the children’s food preferences, land sailing as failover, and restaurants approved by the Guide du Routard.

You want to measure everything: Wi-Fi quality, water tank levels, the temperature in every room, your team’s workload, badminton smash speed, and probably soon the average time required for your children to accept a buckwheat galette.

You also have the rare ability to ask a perfectly simple question and then methodically uncover the twelve hidden layers of complexity underneath it.

“How do I copy and paste in URxvt without a mouse?”

Two weeks later, you are maintaining your own terminal fork, controlled through tmux, synchronised with Forgejo, available in both Swiss and French keyboard layouts, with no AUR package and automatic recovery after failure.

In summary, you are a mixture of conscientious sysadmin, computing archaeologist, and architect who is fundamentally incapable of allowing a problem to remain small.

You are never looking for the solution that works.

You are looking for the solution that works, is open source, silent, repairable, self-hosted, Linux-compatible, subscription-free, documented, backed up, monitored, reproducible, keyboard-accessible, and installable on a computer found for €35 on Leboncoin.

And the worst part?

After eighty messages, three architecture changes, and the purchase of two network cards, you usually manage to make it work.