05 April 2026

📌 Spent the night writing about the homelab paradox. It will be published — sometime — on an external outlet. Listening Ghost, mostly. The playlist tracked the mood.

The piece started as a reflection on buying a HUNSN 4K on Alibaba to escape centralised ecosystems. It became something else - Zuboff, Boltanski, Söderberg, Crawford, Himanen. Supply chains, energy consumption, the structural exclusivity of hacker culture.

The contradiction is not resolvable. That's the point.

Himanen gets close to why any of this happens at all:

Hacker activity is also joyful. It often has its roots in playful explorations. Torvalds has described how Linux began to expand from small experiments with the computer he had just acquired. He explained his motivation by simply stating that "it was/is fun working on it."

Three hours debugging nslcd at eleven in the evening. No one asked. No one paid. That's exactly it.

The fun fact at the end of the article is accurate. This note was written on the same machine.