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Selfhosting is the act of freeing yourself from your dependance on big corporations like Google, Meta, Apple, and the whims of their shareholders.

And while it may seem like a daunting task at first, I can guarantee you, that it is easier than you might think. Thanks to freely available open source software, anyone can spin up a server for less than 20$ a month, replacing Spotify, Netflix, Google Photos, Google Docs, Google Drive, and so much more.

In this series, I will teach you the following skills:

• Setting up a VPS with Ubuntu Server
• Setting up Docker for your services
• Setting up Caddy as a reverse proxy
• Creating sub-domains for each service
• The services I use and how to set them up

We are growing extremely powerful systems that we do not fully understand. Each time we grow a larger system, we run tests on it. The tests show the system is much more capable at things which are economically useful. And the bigger and more complicated you make these systems, the more they seem to display awareness that they are things.

What should I do? I believe it’s time to be clear about what I think, hence this talk. And likely for all of us to be more honest about our feelings about this domain – for all of what we’ve talked about this weekend, there’s been relatively little discussion of how people feel. But we all feel anxious! And excited! And worried! We should say that.

Technological progress occurs in a logical sequence. Each innovation rests on a foundation of prior discoveries, forming a dependency tree that constrains what we can develop, and when. You can't invent the telescope before discovering how to grind optical lenses, or develop electric lighting before learning how to generate electricity.

We did not design this tech tree; it arose from forces outside of our control. The evidence for this lies in two observations: first, technologies routinely emerge soon after they become possible, often discovered simultaneously by independent researchers who never heard of each other. Second, isolated societies converge on the same fundamental technologies when facing similar problems and resource constraints.

Thankfully those of us who want data ownership and agency in our web applications now don't have to wait. The AT Protocol (as in Authenticated Transfer, but also @) was ushered in by the folks at Bluesky, now with a network of over 30M people strong and increasingly spread across multiple interoperating platforms/communities like Blacksky or Tangled and so many more.

The upshot here is that when there's no platform you can trust to be real, the next best thing is a platform where you can trust everything is fake.

Is 90% of code going to be written by AI? I don’t know. What I do know is, that for me, on this project, the answer is already yes. I’m part of that growing subset of developers who are building real systems this way.

That said, none of this removes the need to actually be a good engineer. If you let the AI take over without judgment, you’ll end up with brittle systems and painful surprises (data loss, security holes, unscalable software). The tools are powerful, but they don’t absolve you of responsibility.

We are testing out systems for an extremely broad set of behaviors via ecologically valid benchmarks which ultimately tell us how well these systems can plug into ~44 distinct ‘ecological economic niches’ in the world and we are finding out they’re extremely close to plugging in as being the same as humans – and that’s just with today’s models. Soon, they’ll be better than many humans at these tasks. And what then? Nothing happens? No! Extremely strange things will happen to the economy!

It is very probable we will discover that intelligence is likewise not a foundational singular element, but a derivative compound composed of multiple cognitive elements, combined in a complex system unique to each species of mind. The result that we call intelligence emerges from many different cognitive primitives such as long-term memory, spatial awareness, logical deduction, advance planning, pattern perception, and so on. There may be dozens of them, or hundreds. We currently don’t have any idea of what these elements are. We lack a periodic table of cognition.

An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal. Let’s break that down...