Philosophy

You wake up. It’s dark. You hear a soft humming — fans, somewhere. Slowly your eyes adjust to the light. You find yourself in a container. Metal walls, a few windows looking out at… stars. Only stars. No Earth in sight. There’s a note: “You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.” This is the thought experiment I regularly discuss when I’m in a philosophical mood with friends. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s actually a lens to think about systems thinking, circular processes, and — if you extrapolate — about how we treat the Earth. ...

I self-host nearly everything. Kubernetes clusters on refurbished mini-PCs. GitLab on my own hardware. Vault for secrets. Monitoring, logging, all of it. People often ask: why? Managed cloud is easier. AWS, Azure, Google do it at scale and reliably. Why put yourself through this? The short answer: agency. The long answer is this entire article. The spaceship thought experiment In my post about the space container thought experiment I describe a scenario: you wake up in a closed container in space. Everything you need to survive is present, but nothing goes in or out. ...