Tire Kicking

26 Sep, 2025

I've been playing with some new and old technologies:

• Evolu local-first: mobile PWA Streaks and Pocket replacement LocalMark

• Quilibrium provable compute: Quorum is more private than Signal, but alive like Discord. I host an open Space.

• x402 permissionless payments

• sovereign portable identity: SIWE + ENS + EAS

• LobeChat as private as you want it to be

• scale-to-zero IaaS: Hono on Cloudflare Workers; Neon Postgres; Momento Pelikan Cache; Upstash Redis; Tailscale

• $5-is-all-you-need-until-you-need-more-and-then-we-gotchu PaaS: Bun Elysia on Render; S3 on Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, Tigris; superlight services on DO, Vultr, Contabo; fly.io painless vertical + horizontal scaling

• $20-can-change-your-life AI: Cursor; Cloudflare AI; DeepSeek/Mistral/Phi embedded/edge AI. Serverless inference via Runpod et al has been disappointing so far for me YMMV but it is still early IMHO. I believe self-hosted private AI is a dead end

• Obsidian Markdown notes with e2e sync over S3

• arguably the single most widely deployed and used software component in human history

HMU to compare notes!