Jabber is honestly a more normie friendly name

"XMPP" sounds like some computer bullshit, like even as far as computer acronyms go its not a good one

"The Jabber community has long acknowledged the need for privacy and security features in a well-rounded instant messaging system. Unfortunately, finding a consensus solution to the problem of end-to-end encryption during the community's younger days was not easy. Eventually, early contributors created a quick solution using OpenPGP (RFC 4880 [1])."

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0027.html

...Jabber now that's a name I haven't heard in a loooooong time

I'm on the OMEMO website and uh people used to use OpenPGP to do E2E messaging for XMPP?! god that sounds hideous

I don't even know wtf "OX" is, I've only ever used OTR and OMEMO in the distant past when I used XMPP

https://conversations.im/omemo/

I was looking at the list of XEPs supported by Prosody (XMPP server software) and one of them is the relatively new (2020) XEP-0357: Push Notifications

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html

which is in this module

https://prosody.im/doc/modules/mod_cloud_notify

which says

"Some clients, notably Siskin and Snikket iOS need some additional extensions that are not currently defined in a standard XEP. To support these clients, see mod_cloud_notify_extensions."

so it seems a couple clients do

are there any actually decent XMPP clients on iOS?

and by decent I mean supporting push notifications.

is there a good tool on macOS to clean up items in the "Login Items & Extensions" section of macOS settings?

Mine has some apps that are long since uninstalled but their login items/extensions are still hanging around in there and I'd like to remove them

[ specifically they are under the "App Background Activity" section and I cannot seem to remove them from there, only toggle them off. ]

That said, while I don't want to write too many blog posts like these, I do want my writing to reflect the times.

And the times are Bad. So it means polemics but I think there is a possibility for other things in a similar vein.

It feels weird to be stretching writing muscles I haven't used in a long time but also at the same time my writing has markedly improved in quality in the intervening years when I stopped commentating on such topics. So it all works out in balance.

I have another of these anti-LLM polemics percolating in my brain that I actually need to sit down and start writing. I keep worrying that its a little too abstract and vague but I think it will be effective nonetheless.

Considering this post as a practice run.

@maple same here

In a past iteration of the blog I used to write a lot more commentary on computer technology, in fact it was the primary topic.

OG mutuals may remember that my blog used to have a different name in the past, one with "tech" in the domain name.

Over the years as my interests diversified I started writing about different things and at a certain point I stopped writing about computer technology entirely.

That is partially because my interests are more varied now and I like to write about books more than I do computer technology. Reviewing books serves both as a way to practice my writing and analysis skills and also it is useful to other people, and in general it is a more pleasant thing to write about.

But also it is because everything I wanted to write about computer technology recently is a polemic of some kind or another, and that kind of writing while cathartic up to a certain point is exhausting, and also gets repetitive fast.

@aroacemagicalnerd yes, go ahead!

@noracodes thank you!

I wrote this blog post this morning instead of starting a new book which is how you know I was really pissed off

The blog post is written and published.

Sysadmin In The LLM Age

"You cannot vibe code your way into becoming a better sysadmin. Or better anything else for that matter."

https://nullrouted.space/2026/02/05/sysadmin-in-the-llm-age/

Boosts on this post are appreciated, thank you.

#sysadmin

"Have you ever been stuck troubleshooting an intermittent issue? Something doesn’t work, you make a change, it suddenly starts working, then despite making no further changes, it randomly breaks again."

I run into situations like this all the time at $WORK and what I do is ask my coworkers to take a look and see if they have any ideas.

When I am deep into the weeds of solving a issue like this, I get tunnel-visioned into one particular perspective on the issue and getting past that involves other people with different perspectives and specializations coming in and going - "have you looked at $X? this sounds like a issue caused by $Y" and then going "oh huh I hadn't considered that."

And I usually end up learning something from that experience and that in turn makes me better at what I do in the future.

"I am a better sysadmin than I was before agentic coding because now I can solve problems myself that I would have previously needed to hand off to someone else."

No, it didn't make you a better sysadmin. At best you are the same level of sysadmin you were before you did this. At worst, you regressed your problem solving skills.

Being a good sysadmin means knowing the limits of one's skills and knowledge. To be able to go, "okay, I can't figure this out, lemme ask another person for help". That is not something to be ashamed of or a mark of incompetence.

Did you ask someone else for help? Another sysadmin? Maybe a programmer friend to help with the colorizer? Go on IRC, forums, hell even Stack Overflow? A log colorizer is a solved problem.

I deal with cache invalidation issues in relation to WordPress sites and Cloudflare at my day job, and there other people like me who could have helped you with the underlying problem with caching you were trying to figure out.

Instead, you went about it the most roundabout, inefficient way possible and when the plagiarism machine gave you a colorizer, it was *you* that used your experience and knowledge to find the issue, not the LLM.

"LLMs can be fantastic if you’re using them to do something that you mostly understand. If you’re familiar enough with a problem space to understand the common approaches used to solve it, and you know the subject area well enough to spot the inevitable LLM hallucinations and confabulations, and you understand the task at hand well enough to steer the LLM away from dead-ends and to stop it from re-inventing the wheel, and you have the means to confirm the LLM’s output, then these tools are, frankly, kind of amazing."

If, and, if, and. So many caveats. So if you ignore *the numerous problems*, it is *kind of* amazing. Uh huh. That's what we are supposed to take away from this.

Somehow "amazing" is not the descriptor I would use for something that behaves like this.

"And I had fun doing these things, even as entire vast swaths of rainforest were lit on fire to power my agentic adventures."

If *this* is the conclusion you come to then you need to stop writing, go stare at a wall and contemplate the choices that brought you to this completely unhinged, abhorrent conclusion.

Instead, you published this publicly on a popular site.

see, like Lee I am a sysadmin who is bad at programming, always have been, I haven't written anything more than simple Bash and Python scripts

so I am the target demographic for this blog post and as such it is pissing me off *more* than your average programmer writing a post about how they vibe-coded a thing

I saw this in my feed reader and thought that somehow a Benj Edwards post had gotten past my RSS feed filters but no, it's Lee

jesus motherfucking christ

I'm gonna scream

https://arstechnica.com/features/2026/02/so-yeah-i-vibe-coded-a-log-colorizer-and-i-feel-good-about-it/