Something vexing:

I've got a lot of ideas for improving things, but they're mostly infrastructure / ecosystem projects.

It's very difficult to connect any of them directly to the things people insist they need today.

For example:

• Key Transparency for the Fediverse
  • E2EE for ActivityPub can leverage this
  • AuxData is useful for other protocols

It's difficult to get most people to know or care about this!

But if you want a federated Discord replacement that can be easily self-hosted without making the host a juicy target for privacy invasions, and you don't want to require users to manually verify keys, this work is essential.

them: as a senior engineer, i expect you to discuss tradeoffs in your technical solutions

me: cool, let’s talk about the externalities of LLMs

them: wait not like that

this one has been sitting in my head ever since i first saw the generator.

https://marshdeer.github.io/xkcd2501-generator/

The upcoming #letsencrypt DNS-PERSIST-01 will make it easier to have LE certificates for internal services.

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/02/18/dns-persist-01

Personally I've used HTTP validation with split-DNS rather than DNS-01 for internal services, but I will likely switch to DNS-PERSIST-01 once it is deployed and supported by certbot.