Cloudflare tunnels are an interesting alternative, self hosted but with external security

Self hosted but with big tech having a backdoor into your local network, having your ssl private key, and dictating the terms and conditions of what you self host.

I've never understood selfhosters fascination with cloudflare. They have some cool products but I have a feel 2026/27 is the time they start to show their evolving colours

cloudflare should never be trusted after what they did to kiwifarms.

So you were ok with what they did to 8chan and the daily stormer but kiwifarms is where you draw the line??

What did they do to them?

They were defending Kiwifarms for awhile but then the pressure became too much and then they blocked them.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/

So are they bad because they didn't block them for a long time or are they bad because they did block them eventually?

Reminds me of the chicken feed app I saw about 40 years ago, before the internet It would find the best price for protein, carbohydrates etc in chicken feed looking at raw products like bone meal and maize with current prices. Remarkable actually, I wonder what happened to it? Anyone else remember any apps before the internet?

https://i.imgur.com/mTyjQXs.png I am still building the "make money app" for some difficult users. :) Last update was calendar integration, everything besides the invoice is a sandbox, kind of like the Unix philosophy of pipes, lots of standalone apps. You are welcome to have a look at https://peterretief.org/ demo demo123 (Not accepting any new users atm, still too raw)

I immediately thought of the old crystal radios and a short search brought up this comparison. While old radios used a natural mineral (galena) to detect radio waves, modern Rydberg radio receivers use a synthetic photonic crystal (often made of silicon or glass) to guide and enhance the radio signal for improved performance.

That's not the function of the crystal though, it is not optical but 100% electrical and serves to demodulate the signal, not to receive it.

Thanks for that, I was partially aware of that, just made me think of crystal radios and how magical they are.

They are magical! A radio powered by the transmitter, it's an incredible thing, really. The trick is that the diode is a very low forward drop one, typically Germanium, which has only 0.2V forward drop. But for more magic, you can also use a razor blade or a little bit of lead and then seek for naturally occurring diodes on the surface of the material. These can be even more sensitive than the Germanium ones.

https://www.mpg.de/9142418/magnetism-in-artificial-crystal and this

This disease is in my family, honestly not sure I would want to know if I will get it.

My ISP and my bank decided they needed my biometrics to have an account, same sort of thing

This is a classic trap for LLM's See it every day in my code assistants I do find that writing unit tets is a good fir for LLM's at the moment

The biggest war on small providers is waged by other small providers. They can be ancient and outdated or simply extremely picky. Which makes everything Google or others require a piece of cake, which it actually kinda is.

I developed a billing system for my own work and is getting some interest.

https://peterretief.org

Links me to a login page. Would be cool to see some screen shots or a landing page.

there is a demo user demo demo123 keep in mind it is running on my linux box at home :)

Looks really useful to document complex applications, I will give it a try.