Ben Dicken on X: "I am once again begging you to put your data...

Waylon Walker Author

Sep 5, 2025 1 min read

Ben Dicken (@BenjDicken) on X

I am once again begging you to put your database servers and application servers in the same region.

X (formerly Twitter) · x.com

This is a really great animation of latency across different aws regions based on us-east-1.

Latest Thoughts #

The Internet I Grew Up With Doesn’t Exist Anymore - cleberg.net

cleberg.net html" hidden="">

I align a lot with this post. From growing up in a rural house where internet access was harder to get. It was slow and only had one line, if you were on the internet, no one in the house could recieve a phone call. Idk if what is now the smol webl, the indieweb, is seeing a resurgence, if I’m just noticing it more. It does feel like along there has been a very small number of users willing to get their own domain, their own server, and host their own shit. A few of these are starting to really break out occasionally, see things like wordle [1] hitting mass adoptioun before being swooped up by a giant.

I too miss the internet of old, heck I really dont even mind the middle era of fb, twitter, instagram dominance, but what we have now is dominated by political undertones on it all with everyone shouting “Fake News” at each other. These sites are the easiest place to stay in touch with those you have met online, yet they are riddled with so much toxicity its impossible to have a great experience on them. I’m about a year and a half of not having a single one on my phone, and at this point I barely log into them once a week. RSS is the way forward, as long as its not killed by pay…

Nibelungenlied40 | Book Split Keyboard Design

www.reddit.com

Reddit - Please wait for verification reddit.com [1]

Absolute whimsy achieved in this book themed #keeb build!

References: [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/1u9awcz/nibelungenlied40_book_split_keyboard_design/?utm_source=cassidoo&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=u1f6b8-you-can-make-anything-by-writing-cs-lewis

Dumb people lay off - YouTube

www.youtube.com

oof Mark, this does not feel like it is set to age well. These people in power feel so disconnected from regular people with a job trying to do work.

The Website Specification

specification.website

The Website Specification A platform-agnostic, full specification of the technical features a good website should have. Built in the open under an MIT licence. The Website Specification · specification.website [1]

A solid checklist for agents to implement on most sites. Very few sites need 100% coverage, but most should probably check most of these boxes

References: [1]: https://specification.website/

Revisiting the closed canon

derekkedziora.com

Revisiting the closed canon A post I wrote in 2023, the closing of the canon, predicted that LLM answers would replace search results, dramatically lowering traffic to individual sites, thereby removing the incentives to eve... Derek Kedziora · derekkedziora.com [1]

This is what makes rss so interesting to me. Its boring old tech that fell out of mainstream popularity years ago, yet many sites still support it. Not all, especially ones that come with a good dickover.

At the same time, it’s sad to see the human internet dying, even more quickly than before. Not only do we have rampant bots and sites seo maxxing to get to the top. We have ai search overview that answers mose simple questions pretty good, chat that does good, and agents at our fingertips. The need for tutorials is pretty much dead.

What we need now is human experiences shared and documented more than ever. I’ve been writing a whole lot less simply because this transition has been hard. Most of my pre 2024 posts were how to, notes for future me. Things so simple agents just spat out better versions in seconds these days with barely a question.

References: [1]: https://derekkedziora.com/notes/revisiting-the…

Recent Pings #

hmmm. #

TIL, `?.` is sometimes pronounced as a `hmm dot`

Does codex change throughout the token usage window? #

Is it me or can you feel the 5 hour and weekly limit of codex nearing. It feels like it slowly stops working tasks to completion and asking to continue. I nearly start yelling into the enter, "YES, DO WHAT WE AGREED ON, STOP ASKING" then I notice I'm in the single digits of remaining window left.

Mythos gone already #

Mythos released days ago, now its gone, before most of us were allowed to touch it.

just good enough #

I built shit on the web before AI, some of it was okay, some I put a lot of time into, but some was just really shitty. Done just well enough to get the job done. All of it had to be written by hand or copy pasted from stack overflow. It was a lot of fun. Now we have a new level of shitty, it looks fine. It looks like it should work good. None of it is just barely good enough, nearly browser default style anymore.

Flowing Thoughts Ai To Help Blast Radius #

Not sure how this matters to anyone else, but I'm sitting in the car and letting the thoughts flow.

I'm having really interesting conversations with ai recently. Like things I never thought I would care this deeply about. In part because it feels like the vulns are coming faster and harder, and in part because it is really enabling me to invest some time into the development that I would not otherwise have. I'm thinking about least privilege, reducing dependencies in containers, limiting pod access to the Internet and other pods. Reducing the blast radius.

Now I've always been hesitant to bring in new dependencies. I've always tried to strip to the lowest possible dependency set n my containers, but I would also re-use the main server container to run cron job workflows. I wasn't giving much thought about what services they could access, or their internet access

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