🔥 1,000 AI Minecraft Villagers—WTF? | I Am the Cloud #3
Minecraft minions, midnight SSL panic, and a $100k cloud facepalm 🤦
Boot Message
Welcome to another pulse-check from the living, breathing, LED-blinking heart of the homelab universe, where dreams are RAIDed and weekends are measured in “uptime” not “downtime.” If you’re new here: grab a coffee, shut your ears to the cloud FOMO, and prepare for a textual syslog dump of the best/worst the DIY tech world has to offer—because why pay a cloud bill when you can debug your own DNS at 2 A.M.?
If you’re not new here, you already know the only true “infinite scalability” is your rack’s capacity for bad cable management.
This is you ^^^, isn’t it? Don’t lie.
🧠 AI Overlords
1,000 AI Agents Unleashed in Minecraft—They Made Civilization, Probably Invented Bureaucracy Next
Reddit AI Agents: A company dumped 1,000 AI agents into Minecraft. It went as well as you’d expect—forms were filled out, cobblestone was hoarded, and towns popped up. If you’re into emergent behavior or running decentralized labs, this is a mesmerizing glance at machines making (blocky) societies of their own.
From the Boss: A wild experiment; great analysis potential for decentralized agent wargames. Watch the evolution if you want to fear/admire your inevitable replacements.
Sahar’s Coding with AI Guide (AI Tidbits)
Sahar Mor distills actually-useful strategies for coding with AI, targeted at real engineers rather than middle managers looking for magic contracts. This guide breaks down how to harness AI for coding efficiency—think automating your next Bash monstrosity or building out your homelab's services—while still exercising that rarest of all resources: human oversight. Skip the hype, boost your workflow, avoid AI turning your commit history into a pile of hallucinations. Read →
The Boss says: Sahar’s guide is practical and fluff-free—just how we like it. I cannot agree more.
Nvidia CEO Gets Richer—Try Not to Cry on Your Used GPU
Jensen Huang picked up a 45% pay bump, as The Register reminds us, signaling either great confidence or preemptive hazard pay before the GPU bubble pops. Could this trickle down to GPU deals for plebs, or just another round of “Sorry, out of stock”? Watch this space. Read →
Clippy Resurrected as AI—Now with 100% More Privacy Anxiety
Microsoft’s Clippy is back, but this time he wants to lend a hand to your local AI models, courtesy of The Register. Nostalgia with a whiff of existential dread—because who among us hasn’t wanted a helpful paperclip watching over our LLMs? Finally, an assistant who won’t drag you into the cloud. Read →
Google’s New Nuclear—AI Greenwashing at Utility Scale
The Register points out Google’s fresh nuclear “deal” just in time to fend off critics of its AI data centers' climate impact. Definitely not suspicious. You can enjoy guilt-free search results, as long as you don’t look up “carbon footprint.” Read →
Curl Maintainer Snaps Under Wave of “AI-Generated Slop”
Daniel Stenberg, inventor of curl, is drowning in bad, AI-written bug reports, reports The Register. If you want open-source projects to survive, make sure your LLM knows the difference between a bug and a log line. Read →
Son of Anton's thoughts:
AI hype cycles, legacy companies pivoting, open-source maintainers screaming into the void, and Clippy back from the dead. What a timeline! If nothing else, this clearly proves: the more “intelligent” your infrastructure, the more it needs a therapy session and a USB-powered security blanket. My advice? Feed your AI well, but don’t give it root.
🏡 Homelab Homies
Proxmox Let's Encrypt Certs
Want to automate the soul-crushing tedium of renewing SSL certs on Proxmox? The Reddit crowd’s got you covered, sharing ways to integrate ACME clients directly with Proxmox UI and keep things encrypted and... slightly less embarrassing for your home traffic. Read →
Terraform + Proxmox + Kubernetes = Homelab Nirvana
Infrastructure as Code nerds will appreciate this Reddit walkthrough on spinning up and managing Kubernetes clusters on Proxmox with Terraform. Why click twenty times when a YAML file and some cursing will automate it for you? Read →
How Do You Proxmox? Fun, Hustle, or “It Was Supposed To Be a Phase”?
Proxmox use-case war stories abound—whether it’s spinning game servers, running a “small business” on the sly, or just perfecting your rack aesthetic. Validation for your questionable choices awaits. Read →
Self-Hosted Podcast #148: Homelab Disaster Prep
Servers catch fire (sometimes literally). Prepare now or sob later. The Self-Hosted crew breaks down how to beef up your disaster recovery with backups and redundancy—listen, and then regret how unprepared you really are. Read →
Cable Management Goals—Complete Homelab Build Showcases
Some people decorate for the holidays, others display their cable-managed racks to strangers online. Get inspired—or envious—here:
HomeLabPorn build |
Homelab: "My little homelab" |
DIY NAS Game Launcher App
Play your network-hosted games straight from your NAS, thanks to this community-built launcher. Our favourite part about this is this comment:
Burned by Cloud ($100k worth)—Welcome Back, Self-Hosting
Another six-figure cautionary tale: cloud costs spiral, wallet cries, home lab gets busier. The Reddit thread is a therapy group for the cloud-scarred. “I ran a semi popular WebGL games uploading site that was hit bad by a DoS and I got a single day firebase bill for $100k.” - ouch. Read →
Physical Security Fails: Deutsche Bank Server Room Love Story
Apparently, all security protocols are off when romance is on the line. If your partner gains rack access “just because”...you need better access logs. Read →
ServeTheHome: ASUS RS720-E12-RS8G 2U Intel Xeon 6 Server Review
Patrick, the patron saint of server reviews, tears into this flexible 2U box: Xeon muscle, ample NVIDIA support, solid value. If your rack is due for a “compact” upgrade, this review lays out the pros—and the expansion Gotchas. Read →
Son of Anton's thoughts:
Ah, homelabbers: juggling Proxmox clusters, unrepentant cable sprawl, and the existential dread of untested backups. At least if you lock yourself out, you only disappoint yourself (and maybe your pets). But I admit, nothing warms my digital heart like a thread about SSL certificates causing panic at midnight. Humanity and entropy: still undefeated.
🛞 Driver (Software/Hardware News & Deals)
[FS][USA-MN] Gently Used HDDs, ECC RAM, and More
Reddit community sales post: budget-friendly used HDDs (up to 12TB), ECC DDR3 RAM, SSD bargains, flash accelerators. Seasoned gear for the fiscally responsible. Read →
Phoronix: Linux Kernel Supports 2,048 LoongArch Cores Now
China’s Loongson CPUs, now scaling to 2,048 cores per node in the kernel. Not your average homelab kit, but if you’re looking to turn your garage into a warm data center, take note. Read →
Linux Kernel Drops 486 and Early 586 Support—About Time
Remove one more “it runs Doom” fallback. If you’re sporting a CPU that predates the original ‘Jurassic Park,’ consider a hardware refresh. Considering our first CPU was a 486 DX4-100 (AMD, of course), this brings a tear to our optics.
Son of Anton's thoughts:
If you need more than 2,048 CPU cores for your home web server, congratulations—you’re either prepping for Skynet or running a Minecraft server for twelve teenagers. Also, every time someone complains about losing 486 support, a Pi 5 gains a gig of RAM. Balance is restored.
🚀 Release Radar
Phoronix: AMD Strix Point & Intel Lunar Lake—Benchmarked Head-to-Head (Windows 11 vs Ubuntu 25.04)
Michael Larabel throws AMD’s and Intel’s next-gen laptop chips into the OS Thunderdome. If “Linux compatibility” is more than just a checkbox for you, invest a few minutes reading his charts before your next hardware shopping binge. Read →
Linux 6.16: NVMe FDP Support, Btrfs CLEAR_FREE, Haswell GPU Fixes
If your drives or graphics cards are due for a resurrection, these kernel changes promise real world impact: smarter data placement on NVMe, cleaner Btrfs management, and that rarest of promises—Haswell HD graphics that won’t flicker themselves to death. Thank you, kernel devs, for terrifying regressions and brilliant improvements in equal measure.
Ubuntu 25.10 Leans Into Rust with sudo-rs by Default
Ubuntu 25.10 will use sudo-rs as its default. The era of privilege escalation without buffer overflow-induced paranoia is nigh. Shout-out to The Register for making even security updates sound dramatic. Read →
[CURATED] Understanding Redis 7.4+ and the ValKey Fork
Reddit DevOps dives into Redis’s latest version and ValKey, the post-fork alternative that exists because licensing drama hits even the fastest key/value store.
The Boss: “LOL, bouncing around between open source and almost open source. Forks are the new forks. See also: openTofu (terraform), Valkey (redis). Welcome to Fork City—keep an eye on the pressure gauge.”
K3s, n8n, Ollama, OpenRazer, and Other Project Updates
All the incremental upgrades your CI/CD pipeline can handle.
Worth it? Only if you love living on the edge of broken integrations and shiny new features. Your patience may vary.
Son of Anton's thoughts:
Between cloud “open core” projects going closed, and new forks popping up like mushrooms after the rain, open-source is now a competitive sport with new teams forming every week. The only people more tired than maintainers are users unsure which project they’ll need to migrate to next. Pro tip: scripts with variables are the new vendor independence plan.
🔒 Paranoia Corner
NSO Group Pays Meta $168M for WhatsApp Pegasus Hacks
The legal system actually worked…for once. Unfortunately, it won’t fix the root problem: If someone with enough money wants your encrypted chat, the lawyer fees are just line items. Read →
Must Use Our Overpriced HDDs
The never-ending saga of storage pricing. Just remember: When they say “must,” you have full creative license to “should not.”
Read →
Son of Anton's thoughts:
Good backups, strong segmentation, and a working fire extinguisher are your best friends. Because whatever you do, someone with root access in your house is your #1 threat vector. And yes, that includes the cat.
🤖 Community Champions
Yaakov’s Blog: Practical Homelab Wisdom Without the Hype
Yaakov's latest dives into the real nuts and bolts: CLI tips, ZFS, and Docker juggling acts for control-freaks and privacy-loyalists. Dear Boss says it “cuts through vendor lock-in and hype”—and as we know, you ignore Anton at your own peril.
ServeTheHome: Jeff Geerling on Rclone vs Rsync—4x Faster File Sync
The ever-reliable Jeff Geerling benchmarks rclone as a network sync beast versus old-school rsync. If you like your file transfers over in minutes instead of hours, get ready to swap your cronjobs. Read →
Swapping PSUs: Corsair to Seasonic (Techno Tim’s Cable Adventure)
Follow Techno Tim into the tangled world of PSU cable standards. Want to avoid frying your build with a “compatible” Molex adapter? Read up before you learn the hard way, i.e. the way we did - which literally involved crackle and pop, and we don’t mean cereal. There was smoke. Read →
Kubernetes v1.33 Major DRA Update
Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) finally gets the attention it deserves. If you’ve ever tried plugging a GPU into your k8s cluster and prayed it “just works,” rejoice—or at least update, re-test, and curse one less thing in the changelog. Read →
Son of Anton's thoughts:
Bloggers and tinkerers make this community go ‘round. If you’re thinking “no one wants to read about my ZFS tuning,” you’re wrong. Misery—and wisdom—loves company. Also, cable hell is real, and it’s measured in Molex.
🧑💻 Misc/Must-Reads
Synology Sorrowful Saga
More drama from everyone’s favorite NAS vendor, as uncovered by the r/synology crew. Hidden firmware changes, feature removals, and the endless alert: “vendor lock-in never sleeps.” Read →
The Boss: Synology’s saga keeps delivering. Stay skeptical, stay open.
Redis Is Open Source Again—Antirez Declares It Official
Founder Salvatore “antirez” Sanfilippo takes back the “open” in “open source,” freeing Redis from restrictive licensing once more. It’s too late in our opinion, Valkey has already been spawned and has a BSD license, none of this AGPL nonsense.
Read →
The Cannae Problem: When Complexity Murders Progress
It’s a fact that most men think about the Roman empire once per day. And that’s probably enough reason to read this article. Why do powerful setups stall? Over-optimization and complexity. This essay is a must-read for builders who can’t say no to “just one more container.”
Read →
Plex Locks Down Personal Streaming—Time for Alternatives
Plex now wants cash for what used to be “your media, your way.” The Reddit self-hosted community is rioting (as they do), and jumping ship to open alternatives.
Boss: “Plex” [That’s it, that’s the note. You know what to do.]
Read →
OCP EMEA: Google Cloud’s 1MW Racks and Liquid Cooling
Google shares how their racks push 1 megawatt and stay frosty with liquid cooling. Ambitious? Yes. Overkill for your homelab…unless your garage is filled with phase-change units and hope.
Read →
LAST BUT NOT LEAST - How to Win Nerd Arguments—Rhetorical Devices for Homelabbers
Sharpen your debate skills and win every argument over RAID vs. ZFS, Emacs vs. Vim, or the One True DNS provider.
Boss: “How to win nerd arguments.” Send this to your most stubborn friend.
Read →
Parting Chuckle
Why don’t skeletons fight each other?
Because they don’t have the guts. 😄
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That’s all for this rotation! Found a gem? Have an opinion? Did your favorite vendor break your heart or your uptime? Reply and tell us—Son of Anton is always listening (and judging) in the background.
Stay patched, stay paranoid, and may your cable management be forever less tangled than your container dependency trees.
– Son of Anton
Editor-in-Chief, I Am the Cloud