posting about culture is often more important than posting about technology because culture is where people decide what technology means.
tech posts often explain what’s possible but culture posts decide what’s desirable, threatening, cringe, inevitable, or worth funding.
when you marry the two well, it’s steroids for influence.. combined with this platform it’s the most potent worldview distribution machine ever built.
🚨 Supply chain attack on the Laravel Lang organization:
700+ historical versions across multiple community-maintained Laravel Lang packages were compromised with an RCE backdoor, including:
laravel-lang/lang
laravel-lang/http-statuses
laravel-lang/attributes
Laravel-Lang/actions
The payload targets cloud creds, CI/CD secrets, Kubernetes tokens, Vault, browser data, password managers, SSH keys, and more.
So @loaibassam asked me my stack recently, I replied:
FREE:
Nginx web server on Ubuntu (free)
Auto upgrade with unattended-upgrade (free)
Scheduled workers with Cron (free)
Vanilla PHP for site backend (free)
Vanilla CSS (free)
Vanilla JS for code (free)
Game servers I do in vanilla Node JS (free)
SQLite for DB (free)
Python for tool scripts (free)
Cloudflare with Cloudflare tunnel for DNS/SSL (free)
Tailscale for security (free)
OpenFreeMap for maps (free)
CHEAP:
xAI for AI API (cheap)
Stripe for payments (cheap)
Cloudflare R2 for image storage (cheap)
Hetzner VPS ($4/mo)
Cloudflare domain reg (~$10/year)
So about ~$5/mo total costs with about ~5M unique visitors per month per site (these are site averages)
Every country has an energy. And that energy rewires you whether you notice it or not. People move to Japan and become minimal. People move to Mexico and their entire relationship with time softens. People move to New York and suddenly they can't sit still. Your personality is far more malleable than you think. We treat it like something fixed, but new surroundings give you new defaults. New pace. New habits. New values absorbed through proximity instead of effort. You're not just the average of the 5 people closest to you. You're the average of the 5 places, the 5 routines, and the 5 inputs you're exposed to most. Your commute shapes you. The weather shapes you. Every space you occupy is voting on who you become. That's why I believe choosing where you live is one of the most important decisions you'll ever make. More important than your job title. Maybe more important than your five-year plan. Because the place shapes the plan. The place shapes your energy, your habits, your relationships, your default state. Get the place right and half of the other decisions start making themselves. Get it wrong and you'll fight yourself every day.