Hercules Lemke Merscher

Coding for a living and for fun.
Backend Engineer @gitlab

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Also available on https://t.co/WOc1nOI3zC

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Tsonnet #43 - Object fields, now with an opt-out clause
https://t.co/JXY0Nz54yg

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

@arpit_bhayani That's impressive 👏

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Also available on https://t.co/LdTmTsAIVG

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Tsonnet #42 - If then else (finally)
https://t.co/TXp3CxR2UL

[FLONCHCORE @flonchcore]

I don’t go anywhere without it

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Also available on https://t.co/ASgPlHFEW7

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Tsonnet #41 - Call me maybe, but make it argless
https://t.co/Og3vEWWApO

[Bill Staples @bstaples]

Moving your repo to GitLab is easy, migrating GitHub actions is harder... until now. The team just shipped a new agentic skill that works with Cursor, Claude, VS Code, Codex and others, give it a try. Enjoy the freedom of a cloud and model neutral platform where you're in control of your infrastructure dependency.
https://t.co/oZEP0oIo1o

[The Associated Press @AP]

WATCH: Taiwanese grandmothers aged 89 and 91 train at the gym. An increasing number of elderly people in Taiwan’s super-aged society are hitting the gym to stay healthy, both physically and mentally.

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

@OngMaple https://t.co/XtuE1AaJRm, just saying... :)

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

LastPass was breached in 2022. Hackers stole the encrypted password vaults of 25 million users.

Then they started cracking them.

In January 2024, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen lost $150 million in XRP to attackers who cracked his LastPass vault.

By December 2025, blockchain analysts at TRM Labs traced over $438 million in cryptocurrency thefts back to that single breach. LastPass paid $24.5 million to settle the class action.

Your passwords. Your credit cards. Your bank logins. Your crypto keys. Stored on a company's server. Breached. Downloaded. Cracked. Used against you. For years.

1Password: prices going up 33% starting March 2026.
Bitwarden Families: $47.88/year.
LastPass Premium: $36/year.

All of them store your vault on THEIR servers.

There is an open-source alternative. Your vault lives on YOUR server. Nobody else can access it. Nobody else can breach it. Nobody else can sell the encrypted backup to criminals.

It is called Vaultwarden. 58,700+ stars on GitHub.

A lightweight Rust implementation of the Bitwarden server API. It works with every official Bitwarden app. Browser extensions, mobile, desktop, CLI. You point them at your server instead of Bitwarden's cloud. That is it.

Here is what it does:

→ Full password vault. Logins, cards, identities, secure notes.
→ Works with every Bitwarden client. iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Windows, Mac, Linux.
→ TOTP authenticator built in. No separate 2FA app needed.
→ Password sharing. Organizations, collections, roles, groups.
→ Emergency Access. Give a trusted person access if something happens to you.
→ Send. Share encrypted text or files with self-destructing links.
→ FIDO2, YubiKey, Duo, and Email 2FA.
→ AES-256 end-to-end encryption. Your master password never leaves your device.
→ Single Docker container. 50 MB of RAM at idle.

Here's the wildest part:

Bitwarden's official self-hosted server needs 11 separate Docker containers to run.

Vaultwarden is one container. One Rust binary. Less memory than a single Chrome tab.

All the premium features Bitwarden charges for are free on Vaultwarden. TOTP. Send. Emergency Access. Vault Health Reports. Organizations. All of it.

One of the active Vaultwarden maintainers is employed by Bitwarden and contributes on their own time.

Vaultwarden: $0. Unlimited users. All premium features. Runs on a $5 VPS. Runs on a Raspberry Pi.

2,700+ forks. 81 releases. 83% Rust. AGPL-3.0 license.

Your passwords. Your hardware. Your keys.

100% Open Source.

(Link in the comments)

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Also available on https://t.co/dp2lQ51mhy

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Tsonnet #40 - Call me maybe, but make it typed, part 6
https://t.co/ikwUS9PTeH

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

CFOs realizing that their AI token budget is going to be higher than the salaries of the people they laid off

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Also available on https://t.co/fQ1keoajCP

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Tsonnet #39 - Call me maybe, but make it typed, part 5
https://t.co/PgYlDoj1kR

[Cory Levy @cory]

this is pretty cool

some MIT students turned a building into a giant playable game of Tetris on Saturday at midnight

rigged each window with LEDs

MIT students are on a diff level

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Also available on https://t.co/3QAQwxJpai

[Hercules Lemke Merscher @bitmaybewise]

Tsonnet #38 - Call me maybe, but make it typed, part 3
https://t.co/WfIHkpOjjn