One thing you gotta remember when dealing with that kind of situation is that Claude and Chat etc. are often misaligned with what your goals are.

They aren’t really chat bots, they’re just pretending to be. LLMs are fundamentally completion engines. So it’s not really a chat with an ai that can help solve your problem, instead, the LLM is given the equivalent of “here is a chat log between a helpful ai assistant and a user. What do you think the assistant would say next?”

That means that context is everything and if you tell the ai that it’s wrong, it might correct itself the first couple of times but, after a few mistakes, the most likely response will be another wrong answer that needs another correction. Not because the ai doesn’t know the correct answer or how to write good code, but because it’s completing a chat log between a user and a foolish ai that makes mistakes.

It’s easy to get into a degenerate state where the code gets progressively dumber as the conversation goes on. The best solution is to rewrite the assistant’s answers directly but chat doesn’t let you do that for safety reasons. It’s too easy to jailbreak if you can control the full context.

The next best thing is to kill the context and ask about the same thing again in a fresh one. When the ai gets it right, praise it and tell it that it’s an excellent professional programmer that is doing a great job. It’ll then be more likely to give correct answers because now it’s completing a conversation with a pro.

There’s a kind of weird art to prompt engineering because open ai and the like have sunk billions of dollars into trying to make them act as much like a “helpful ai assistant” as they can. So sometimes you have to sorta lean into that to get the best results.

It’s really easy to get tricked into treating like a normal conversation with a person when it’s actually really… not normal.

“No worries!” means “Yes, that’s fine, there is nothing to worry about.”

He thought it meant “No! You should worry about that!”

Friendship drive charging…

You forgot interrobang‽ The most important and incredulous reason for a compose key.

Hmmm…

That looks pretty paywally to me. That said, I’m all for people supporting independent media.

This is called “semantic satiation” which are both pleasingly weird words now that I think about it…

I don’t think that’s how it works? It’s the client application that has the key for the end to end encryption, not the server. I don’t think you need to trust the matrix server you use? I could be wrong, I don’t know matrix particularly well.

They ruined Linux!

That’s pretty cool!

Although that’s probably what op is actually asking for, I don’t think it’s a modem. It’s a router with an access point.

It does have SFP for a fibre connection and pcie and USB for you to potentially add a modem or whatever else you want.

I’m guessing OP is just looking for a wifi router? Otherwise we’d need to know what kind of modem they’re looking for, like Cellular? VDSL? HFC? Satellite? It depends on the internet connection. Different parts of the world need very different kit.

I guess eternal life through some profane kind of undead cyborg magic… Bad maybe?

They’re not files, it’s just leaking other people’s conversations through a history bug. Accidentally putting person A’s “can you help me write my research paper/IT ticket/script” conversation into person B’s chat history.

Super shitty but not an uncommon kind of bug. Often either a nasty caching issue or screwing up identities for people sharing IPs or similar.

It’s bad but it’s “some programmer makes understandable mistake” bad not “evil company steals private information without consent and sends it to others for profit” kind of bad.

Totally agree on all points!

My only issue was with the assertion that OP could comfortably do away with the certs/https. They said they were already using certs in the post and I wanted to dispel the idea that they arguably might not need them anymore in favour of just using headscale as though one is a replacement for the other.

Tailscale isn’t an exposed service. Headscale is

Absolutely! And it’s a great system that I thoroughly recommend. The attack surface is very small but not non-existent. There have been RCE using things like DNS rebinding(CVE-2022-41924) etc. in the past and, although I’m not suggesting that it’s in any way vulnerable to that kind of thing now, or that it even affected most users we don’t know what will happen in future. Trusting a single point of failure with no defence in depth is not ideal.

it’s more work and may not always be worth the effort

I don’t really buy this. Certs have been free and easy to deploy for a long time now. It’s not much more effort than setting up whatever service you want to run as well as head/tailscale, and whatever other fun services you’re running. Especially when stuff like caddy exists.

I recommended SmallStep+Caddy.

Yes! Do this if you don’t want to get your certs signed for some reason. I’m only advocating against not using certs at all.

Are you suggesting that these attack techniques are effective against zero trust tunnels

No I’m talking about defence in depth. If Tailscale is compromised (or totally bypassed by someone war driving your WiFi or something) then all those services are free to be impersonated by a threat actor pivoting into the local network after an initial compromise. Don’t assume that something is perfectly safe just because it’s airgapped, let alone available via tunnel.

I feel like it’s a bit like leaving all your doors unlocked because there’s a big padlock on the fence. If someone has a way to jump the fence or break the lock you don’t want them to have free reign after that point.

there’s an argument that HTTPS isn’t really required…

Talescale is awesome but you gotta remember that Talescale itself is one of those services (Yikes). Like all applications it’s potentially susceptible to vulnerabilities and exploits so don’t fall into the trap of thinking that anything in your private network is safe because it’s only available through the VPN. “Defence in depth” is a thing and you have nothing to lose from treating your services as though they were public and having multiple layers of security.

The other thing to keep in mind is that HTTPS is not just about encryption/confidentiality but also about authenticity/integrity/non-repudiation. A cert tells you that you are actually connecting to the service that you think you are and it’s not being impersonated by a man in the middle/DNS hijack/ARP poison, etc.

If you’re going to the effort of hosting your own services anyway, might as well go to the effort of securing them too.

“Toad in the Hood” is the gritty HBO sequel to “The Wind in the Willows” that takes place after Toad breaks out of prison.