Just after New Years day this, I drafted a post on how self hosting is starting a return. In this post, I stated the following;

With the end of ZIRP, the cloud bills have started to rise, and many services have started to charge for previously free services. The writing is on the wall. While was I trusting my digital life to the hyperscalers, self hosted software improved markedly. Technologies such as docker made deployment easier, and golang offered a better option for web services than fragile scripting languages (Python, PHP, perl, Ruby) or heavy bytecode (Java, .NET). At the same time Moores law and virtual machines relentlessly drove down the pricing of virtual services. The time has come for me to return to self-hosting much of my digital life.

I don’t think this analysis is wrong. I am doubling down on my self-hosted digital life. What I didn’t forsee was the combination of MS implosion, AI improvement, and the incoming threat of the USA which is causing all sorts of companies and individuals to rethink their risk profile, and oppurtunities.

About a month ago, I picked up a Claude subscription, and I’ve built two local Linux applications in C that I’ve always wanted. These applications are approximately total about 12,000 lines of code. At best speed, it would have taken me six to eight weeks fulltime to write them. Instead I’ve had Claude spit them out between parenting and work, as well as doing a bit of server hardening, redesigning a website, implementing search on my LANs recipe website, and several other bits of software engineering that I’m well capable of doing, but just had not had the time for.

I’m eyeing up various small nice-to-haves on Linux that I can implement. I can’t be the only one…

On the demand side, the ongoing destruction of the goodwill of Microsofts userbase has meant that increasing numbers of people are switching over to Linux simply to escape the ad-ridden user-hostile hellscale that is Windows 11. Combined with the current USA administrations contempt for anything that isn’t American and it’s no wonder that user counts are sky-rocketing.

Even if AI gets turned off tomorrow, all that software that AI wrote has now been written.

So where does this lead us?