ATDT: first handshake

If you ever sat next to a modem while it connected, you know the sound. A dial tone, a burst of touch-tones, then that screech and hiss while two machines worked out how fast they could talk to each other. It had a name, the handshake, but back then it just meant something was about to happen.

This is the handshake for The AI Loopback. Issue zero. Nothing to learn here yet, just two ends of a line agreeing on a speed.

Where this comes from

A monochrome green screen, first. The opening of Prince of Persia, a door dropping and a small figure standing back up. Then a PC dialing into a BBS, and L.O.R.D., Legend of the Red Dragon, a whole world made of nothing but text arriving one line at a time.

I never really got over any of it. The hardware changed and the speeds changed, but the feeling of owning the wires is the same one I chase now with a rack of machines at home.

What runs here now

The short version of the homelab, for the curious:

• A two-node Proxmox VE cluster doing the heavy lifting
• TrueNAS for storage, plus several VMs
• A lot of LXC containers, one small job each
• Local models (Qwen, Llama, Gemma) behind Open WebUI
• A couple of Discord and Telegram bots wired into all of it

The longer version lives on the uses page, and most future issues will be about some corner of this setup: what worked, what broke, and what I would do differently.

What to expect

Five threads, woven together however the week went:

1. Nostalgia. The internet I grew up with: BBSes, door games, dial-up.
2. Homelab. Running real services on hardware you can touch.
3. Linux. The tools, the terminal, the small tricks that stick.
4. Self-hosted AI. Local models, without sending your thoughts to someone else’s computer.
5. Privacy. Quietly taking your data back, one service at a time.

One issue, whenever it’s actually worth sending. No growth-hacking cadence, no “10 tools you need right now.”

The deal

The archive on this site is free and stays free. The site itself has no cookies and no trackers. If something here is ever paid for, it will say so right where it appears. The details are on the support and privacy pages.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, subscribe, or just add the RSS feed to your reader and never give me your email at all.

ATDT 5551994
CONNECT 33600

Talk soon.