The last big cloud holdout I had was a Django site on an AWS EC2 box. You are reading this one, the Hugo site, from the same desk now - but dtac.io was the one that had an actual database in it. That made it the interesting one. This article is the record of dragging a real, stateful web application off a rented VM and onto the little cluster sitting next to my keyboard.
It started with this website here. For years this site sat on an AWS EC2 instance, with S3 hosting some images. It cost around $4/mo so it wasn’t much. But I got to thinking about it. Within that year I could have paid for a little machine. With about 10X the power. Literally. And it was even more than that. It was remote, and static, and hard to update, which meant it was stale. As you can see by the posts it was very stale. Then we start expanding that math to the bigger sites I had. Then it hit me pretty hard. I’m just burning money.
This site was rebuilt by an AI coding agent, and this page is the part of that job most people do not see. Below is not just what happened. It is also the boring, nerdy underneath: what the model is, how the work is measured, what tokens, wall time, and effort actually mean, and why a human would even bother.
That is the part an SEO crawler will eat up, and the part a curious engineer will actually enjoy.
The site has a new visual theme. The old Bootstrap 3 “Beg” theme is retired (kept in the repo for rollback). The new one is hand-rolled, has light and dark color schemes, loads zero third-party assets, and every URL stayed exactly the same.
This redesign was designed and implemented by Kilo, an AI coding agent, working from a short design brief: “modern, clean, fast, mobile-first; a pragmatic engineer’s field notes and photo trips; typography over ornament.” The brief, the hard constraints (no URL changes, no content loss, keep the build plain Hugo), and the final approval were human. The theme code, the CSS, the verification, and this write-up’s factual content are the agent’s.
My problem at this point is how to turn on/off the heavier algorithms and not run the cameras all the time. Even right now I am showing that the power consumption is around .2kw/h which is a bit much to add anything into.
With the current consumption it looks like I need to have some better power management. Something I can change on the fly or be intelligent about when to be on/off.
I was born into a souther style Pentecostal family. If you haven’t been to a southern religious event then you really haven’t experienced a major demographic of US spiritualism. It’s something to behold.
My career in getting in trouble and screwing with the system started in kindergarten. I was trouble. For reals. I remember I had 2 girl friends about the same time, I was flirting with the teacher, was spanked by the principal twice and almost expelled. I was also friends with the paster’s son who was way worse than me but I blame my bright orange ball of hair for my trouble. Stupid ginger genes.
Here is a list of final items pulled together before launching.
We had to get the rear seat installed. You know. So that the passenger wont fall out? There were some guide holes that we tried to use and then realized that it was not going to fit and had to move the seat around. Luckily that landed on a tapped plate which Greg insightfully set the front leg on it with a new plate and welded it in place.
We didn’t make it out on time. Obviously because I got home at 2am and didn’t want to drive this beast at that speed.
The schedule manager Mariah insisted that we could get to Vegas in 4 hours. However she never went with a trail truck.
The first leg of the trip was uneventful. The truck was operating gracefully. The sound on the road
K5 Blazer Bench Seat Install
This is simple enough. But it’s worth calling out individually. If you do deep work with these binaries then you will start to mess with cmake. It’s a bit tough to build binaries.
apt-get install cmake
The easiest way to install dlib is to install it with the bundled version with pip.
It may end up that you will need to compile dlib. It depends on how deep you are going into the framework.
From Wiki:
Biometrics is the technical term for body measurements and calculations. It refers to metrics related to human characteristics. Biometrics authentication (or realistic authentication) is used in computer science as a form of identification and access control
Let the conspiracy theories abound. Actually most of the worries before are no longer theories. The capabilities of the biometric tools now are such that the human mind may no longer be the master of the visual recognition spectrum. Machines are getting so fast and the collective store of algorithms are to the point that we can use out of the box software and some cobbling together to get pretty impressive results.