Lawyer turned product manager at a privacy company. I self-host things, break them, and write down what I learn.
Sixteen gigabytes and an agent that wanted ten
I should have bought RAM last year. Anyone who runs anything at home has said some version of that sentence in 2026. Conventional DRAM contract prices rose 93 to 98 percent in the first quarter of this year alone, according to TrendForce, and they are still climbing, with another 10 to 15 percent forecast for this quarter (TrendForce, 30 September 2026). Graphics cards are worse. TweakTown found the cheapest RTX 5090 in Germany listed at about $5,900 (₹5,61,000), against a list price of about $2,360 (₹2,24,000), converted at 18 October 2026 rates. The AI build-out is buying the memory, and the rest of us get what is left. ...
Pushed, not poured: the tiny holes in an espresso machine
A few days ago I got stuck on what I thought was a simple question. When you pull a shot of espresso, the hot water comes out of a metal plate full of small holes, the shower screen, and lands on the coffee as a gentle, even rain. How does water get through holes that small so neatly? I had a picture in my head for this: a bathroom shower, water sitting up top, gravity doing the work, the holes letting it dribble through. Both halves of that picture were wrong, and the real answer is a lot more interesting. ...
SB 690 explainer: one door closes, two stay open
California took the most common website-tracking lawsuit away from private plaintiffs. What closed, what stayed open, and what the retroactivity clause does to the cases already in court.
What my agent remembers, and where it keeps it
Ted Lasso recommends being a goldfish. It is, he says, the happiest animal alive: it forgets everything in ten seconds and moves on. My agent took that advice. Hermes is a goldfish — every conversation starts from zero, and anything it “knows” about me is either written into the prompt or fetched from somewhere else. And for a while I was one too: it would ask me again about things we had settled a week ago, and I would explain them again, from the beginning. The difference between us is that I could do something about it. So I spent a few weeks giving it a memory. We are goldfish, the agent and I, but only one of us was going to stay that way. This is what I learned about the options, what each of them actually means, and the architecture I ended up with. ...
Metering what my Hermes agent spends
My agent, Hermes, talks to me on a Matrix server I run myself. Self-hosting the chat window was a privacy decision before it was anything else, and that setup is a post for another day. What matters here: an agent that chats all day needs a meter. So every LLM call it makes goes through a proxy I wrote — and “wrote” deserves an asterisk, because I’m a lawyer. An LLM helps me code things out; I mostly argue with it until it works. One SQLite file tells me what it spent today. ...