I was born in 1987. Which means that somewhere out there, the 8X generation — anyone born in Vietnam in the 1980s — already has people sliding past forty, and the eldest of us, the ones born in 1980, are close enough to fifty to feel its breath on the back of their necks. As a child, the word “retirement” conjured a very specific old man in my head: gray hair, a woven basket on his arm at the morning market, a game of chess in the afternoon shade, the evening news murmuring in the background. And now, without quite noticing the years slip by, the same people who once hummed Backstreet Boys and Boyzone under their breath, who fed coins into four-button and six-button arcade machines, who wrote to each other in purple ink and typed out love notes on Nokia keypads — we are the ones sitting around now, asking each other, half-joking, half-not: how much money do you think it takes to finally stop? Time has a way of humbling a person so gently you almost don’t notice you’ve been humbled at all.

I’m immediately reminded why the version I had installed on my desktop was a pirated Studio version.

Part 1 here

VNExpress – our local e-newspaper – decided to go down the memory lane once again. So here we are:

Now, in Part 1, I processed everything locally with my 4070ti and a ComfyUI workflow. This time, we’re leveraging the power of GPT Image 2 with a custom prompt. Let me know how they look.

A tier list of the best open-weight coding LLMs you can self-host right now (if you can front the hardware cost that is). I have personally tested 3 out of 4 S-tier models (only Kimi K2.5 is not tested yet) and can confirm they are not far off from Claude Sonnet 4.6 performance.

Finally managed to bring my website and my sister’s websites back up after almost a month of downtime.

In my last post I was complaining about Netdata eating all the resources. Well after that the droplet just went down completely. You can’t even access the recovery environment. Power cycling the droplet simply returned a Kernel Panic error.

Woke up to over 70 netdata warnings in my inbox and Telegram saying that my VPS is being overloaded. So I SSH in as soon as I can to see who’s been mining in my VPS, and low and behold:

So the thing that was supposed to monitor my VPS for abnormalities is the culprit itself.

To be clear, this wasn’t the first time Netdata pulled this shit. I always knew it is among the most resource intensive monitoring tool. I had it installed, and uninstalled before, only to install it again, because I’m a sucker for pretty dashboards and I have no self-control. But this is it, this is the last time. It is time to start learning Grafana, and make do with btop instead.