Blog entriesSun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.comurn:sha1:5e078d671540bf25d234144a6df878d4ebb67565The Internet is almost anonymous and privacy-preserving by design. I mean, unless some administrator actively tries to track you, there is no built-in identity layer. What breaks both properties is the centralization of communication onto closed platforms, where identification becomes possible either by the hosting company itself, or by governments compelling them to cooperate. After recent events, it is time for us to start using protocols again instead of services.Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/use-protocols-not-services/urn:sha1:cd3d1bbb1acc7fd66f55b3dce9b2dd2731b72cf9I needed to call an RPC service hosted behind a home NAT, with no public IP and no port forwarding. Using Valkey (or Redis) lists and blocking pops, I built a lightweight request/reply protocol that lets machines communicate across NATs without tunnels or VPNs.Sun, 8 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/valkey-as-a-message-broker-for-request-reply/urn:sha1:a4968d26fea4d3991ae75c2befee9c08dc379671This article shows how I implemented semantic search in SQLite using binary embeddings and Hamming distance, enabling hybrid search without external vector databases.Thu, 5 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/hamming-distance-for-hybrid-search-in-sqlite/urn:sha1:5656f9bc54819125639073e73b67e071a1c478b1Here are the technical books I plan to read this year. As of time of writing, none of them are published yet, they all are expected in 2026. Writing this down publicly serves as a commitment device. Maybe you'll find something worth adding to your own list.Mon, 2 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/upcoming-tech-books-to-read-in-2026/urn:sha1:8fbda61004babfbe9685103f3b2236395f63ddebLast week, AWS launched its European Sovereign Cloud, a physically separate infrastructure ("partition"), operated by EU residents, under a German legal entity. Analysts are already asking the right questions: Is it still a US-owned company? Does the CLOUD Act still apply? I have a simpler question: who is this actually for?Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/aws-european-sovereign-cloud-is-not-about-sovereignty/urn:sha1:3ab73b29c6d25739052cb10982d64315d74f3cf2LavaRand implemented by Clodflare uses lava lamps to generate random numbers for cryptography, but the camera sensor capturing the images already produces abundant entropy from unavoidable physical noise. Do the lava lamps actually add anything, or are they just good marketing?Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/do-cloudflares-lava-lamps-actually-do-anything/urn:sha1:faf72818a2a158796c24becb07f1e99cb7bf836bIt turns out the recent Arduino models such as the ARM-based UNO R4 can act as USB-attached HID devices. USB HID (Human Interface Device) is the standard protocol that USB mice and keyboards use. The Arduino board can speak this same protocol, making computers treat it as a genuine input device. Building a mouse jiggler (or a keyboard that sends continuous inputs) is therefore as straightforward as...Mon, 5 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/diy-mouse-jiggler-with-arduino/urn:sha1:a6cfd41f8a5299452b2a8799bba13cece6ed827cARM has this very specific instruction, FJCVTZS, doing "Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero". For example, it converts Float64(42.99) to Int32(42). JavaScript uses double-precision floating-point (Float64) for all numbers (i.e., of type number). Yet many operations require 32-bit integers: bitwise operations, array indexing, typed array access. The language runtime must constantly convert Float64 to Int32 during normal execution flow of a typical JavaScript program.Sun, 4 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/til-why-arm-has-a-js-instruction/urn:sha1:a4f1f4211c53fb16f49d476534ef8459e2429bd3Ten years ago or so, I self-hosted everything: file storage, calendars, DNS, analytics, version control. I was in complete control. Or maybe I wasn't.Thu, 1 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/self-hosting-is-not-hard/urn:sha1:3d1e0bfe2a9ac634d7925bd7c6ecf1603d91cc64900k users got their AI conversations stolen by malicious Chrome extensions, according to this article. You wouldn't believe how easy it is to make an evil Chrome extension. I know it was easy because I built one. Not to scam anyone, of course! I needed to grab a session token from a site I use for work and send it to my API for automating some boring tasks. It took me an afternoon, and I'll show you what kind of power Chrome extensions have. It's pretty wild.Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/steal-your-data-with-a-chrome-extension/urn:sha1:c10d17882f6c5cec08bf056614eda5b26dd41077I needed to monitor a few servers: this website, and some APIs I run for my small company. When something goes down, I want a notification so I can confirm and take a corrective action. That's all I need.Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/downtime-detectors/urn:sha1:5c22f56c48e476fb7d4c218a2bdd31218f9c6007Every time IDs are discussed on Hacker News, someone suggests encrypting them instead of using public-facing UUIDv7 or other alternatives. This sounds clever. It's not.Wed, 3 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/do-not-encrypt-ids/urn:sha1:7782e80ef6449431d764e9629260e1228af88754I wanted to move away from Node.js and the practices that come with it. I wanted TypeScript to just work without configuration, JSX/TSX support out of the box, and better developer experience through unified tooling, no more juggling npx, yarn, tsc, tsx, and whatever else the ecosystem requires this year. I went with Deno.Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/deno-over-bun/urn:sha1:e2851b0dc911517f7c98c4a689cff39331feb0e9Last fall, I started learning Go seriously. Since then, I've used it exclusively for personal projects, so here are my takeaways after a few months. Background: I come from Python. I used it for years, both at work and for side projects. My projects are mostly the same kind of thing: web services, APIs, automation scripts. That's what I've been writing in Go.Tue, 4 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://notnotp.com/notes/first-impressions-on-go/