lee/hpr-knowledge-base
1
0
Fork 0
Code Issues Pull Requests Actions Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity

Initial commit: HPR Knowledge Base MCP Server

Browse Source 
- MCP server with stdio transport for local use
- Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series
- 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts
- Data loader with in-memory JSON storage

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Lee Hanken
2025-10-26 10:54:13 +00:00
commit 7c8efd2228
4494 changed files with 1705541 additions and 0 deletions
Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

794
hpr_transcripts/hpr3941.txt Normal file
View File

@@ -0,0 +1,794 @@
Episode: 3941
Title: HPR3941: Interview with Yosef Kerzner
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3941/hpr3941.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:45:05
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,941 from Monday 11 September 2023.
Today's show is entitled Interview with Yosef Kursner.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 59 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Interview with Yosef Kursner.
I'm here with Yosef.
I worked with you at KFMG, so I guess if you want to tell a story how we met or how we know each other.
Sure.
We know each other from KFMG.
We used to work together.
Rob was on a penetration testing team and our group that in which we did penetration tests.
I don't like to call it clean. It's not so much a team, not really.
So with that, our first time together was when we were both told to go to California to do a pen test and turned out to,
and then spent about a week doing the test.
It was my first project at KFMG. I had been hired about two months before and Rob did most of the work.
I watched him do it.
He helped me do something. He told me to do a few small things.
The rest was history.
The client liked us so much.
Despite a few interesting hijinks that I went back there later on.
Drinking which caffeine?
Was that the one where I screwed up and locked out all the accounts?
Yes.
That was my fault, but I made you hit the inner button.
That's what made it hilarious.
I was like, yeah, that looks fine.
Go ahead.
But the guy took it well.
He was like, oh, that's interesting.
You can deduce the entire domain and lock everybody out.
Which has actually since happened at a payment provider I went at.
I started with another guy and he did the same thing.
So I made a power cell script.
You just run the power cell script and it'll unlock all the domain accounts.
It's like a fire, you know, a fire hose panic button.
You just run it and run it as a domain.
I'm an user and it'll reset all the accounts because that clown locked everybody out the same way.
That's awesome.
And he was very cool about it.
And definitely one of the more fun stories that I got to tell around much later on.
They all started playing together after a few years.
Thank you.
For me, it was a good one because it was the first one.
And it was a good environment to start off with because back then,
most people didn't really do vulnerability management.
They didn't really run vulnerability scanners.
So you can get very far, which is running tenable against the computer network.
Again, it's just running in-app and seeing what's out there.
You really could get very far now.
I noticed the switch around 2017-2018 that more and more places were doing vulnerability management to their own.
And it was just recently harder and harder to do.
Just run tenable.
And then part of the reason I really pivoted away from doing pen testing is because it was pointless.
And a certain point to do pen testing like that.
Yeah, nobody actually fixes anything.
I mean, there was a rare occasion that I think I did a school like a technical school that ended up.
They ended up fixing everything, which was cool.
And they put some other controls in place that blocks some of the stuff I was doing.
So it's nice to see that everyone was talking about it.
But in general, it's pretty much you find the same vulnerability that you found last time.
But remote is a little bit different.
I know a couple guys that do the remote stuff.
They have to do the remote work.
They got to do like passwords fraying and the fishing thing and trying to get that pivot.
And that's a little bit more difficult.
Yeah, fishing especially.
But I think especially at KVMG, the team wasn't super well organized.
Since we're on a podcast, I'm not going to go and go right about things that happened years ago.
But it did mean that functional.
We have to set up our own fishing infrastructure every single time for each engagement,
which kind of limited us.
Yeah.
Where did you go?
You have your domains having someone dedicated for that kind of stuff.
And it wasn't it was just very difficult to do that by myself as part of the team.
Yeah, you are the you're the team.
Yeah.
I had like a portable version of.
Was that the Fox Fox email client or whether Mozilla email client.
With box groups.
Yeah, it was called Fox something Mozilla something Mozilla's email client and you could install plugins for doing.
Bulk email and you could put unique identifiers in each one.
You could tell who clicked what link and stuff.
So I would do that.
But like you said, every time I did this set it all up and.
Out of the set up the domain them keys and SPF records and stuff of whatever domain I was set up.
And I try to get it as kosher as I possibly could.
Pun intended.
Nice.
Yeah.
It's been a while since I remember at one point I did get a.
Go fish working very wonderfully and totally forgot to write what I did in a tutorial that would have been handy.
Yeah, usually do videos or just a bunch of copy and paste or I'll make the whole thing a script.
So that way I just run the script and if it doesn't work, I'll be like, ah, what part of the script is broken?
So next thing I've got this kind of like more like background, like what kind of like where did you grow up?
Like your hometown, like, like, like, how did you had it?
What made you?
What were your parents like and how did they?
Did you have the same kind of inclinations when you were kids?
Like did you?
Did you kind of take stuff apart and mess with things?
Because I know you've, you've done the, you do the gardening stuff.
And you have a, you have told me some crazy stories about that.
So like where did that all start?
Like how did your parents all weird it out about it?
Well, let's see.
So I grew up, I'm from Houston, I grew up in Houston and I only moved to New York actually a year ago.
I growing up, I was, I had a computer since I was about 13.
It was a Rinky Dinky thing with 2056 megabytes of RAM, which they got used somewhere.
And that's why I spent way too much time optimizing every single process on the computer to maximize the amount of,
minimize the amount of RAM that each process used and like watching each one like a hawk.
Sometime in high school, my dad was got interested in learning how to hack.
Of course, being a software developer, he found his like the path to hacking was maybe a little tricky because that required figuring out a good source of where to learn things.
He found that he decided to learn the C H and get the C H certification.
And like you should do it too.
And so that's how I found myself learning about the time.
Backtrack, when I was in the 10th grade and loading up on my labs on my school's lab, getting caught running that.
Installing Grand Theft Auto, a free version of Grand Theft Auto 3 on a.
On like a student's network partition, very limited space, but every person got there like rolling profile partition.
Yes, I was called out there and just spent most of a whole year procrastinating online AP government is by playing Grand Theft Auto 3 instead of actually doing my work in a lab class.
So that was fun.
It, I never, I didn't go very far to the C H course because even at the time I felt like it was a little outdated and there was, it was very, is it is very focused on kind of like CSP on memorizing.
Kind of obscure stuff that you'll never, ever use in practice.
It's very similar. It's, it's basically like a course of hacking exposed network for 10 years.
And that's, that's already 10 years ago. So it was, can't even imagine doing account would be so, so feel very, very updated.
And that's how I started.
I did some obscure hacking of various things on my core.
People soft on my colleges, people soft network.
That was fun. Random explorations basically.
I was hanging out on a online page that showed students waiting in the line for something and somehow timed out and dropped me into authenticated session.
Of the people that they're people soft back end, which allowed me to just spend a ton of time and saving your company and everything in their people's office.
That was very fun.
I think I may be a press to random combination on the waiting screen that it was really fun.
I've reported it anonymously and never heard back.
And then I think my parent in terms of the computer stuff, the hacking stuff.
It was, I studied biotechnical college and then didn't put any importance into the empty, any, any emphasis on the importance of finding a job.
I submitted a resume at a career fair where basically no one was hiring.
Everyone was there for show, including like these pipes of like industrial stuff.
It was just for show. No one was actually hiring, but there was one company called my head security that was some friends I had.
That was doing a project with encouraged me to apply.
I applied. I got in.
Like, okay, fine. No more biotech.
I'm sick and tired of that. I don't want to work in a lab.
I don't want to be a lab rat in some windowless room doing pathetic or bioinformatics.
Yeah, right.
So I opted to just do that and maybe come back to college in the year and that was 10 years ago.
So you started out and doing like fun biology stuff or what you thought was going to be fun biology stuff.
I mean, it was supposed to be fun biology stuff and then turned out to be like, I can't really.
I'm not good at memorizing books, which is the node operation when you're doing a biotech degree where it's like a half med students.
And I think they all pre-med students. So biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, various.
And a little bit of like, I thought it was going to be a lot more computer stuff and turned out that because there's very little interest at least at that university.
Everyone wanted to manufacture going to like drug manufacturing or drug or like like pharmaceutical stuff.
And like one other person out of in four years wanted to do what's called bioinformatics, which is using computers and mostly R and statistical languages too.
And of course, C and C++ to analyze biological data of various sorts.
Yeah, probably talking about the R stuff.
Yeah.
But unfortunately all that kind of stuff requires either masters of PhD and I wasn't super interested in that kind of stuff.
That's hard. That's hard work.
Yeah.
Yeah, we had some people that I did support for Carl's ice and we had some.
I got a chance to talk to some of the people that worked on the microscopes and stuff and they were doing the people they would work with but talked about R and doing R stuff.
And like I kind of wish sometimes I was a data analyst guy where I could do like cool stuff like that word.
I mean, I like analyzing data and taking learn, you know, taking two sets of data and merge them in together and like kind of doing the data science part, but I'll do it once.
And then once I do that, it's like, OK, I've given you the tool you go figured out I'm not going to support you within hold your hand and whatever and say that's what ends up happening is you have to hold everybody's hand through it.
Pretty much didn't have much hope for me.
Plenty of data analysis lots of data deal with a lot of all sorts of unusual file formats.
A lot of professors that write a write a project or have the lab guy write a project for them and then never use it again.
So it's a lot of unsupported code.
And yes, a lot of data analysis, whichever you said.
And I even have a book somewhere on paramedics, but once I was dated, once my day to day was in FOSEC or at the time I had websites with my security, which is still a thing.
Believe it or not.
Yeah.
They're just wasn't I lost any interest in pursuing a master's day.
Yeah.
Too much that book learning.
I was very much on hands on and I guess I just enjoyed working.
Well, there's a there's an overall sort of you can start making.
Start making an enemy.
If we start talking about we start talking about stimulants and drugs.
This this podcast will be uncompletely unreleasable.
So I'm not absolutely not getting so.
Have you seen the there's a like a band commercial for the movie spun.
And the actor he plays the cook.
And like at one point in time his girlfriend's dog is like green got gets dog like died.
Well, it's probably not a thing, but his dog gets died green because whatever chemicals and jokes he's making in this little shack.
But yeah, he does like a cooking show, but it's like he's like cooking method or whatever.
Like he's got like a butt crack and went around to out there.
Remember to send it to you.
No, it's a classic.
It's a problem with with math is is not only is there a shortage, but it doesn't have to be it's just because.
Actually, I think the shortage is really due to.
Like not enough competitive.
It's kind of twofold.
There's not enough.
It the shortage is because there's not enough producers of it.
Well, more importantly, there's like one producer and that's it, which is.
Ties more into vertical or I guess horizontal sorry horizontal.
Conglomeration and all sorts of monopolies and things like that.
These days, a lot of Adorama that you can actually find on the streets.
Should you actually try to do that is cut with what's known as a fedamins sulfate, which is.
Or that or other other stimulant analogues like.
Like any team peer or something like that.
I happen to have dabble have picked up an interest in research chemicals over the last five years.
So I have some knowledge of that and my chemistry knowledge comes in handy.
Well, you know, that's why it's like because it's it's it's so annoying to have to go to the pharmacy.
I have to go to the doctor get the get the prescription.
And then I had to remember to go to the doctor get the prescription and then I had to remember to go to the pharmacy and drop it off.
And I have to remember to go to the pharmacy and pick it back up and then I have to remember the date that I picked it up.
Not the date that it was filled.
That I dropped the prescription up with the date I actually picked it up.
They go by the date you pick it up and not by the date you actually filled it.
So it's like I've got this weird convoluted thing where like I have repeating.
I set the date out and then I put the date on the actual event on the calendar.
And then I have it repeat every single day with the timestamp with the date stamp.
So I know who on 226 that's when I was supposed to get my meds.
But because it was on vacation or had to work or whatever, you know, now it's three weeks behind.
And you know, basically I'm out.
So I actually ran out for the first time in like, I don't know forever like three years.
And then they're like, oh, there's a shortage.
I was like, what?
And so I had to go drive like 30 minutes to a different store to get to get to get my meds.
But yeah, I'll just make them.
And then a friend can't want to cat these friends is like she says, oh, you know, I'll buy some.
I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I start selling drugs.
That's when you get in trouble.
Nobody got in trouble for giving away drugs.
But you start selling drugs.
They get all upset.
But yeah, I know it.
No, I would probably no one know just to get in trouble and end up.
But I can't do that.
You know, I got kids and responsibilities, right?
Yeah, I don't have kids.
I don't have to worry about the responsibilities, which is why I know a little bit more about drugs.
I think more about drug selling than being both people.
Probably to be told about or not necessarily drug selling, but just the drug market in general.
Yeah.
That's a nice.
Yeah, most the dark net has gone.
I'd say that a couple of things have changed in the.
Oh, alternative chemical acquisition process recently.
Most of all, yeah, tour has gotten the tour network has suffered a bunch of attacks.
It's gotten really slow at times.
It's always changing.
Plus, Bitcoin is.
Well, it's Bitcoin.
We all know what the problem with Bitcoin is.
If it's not getting regulated, someone is running off of your money.
So.
Yes, I never really understood the whole thing of the Bitcoin exchanges.
And then people are like, oh, the exchange got popped and now my Bitcoin is gone.
I was like, well, that's the whole point of Bitcoin is to not like put it in a bank.
Like what?
Why?
I don't understand why people are using Bitcoin now.
It's all right.
Like you said, they have like a black list of like Bitcoin IDs.
So you could just be like, okay, well, now this this Bitcoin ID is I guess trashed.
And it's labeled as whatever.
And none of the exchanges will honor it.
So it's like you said, it's starting to get all regulated and stuff, which has bound to happen with any kind of.
Yeah.
Any thing with a value or anything that's good eventually gets ruined by the government or corporation, right?
Yeah, corporations or it got regulated and what else happened?
I mean, the whole idea of decentralized currency went out the window just as soon as people realized that they could make absurd amounts of money if they buy in a hotel.
I think that the ethos of Bitcoin has been lost was lost a long time ago.
Oh, yeah.
And so now now I think that when it comes to transactions, people recently have been using the narrow because it's less traceable.
And because you can literally.
I don't know exactly why I guess it's also because Bitcoin transaction fees and transaction times are really, really issued a really, really long.
I recently, the time it, like, especially the transaction time because what happens is when there's not enough.
If you're if you set the fee too low, you're the priority will be really low.
And then there's also some weird backups.
And before you know it, you're waiting a day and a half for your transaction to go through and paying like 10% of the fee just to get through because you have to set a higher network fee for transactions to go through.
Okay, well, what's the point?
Yeah, the I ran I ran local for a while just to pay for like NCB.
NCB database NCB services, which is like use net.
Like you've ever heard of the NCB stuff.
It's like a it's like a use net.
It's like where you get like old school back in the day.
It was like we're in the old dot binaries dot whatever.
And every service provider would give you access to use net.
And you could download games and movies and TVs and porn and everything.
And at some point in time somebody came up with NCB where it was like a index of all that stuff.
So somebody would crawl all of using it.
Well, the important parts of the use net and then create these pointers that would tell you where to download shit.
So that's where NCB came about.
And then like you had like three major indexes.
This was like around 2016, 17, 18.
And there's like three big ones and they shut one of them down.
The RIA or whoever shut one of them down.
And I was like, oh, that's not good.
And then like the second one got shut down.
I was like, oh, that's not good.
And then by the time the third one shut down is like a hydra.
Because you know, this dry sand effect.
So what happened is I ran my own use net index indexer.
So I was scraping all of these net and creating my own NCB indexers.
So instead of, you know, this is like a three headed hydra and they cut two of the heads off.
And then like 10,000 heads popped up in this place.
They were all shitty, but they still got the job done.
But for a while there for like two years, it was like that.
If you would get spam and like you would get everything,
but like the last file on something and it would never really work.
But yeah, that was part of the whole, the whole use net,
use net NCB stuff.
And I would use that to pay for, I would use Bitcoin to pay for the use that indexer.
So they all take weird, weird non Bitcoin currency now.
But yeah.
And it says to pay for that stuff.
Especially when you're like, if you want to actually practice good op sec,
then there's a lot of stuff that that either I don't know or no one really tells you
because it's also secretive.
So it's going to work about word of mouth.
But generally I found that most people have no idea what op sec is.
And even when it would benefit them.
And it's actually kind of surprising when there are people who,
when I meet people who could really benefit from some knowledge of op sec
and just nothing.
Or like, or you tell them that you need to order a session such a way.
And that's, and they're like too complicated, computers too complicated.
I'm like, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
That's.
And then eight years later you get pissed because you know,
you put your Yahoo email on a form somewhere in Wisconsin or something.
But I mean, when you look at it, when you're trying to create a persona,
like, or some alternate persona, it's easy to make fun of someone who messes up
with like one email.
But thank you.
Yeah.
We're like, what is it?
The grunk on op sec stuff.
When you're trying to create a persona, like it's very easy to mess up
because at a certain point, unless you do a really good job of generating fake
using names for everything, at a certain point, there will be a tale that we've built.
And all it takes is the one to look closely at you and figure out what's what's
what's there.
It's tricky.
And of course, people get popped.
The key is not to do extremely stupid things like not to signal or something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had a, I had a pro-tron mail account that I set up for like, like an honestly,
disclosing vulnerabilities and stuff I found.
So I'd be somewhere or whatever doing something or I'd find a website or whatever.
And I would, an honestly disclosed something.
I would use that email for it.
It was, it took me a while just to set that up because some of them wanted SMS, like verification.
So I had to find a place to get like free SMS.
And that was like a painted butt.
Yes.
And now everything, like nowadays, everything wants SMS.
And then if you try to use a VoIP number for SMS, it's like, oh, you can't use VoIP for this.
You have to have a real DID.
And it's like, oh, my God.
So I'm, I think God, I don't have to do any of that stuff.
I haven't checked my pro-tron.
That's for sure.
It's all wiped out.
But I haven't checked that stuff in a long time because I haven't done any public disclosure stuff.
But, yeah.
So it's.
Yeah.
Do that stuff now.
So back then, it feels like it was so much easier to do stuff.
And now everything is harder than it's like, you got to like do all kinds of crazy stuff and actually try.
I feel like before it was a lot easier.
Yeah, it is.
When everyone does SMS, like you say, everyone does have, you can be connected back to your disclosing a persona very easily.
And it's just.
Yeah.
It's, it's really not worth it back back in 2019.
I had the whole project when I was doing.
I'm unrelated.
No, I'm not doing as much personal hacking as much as I used to because not more of my interests are related to.
You can look on my website.
I finally, we decided the whole thing.
No, you should send it to me.
I'll put it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it really really like it, it was interesting.
When I first started copying machine, my personal interest and my professional interests combined and coincided now a lot less so like I can.
It's definitely like the move, the move to the cloud has made it much harder like I can't just install a local version of class.
Yeah.
The enormous quantity of fake vulnerability made it and just.
Play around with it like it's much hard.
It's like I even thought about setting up back when I had a.
a nice big VM environment on my home network to just set up a staging in a product environment,
but just that alone would have been really difficult, especially if I'm just doing it myself.
So I never bothered with that.
Like I can't just spin up a local instance of service now, not really.
So it's a lot harder to experiment or learn new things on that stuff.
Nor are those, they're not hacking really.
At that point, it's a second off, if anything, rather than it is hacking.
Yeah, you get these commercial tools that cost millions of dollars.
And while you're in there, I'll end up poking around.
I'm like, let me poke around while I'm in here, because I'm not going to have the opportunity to figure this out.
But yeah, to your point, I don't, I don't get a whole lot of time to poke around with stuff.
I've got like a bounty board for work that I just, if I see something weird.
I like, I just bang on the keyboard and I put it on the bounty board.
And there's, I haven't put stuff on the bounty board in like a year, but there's like tons of stuff on there for work that's like,
I'll run across some weird site or some weird idea or whatever it is.
I'll put it on the bounty board.
And of course, I never have enough time to do poke around with stuff, because there's always something else, but.
Yeah, there always is something else.
Let's see, see if I find some, some good, some good questions.
Let's see.
What are you not very good at?
It's like interview questions.
I'm helping you with your interview questions.
Yeah, is this, is this like a, is it a work?
Things I'm not very good at work related?
One of those is actually finishing what I started.
My world is living like half, half finished, half begun projects.
Yep.
Everything in the past.
In the past, it used to be projects that were say 80% of the way there and the extra 20% would have been some documentation that could be really useful.
Should I, for example, abandon it for five years and then get back to it later on and want to do something now.
Now it's, now it's much harder. Sometimes I have ideas.
I'll study for, I'll read about them for about a week, approximately two weeks, and then I move on.
It's two weeks.
I get assessed with everything for like from two weeks to like three months, two months, and then I'm out of it.
Like I had a problem with like the, the, the AI art stuff.
Yeah, you know, if I trained like models of my wife and myself and like, I was obsessed for a while.
I was like, I had to like call it because it became like it ate like all of my spare time.
So I think we're where it's, let's say so.
What else do I have problems with?
I can sometimes I, let's say I'm working a team.
I will forget that I will, I have responsibilities to other people and I'll do, and I'll just sort of procrastinate without realizing that it affects other people.
This is a more of a work related question.
I'm not super good at recognizing when an emergency at work is really an emergency because I'm always like, especially if this was especially a problem as a consultant because my managers would be freaking out about the clients having a slightly changed tone of voice.
I'm like, what's the big deal?
There's a lot of problems every single time on almost every single project I had to tell me, oh, this is a much bigger deal.
The client is very mad.
Did I miss something critical?
They were yelling at me.
Yeah, it's like these subtle hints that you can't, you can't pick up.
Oh, listen to a comedian.
I don't remember what her name was, but she was talking about, she's like, I think she's autistic or whatever on the spectrum.
And she was talking about her spouse was like her interpreter.
So they would go to an event or something and she was her agent or whatever.
So they go to an event and then they come back and they, you know, she would say what happened.
And then her spouse would be like, what, where the fuck were you?
You're like, this is not what happened.
You completely don't know what happened.
This is what actually happened.
So yeah, some of that gets lost in translation for me too.
Like people will get upset and I'll, you know, either usually under, under prey,
what they're, they're stressing or going having a hard time about.
It's not a problem.
Don't freak out.
Yeah, I'm very, very relaxed.
And that, that means that sometimes when someone else will be freaking me out, I'll be super calm about it.
I'll be like, don't worry.
I got you.
We've got to figure this out together.
We'll be fine on the reverse side.
I might be like, don't worry while everyone else is like the deadline is tomorrow.
You should have worry to a week ago.
It's pretty standard and that happened very frequently.
Sure.
So what is it when you're, when you're having a hard, when you're having a hard time, people will be like, you know,
what was the, the comedian she said to.
She was having an episode or whatever.
She said calm down.
Just calm down.
It's like, oh, yeah, that's, that's going to work.
That's somebody to calm down when they're just having an episode.
Yeah.
Never, ever, ever.
All right, you've got to, what's your, what's your favorite website?
Okay.
I obviously will not say Reddit because that doesn't count.
My favorite website.
Oh, tricky, tricky, tricky, tricky.
That's all I'm going to say right now.
Wow.
Okay.
No, no, no, no.
That's my favorite website.
Probably my favorite website is.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I tried to.
Favorite website.
Honestly.
I will.
Arrowwood.
Arrowwood.
Arrowwood or a drugstata.net.
Arrowwood is a website where you can read all sorts of things about various end theogenic substances out there.
And the craziest thing is that it's been around since the 90s.
And most people have no idea what it is.
Even though it's chock full of experience reports for every single substance known to mankind, including caffeine and alcohol.
So don't think I'm just playing with you all.
Oh, I think I probably use this for Google.
Like I'll pick up a, I'll pick up a, I'll have my pills are in just the box.
And they're usually not labeled.
So I have a cardboard box with a bunch of pills in it.
And I'll be like, oh, the white one with the art on it.
And I'll go like white pill with the art on it.
Well, that's my, you know, iron pill.
So I'll, I'll look through there and.
I mean, that's currently my favorite website, but those two probably because it has something that's incredibly illegal and scheduled and fought against in the war on drugs.
Yeah.
It's nonetheless very interesting to consider how, how the evolution of.
Like what drugs look like, for example, there's a summer of obscure drugs, which is all about here.
I found this ancient opium in a pill and that with a rubber stock.
Stopped in my attic that my grand grandfather was prescribed years ago.
And it's probably just as potent as it could be.
And they're all like, and they're under the best part about if you had that.
My favorite summer that might be it because there are people who will just be like, yep, that's this obscure drug that was made only once in the city.
There's only once in the seventies for people who suffered from narcolepsy.
I have no epilepsy.
I have no idea how people even do it.
It's almost as fun as like a.
That's the cool thing about the internet is like for everything.
You like, I just got into the, my son has, I had the wrong version of Minecraft installed on the switch.
It was like the old Minecraft switch edition, which is not the right one.
And just today or yesterday, I installed the newer one or whatever.
And I've been trying to get mods on it and trying to get new worlds on it.
And it's just like somebody built an entire world with like a transit system.
And like the documentation for the whole world is like bigger.
It's like 200 bags of documentation.
Like how the transit system works and like the different sites and it's like a whole flyer.
Like they have like a whole thing like this people in their time.
And how much people can get obsessed with stuff and just like yellow.
Just so whatever, whatever.
Take a lot of course.
Link rodents always a problem because there was probably my favorite website I ever found was this engineer guy who.
Had filled his website with all sorts of crazy projects he had done.
But we're talking like the man built.
An elevated model rail in his backyard.
He it was like 10 feet tall.
He built himself a loop.
He made cars with like 80 bitty horsepower motors to just slowly move around.
He iterated like five different iterations.
Yeah.
Would tram line in his fucking backyard.
And he just and that was just one page and there was.
There were probably tens of pages like one where we where he grew hydroponic watermelons,
which is how I actually found it because I was doing the same.
Hydroponic and hydroponic watermelons or for example, he built himself.
That was a big day.
20 foot kite because he could.
The sort of people who are really driven and I can never find that site again because.
The the algorithms changed or something changed you can't find anymore.
There was a really favorite one of my favorites on the past was.
It was about milk kefir, which is a type of fermentation for milk,
which you can make which turns into this kind of a yogurt.
Substance part.
There was this one guy.
Kefir kefir milk kefir.org or something like that who had devoted.
Years and years and years to all the research about kefir and studying it.
And how to store it and where to store it and what conditions it's good to store it.
And he's actually.
He died I think last year, but he actually put it on to a beautiful PDF that has more information
than you could possibly imagine about something that most people get the grains off Amazon for.
Like it's a it's a used to actually there was a time when I would travel with milk kefir
so that I could buy some milk in the city I was going to and basically brew myself dinner while I was at the client.
And I remember that one time you're like, because I knew you were kind of into the gardening thing and you're like,
oh, I grow wild vegetables.
And then you're like, yeah, I'm like making yogurt in my hotel and I'm like, dude,
whoever's going to be in that room.
Because I just think of like oil, old spoiled milk smell like.
Like somebody's going to come into the room and be like, what the hell happened here?
Like instead of dead body or like.
So you said K E F I R yogurt.
Okay.
F I R.
See, maybe you can find the PDF and I'll put it in the show notes.
Yeah, absolutely.
I gave him a donation. His name is Dominic Enfiat.
I'm 50 up.
It's a probably because it's how long is this thing?
It's a 40 page book about kefir here.
I can actually send to Rob.
What's your what's your email actually?
Let me put it in chat.
I guess.
That's my real email that doesn't go in any kind of form anywhere.
Thank you very much.
There you go.
The only rule about that email is it doesn't go into an input box.
That's my non input box email.
A couple of things.
Everything related to got kefir and all the craziest unusual things you can actually
use something like this, which mostly if we're being really dishonest,
boiled down to the fact that it's unbearably probiotic.
So anything that is dangerous in your body that can survive a probiotic thing
is probably healthy at that point.
So.
Yeah, you may think of when.
Vice to the thing a segment on the.
The injection of like other people's fecal matter into your.
And you're into your stomach, I guess, into your into your intestines.
So like to help like jumpstart your your whole bio bio thing and like.
The same thing they did for they did for like, you know, Chinese drugs.
They did an episode on that where the guys like, oh, yeah, they gave me a whole bag.
Like a free sample of this of this drug that's like, you know, in the US,
would cost you like $300 for this tiny bag that you gave me for as like a free sample.
I don't know.
It was one of those things for like he went to a conference somewhere in China or something
for drugs and they gave him some free sample of something that was like, you know,
this amount of drugs is and they also addressed like the whole like people doing their own hacking of.
What's the thing you wear on the P3 player, the insulin pump things.
And like people are doing that now where like instead of paying stupid amounts for insulin,
they're like DIY insulin stuff.
But yeah, it's a soft stuff.
Let's see favorite website.
We didn't read it is all doing the whole.
It's all going dark now.
There's a bunch of all sorts of fun.
I have this this like festering or maybe festering something.
Where because that implies put your fine.
It's just a offhand site idea of seeing if it's possible to archive a subreddit.
It creates basically not just a federated version, but like a local federated version on the
equivalent of a pirate box since.
Pirate box is was a just for people overview was a now defunct project to put a to override.
A travel router with a form of open W RT to create a standalone network.
You can connect to and stream stuff from.
They all used a TP link router called the MR 30 20, which is actually still made.
And you can still buy brand new on Amazon.
I got this is what I like.
And I actually and so so interestingly enough, the actual firm.
The GitHub is still archive somewhere, but not only that, but the firmware.
I think you as long as you match up the firmware and the GitHub correctly,
you can get something that works just as good as it did five or 10 years ago.
It doesn't have any updates.
So try not to hack it.
But like my I still have one.
I still use it.
There was a split off actually to this one called library box, which uses a slightly different model router,
which had a little battery in and of itself.
So it's just you didn't even have the connector battery.
It came in the battery.
So, but my idea is if it was it would be possible to, for example,
put something like internet on a box.
An internet in a box on that.
The problem is and I've already looked at that.
Internet in the box really relies on like Raspberry Pi's or Intel Nux.
But I think my next project, my next teching project after I figured out how to rewire my home network will probably be.
Build an internet on a box in a box on a local fund myself.
Yeah, she can use that can build that and see what the minimal requirements are that are there.
And whether or not it could be possible to run.
To to read, read either.
Find how to refurbish this project or restart it because I still feel that local.
Local networks, local sneaker nets are going to have a place in the future.
It's like what if there's a power?
Yeah, the first singularity thing is going to take over and you know, we'll just be pets to the pets to the robots, right?
Yeah, I had an interest in that space for.
I don't remember.
I don't know what website it was, but like.
You know, if if if a post got removed, chances are it's like interesting, right?
So like if he post something on Reddit or somebody else posting something already and then all of a sudden it disappears.
Everybody wants to see that post and like being able to archive that stuff.
I think there's a couple of people that do.
Like archive, archiving videos of Reddit.
I don't know if they do the actual text, but text is so cheap and storage is so cheap now.
Text is tiny.
I mean, you could easily.
Well, you'd have to have like 18 accounts to like.
So to rummage through to like pool, you know, all the subreddits of whatever you're doing, but.
You could easily, you know, if you got like if you had like a hundred Reddit accounts, you could probably cash.
And I'm sure there's probably hundreds of people that are caching like all like all of Reddit right now.
Because it's all text, right? It's tiny amount of hard.
There are people doing that, but but like there are tools where you can get like the last 1000, but.
As of as of the next we basically have 10 days before API calls are getting probably become a problem.
And I don't know what the effect will be of that.
I don't that's weird.
That's weird.
Yeah, I don't personally believe in the singularity.
I personally think that my made most controversial views are not on anything related to anything else.
But more these days related to the fact that I feel that I think that civilization will collapse within the next 10 years.
Civilization as we know, due to a mo poly crisis related to peak oil or peak extractible oil.
Wanted to do other things like that.
So I think that that's where forums, micro forums, if you want to call that will still have a role moving back to forums will be inevitable.
Like also Corey doctor wrote a.
Article I was was was going to say like widely spread.
He basically wrote an article called the inscientification of online platforms which talks about the cycle that online platforms are going typically go through where they start out.
They get a bunch of users and then they are wonderful then and then they try to monetize or they go public and then all there and they go to shit happens.
Yeah, it happens.
It's it's like with when Uber came out and I started using it and like I was like, okay, this is really cool and this is really nice.
Someone's going to ruin it and I don't know if it's actually happened yet, but like you know, that's what happens with all things that are good that they get.
They end up getting the corporation gets a hold of it and then they add ads or whatever and then it gets run.
Like anything even the like even the chat GPT stuff is going to get ruined soon because like you'll have agents.
Really nice is like you'll have like agent from like Amazon or Google or whatever being or got forbid like you'll have an agent and you can tell it to do stuff and it will actually go do it for you and do research for you and then pull back information and it will be cool for a while.
But I feel like what will happen inevitably is like it's going to be like an ad and a race to the bottom for like spam and ads and it's going to be like 1996 style pop ups but with AI and you know, I could be able to tell it's between like real articles and fake articles.
Yeah, and I think that if you take take what what Corey talked about over there talks about sorry, it was a distraction.
I think that Reddit will go will get and should have had pretty fast and there will still be a desire for a relatively clean online or offline forum like an online forum or offline version of a forum, which is basically static version of the forum.
But any time you can't remember it pulls all the data kind of like a GitHub style basically GitHub hosted forum forum but not hosted on GitHub. It just has to be local.
I don't like our and I'm sure someone has come up with this before there has to be. I just don't know but might might I think the killer application killer and application.
Yeah, I don't like to use those terms, but if we have the audio podcast you're doing air quotes.
Yeah, would be something that is is powerful enough that but while powerful powerful but also cheap enough storage is no longer an issue.
USBs you can get extremely powerful and strong USBs really very easily and you can it takes it to the amount of way long.
Like you can make yourself a local like in a local resource for learning or even browsing so easily offline Wikipedia is maybe 90 gigabytes.
That's nothing. Intra and inbox with all the data is probably 80 or 90 as well and that's endless amounts of learning slash useful information.
And I think there's a value like I can first see a world where we have less we don't like a world where there's a famine but people still have phones like.
Yeah, right. We have everything but you can imagine a situation where, for example, there's a much more immediate one would be there's a hurricane.
Like let's say you're in Louisiana hurricane is fun through infrastructure is not coming back and you have fun all to do.
Yeah.
And we had to like a water main busted here and locally and I want to say Sandy's frames or something and they're brought down like the whole county or something.
And you know I was talking to co worker and they're like yeah I don't come to the office water but Kathy's friend she works at hospital and the basically the hospital is broken because they're air.
I guess you use water for some reason or need water and that was all broken and of course you can't clean anything without water right you can't like operate on people without water like you need to clean yourself.
I like hydrate people like so they had a big time and they had to go by like you know.
You should turn a bags of ice to like you know get around and it was just a day like that cool that caused chaos for the entire county for just a day just like we're not having water for like like a day like.
A lot of around flipping out and going bananas about you know by toilet paper right.
Yeah, there's a lot of there's a we built ourselves a such a complex world that when we when something breaks not only does a lot of different things are affected.
You have to kind of be like oh no how do we purify water all over again we've never had to worry about this but suddenly we have to not only purify water but like what it happens.
What are some easy ways to stay clean when the toilets don't flash I encountered this a lot or which really spurred issues during the freeze of 2021 Texas so.
Nice that's nice good things so those are definitely that was that was like the power grid got to take it out like somehow like large sloths of Texas had like no power.
It was to go way too cold and then the last time in the last water because the water system is based requires power to pump because it's not uphill or downhill is all flat.
To pop the water yeah yeah that's what happens like we did some work for way back and I think it's before you are after you I don't know.
We did some work for coke and like something happened during our testing and some something broke and.
They're like stop doing your testing whatever and.
You know they stop I never could figure out what actually caused the problem they would never tell me of course but.
I guess one of those things were like when something dies especially from like a technology perspective like some service dies there's like there's no nobody knows how many this crap works there's like one guy that knows how to fix it and if he's not paying attention or he doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
Like this stuff breaks and people have no idea how to fix it and like you said there's all these dependencies of stuff and I don't know how how even anything even even works like most people do not know how people how things work and that's not an indictment that's just a stake in the fact so.
But my idea is if I can have a self hosted forum slash information thingy that is easy to install slash even if it's not easy to install is on very low power hardware in a world where.
You have one battery for your phone and everything else and everything else is running out you need to have and like the like the scenario where.
You have power but you don't have something else is very valuable and it's good to have little like things you can.
Get like my other idea for information my other idea is set of playing cards that on the back has.
Basic information like water purification or surviving heat or basic things like that which most of all don't have to worry about because for example you can plug in plug into the output and get electricity whenever because there's face load.
Or they're conditioning but what if you don't have that and the most people in the spur of the moment they're going to get really scared nervous anxious and have no clue what to do.
If you have something like playing cards well I know that sounds pretty stupid but yeah but if you have something accessible that says here's some steps you can take right there with common household items there are books like this but they're not.
Like zombie apocalypse books right to like.
I obviously think I've I've contemplated buying some of those those kind of like.
Childish books but like I honestly want to have one just so like you know maybe I'll last maybe I'll last a couple of days if everything goes to shit but I'm like.
I think it's the same time because I'd like to like if the world were to end like that would be cool to be around like if the world ended or if like everything went to shit and we did like the whole reset but like.
I guess you know that that'd be a good time to to die would be would be like when the actual world ends like that'd be exciting.
Yeah I can talk about this for days I am actually I help run help mod one of the subreddit's devoted to this the collapse subreddit.
Okay so I have read a lot about this I continue to read a lot about the fact the most recent thing I was for just reading was the guy who's making very good argument that.
Cole is a very good investment strategy right now because as companies.
Realize that a move to renewables is fundamentally impossible because we don't have remotely enough green minerals.
They will substitute everything with coal because coal has to provide a base load.
When you shut down nuclear coal like in Germany when you shut down nuclear power plants coal takes over so invest in coal but not just coal that goes to the United States because the United States doesn't have this problem everywhere else does especially developing worlds so invest in like.
His three to five year thesis is invest in plants that export coal from like South Africa or Indonesia that's specifically thermal coal which is used for power generation.
So I thought the whole I thought the whole like cold fusion thing is all like figure all this half figured out right like that aren't we.
And that the thing little savings right fusion fusion is good for power but but now you need to convert an entire power distribution infrastructure to use fusion good luck.
A power.
Our entire power infrastructure is built on on delivering electricity and providing electricity stable electricity using oil and natural gas and coal and a little bit of solar and wind power as opposed to so let's say fusion is figured out now you have to build very.
Yeah no fusion is much more detailed it's not retrofit you like you have to the easiest way if you want to do that would you have to create like portable fusion packs kind of like those getting home nuclear nuclear.
I'll take the first talk about except it would have to be fusion so you have to have these massive react magnets essentially everywhere there is a power station and there are tens of thousands of those across the country.
So you would have to be very fast in a way that has never happened before I don't have my hopes up for that I would love to but that also requires a lot of fuel and oil and already gas to actually deliver because we don't eat energy diesel powers are fuel our trucks that drive our trains.
Our trucks and the rest of the delivery stuff see me enough to deal with that it's it's a problem that I can again talk about for days because it's really really complicated and you can be all sorts of well actually read it on this.
Yeah well you can't read it because you know read it's all broken right now so you know we're all.
It's all got dark yeah complicated so yeah might might and of course might the primary issue with me is because I have so much to say about the collapse of civilization makes potential employers a little nervous when they start talking about how they might not they really should think about this and they might not have a much of a good stable environment to work in in the next five to 10 years which is a reasonable.
Yeah and I feel within five years if not less than 10 years all the all the stuff like entry level stock is all going to be the I driven like you're going to have all that stuff I'm using it for grammar check right now but I used it I was proud of myself I used the chat GPT to like tell me about a character in the Lord of the Rings TV series without spoiling the story so I said tell me about this character.
Without telling me the names of other characters or spoiling the story so it was able to tell me like the crab man or something and like I didn't really understand it and I'm like well how can I you know when you Google my wife does it all the time so Google like crab man and then she gets some spoiler so read some kind of spoiler.
But yeah I don't I don't know enough to do the large thing with model stuff I just run the tools like that I made a I made like a local a local model of myself my wife where I could like make myself look like a Santa Claus or whatever which is this fun stuff but I don't have enough gear.
I think the smarts to do the like my own large language models I would really like to replace like take all of my emails and all of my communications from work and like create my own like large language model and then I have a voice you can you know there's a file myself like.
What do you call a model for my voice so the idea would be is if I had a fast enough GPU I could have my AI join a meeting and see what happens see if it could like you know like you can be that sound like me and like respond enough like me to like replace myself with AI which would be that's my goal.
But there are there is actually a separate I think the llama llama separated talks about there is a post I can send you dig up and send up to you which talks about setting up all like downloading the fully weighted models 280 people by the time and just running it all at home yeah chat with you without the filters yeah it's like I looked at a while talking to somebody that knows actually and has their own setup like half half whatever it's like.
Like 30 grand to do like some of the even reasonably doable large language model stuff locally and I'm like oh that sucks because you know all the all the are all the compliance guys are going bananas because people are copying and pasting shit and putting it on chat LGBT and like all the you know are the the GRC people are just going insane I'm like oh yeah and I sent a sent a thing to our guys to our GRC guy work and there's like.
There's a 6800 people using chat GPT or something crazy it's saying oh I lost you.
Like I lost them.
Oh I lost you.
I lost you there.
Sorry about that I yeah I accidentally actually closed wrong tab.
Well yeah I got to be I got to be respectful of time I have to go to the Boy Scouts meeting of all things take to take the kid with me and but we'll definitely sync up on the on the doom and gloom of that is you know robots take it over the world and.
Yes I generally don't treat it as doom gloom I just I just mostly I wish that people would get on the same pages me and yeah.
Yeah make some changes but yes yeah when it comes to entry level sock jobs there's a lot of doom gloom at the entry level anything is yeah.
Yep I consider I mean the stuff I do is kind of weird but like just entry level sock stuff that that's going to go bye bye like real quick anything like an all your tech support all that stuff is going to go bye bye it's going to get worse before it gets better is it's going to be awful.
Because everybody's going to be the first person to implement and make a dime off of it and it's all going to be hot garbage for like 10 years or five years but yeah yeah.
But yeah I think we got through most questions we'll definitely sync back up about the the future stuff that would be fun and we could do some cool hacker stories if you got I'm sure you got a couple of them.
But I'll probably be the next couple of weeks or so I'll hack this up and then send it to you so you can listen to it or whatever and then if you are comfortable then then I'll put it up so that's how the idea goes if I don't lose it.
Yeah okay.
All right I'll talk to you in a good luck.
Thank you.
With the fiance stuff too.
Thank you.
Okay.
Okay.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts you click on our contribute link to find out how easy it leads.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an onsthost.com, the internet archive and our syncs.net.
On this advice status today's show is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.