News

Perhaps you noticed — more likely you didn’t, and that is exactly the point: this website has no cookie banner.

Not an oversight and not a legal loophole, but a design decision. The banner is only mandatory where consent is required — and consent is only required where visitors are tracked. We track nobody: no advertising cookies, no fingerprinting, no third-party scripts.

What we still know: which pages get read, where visitors come from, which campaign works. That is measured by a self-hosted, cookie-less analytics solution — counted anonymously instead of tracked personally. For better content, that is entirely enough.

The pleasant side effect: the first impression of this website is its content, not a consent dialog.

How exactly this works technically and legally — and what you deliberately give up along the way — will appear soon as a full post on the blog.

Our ticker — the automatic trail of our own posts, security patches and press picks — got a page of its own: with day separators, filters (“patches only” works straight from a link) and a marker for what is new since your last visit.

And because news belongs wherever you want it, the feed now comes in every form: as RSS for the feed reader, as a newsletter in four flavors (per post, per note, daily, weekly — signup at the bottom of every page), via Fediverse and Bluesky — and as an app: open analytikdata.ch/ticker on your phone and you can install it on the home screen. Its own icon, its own window, works briefly offline too.

The part that surprised even us: the app was the smallest item of the evening. No app store, no approval procedure, no cut for a platform — the open web has shipped the entire app infrastructure for a long time; most companies just never use it. One manifest, one small script for the offline moment, done. The longer story follows on the blog.

Our visitor numbers are, frankly, still small. And that is exactly when something starts to matter: whoever builds their own website all day is its most loyal visitor. Every deploy check, every glance at a new post — all of it lands in the statistics and distorts them.

So: exclude ourselves. With classic analytics services there would be an opt-out cookie for that. Except — we deliberately track cookie-less (Umami, self-hosted, no personal profiles). No cookie banner for you, but also: no cookie to write an opt-out into.

The solution is almost disappointingly simple. The Umami tracker respects a flag in the browser’s localStorage:

localStorage.setItem('umami.disabled', 1);

For that there is now a small page, linked from nowhere: visit it once per device, done — the browser no longer counts. A button undoes it. And since the whole thing can only disable tracking, it is no secret either: analytikdata.ch/opt-out is open to anyone who would rather not be counted while reading. Fits the attitude.

Why we measure at all — and everything you can measure without surveillance (and what we deliberately don’t) — more on that soon on the blog.

While planning our AI cockpit, the uncomfortable question came up: what happens if the model behind it is discontinued — or if in a year we would rather have a different one? Maybe a Chinese one, maybe ChatGPT.

Our answer has two parts.

Part 1: The knowledge belongs to us, not to the vendor. Everything our agents need to know — decisions, runbooks, inventories, even the agent’s long-term memory — lives as Markdown in Git. No proprietary format, no vendor cloud. If today’s agent goes away, tomorrow’s reads the same files and carries on. Structure beats intelligence — at parting, too.

Part 2: The vendor becomes a config line. Anthropic’s API format has become a de facto standard: several providers (GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek) offer compatible endpoints, and translators like LiteLLM cover the rest (ChatGPT, Gemini). Our tools will therefore no longer point at the vendor but at a gateway of our own:

# Which model answers is decided by our config — not by the vendor
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://our-own-gateway

Honestly: there is never zero lock-in — the agent tools themselves come from one vendor, and every switch costs habituation. But it is the difference between moving house and expropriation. Own your stack also means: own your exit.

On this machine, almost every work session starts the same way: open a terminal, start the AI agent. If the first command of the day is always the same, it should cost exactly one keystroke.

That is why every new terminal now greets you with a small menu:

Type a digit, hit Enter, go. Technically this is unspectacular — and that is exactly the point. It is Bash aliases (yes, 1 is a valid alias name) plus a small function that shows the menu only in fresh terminals, not in nested shells (abridged here):

alias 1='claude --dangerously-skip-permissions'
alias 2='claude --continue --dangerously-skip-permissions'
alias 3='claude --resume --dangerously-skip-permissions'

quick_menu() {
  echo "Quick launch  (type ? to show again)"
  echo "  1  claude (skip permissions)"
  echo "  2  claude --continue (resume last session)"
  echo "  3  claude --resume (pick a session)"
}
alias ?='quick_menu'

[[ $SHLVL -le 1 ]] && quick_menu

About twenty lines of Bash. The agent wrote them itself, tested them (including the question of what shell nesting depth a fresh terminal under Hyprland actually has) and documented them in the inventory — effort: a few minutes of shouting instructions into the chat.

An honest note belongs here: key 1 starts the agent in autonomous mode, that is, without asking back on individual actions. On a machine of your own, encrypted, where everything important lives in Git, that is a deliberate trade of control for speed. You should make it deliberately — which is why it is stated here.

Hand-sized jobs like this come up daily for us. Individually they are too small for a blog post — hence this new section: short notes from the ongoing rebuild, unfiltered and in real time. The long stories will keep appearing on the blog.