Thoughts of NSP

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• 11 Nov, 2025 *

No catchy tagline this week, guys. Here’s what’s on my mind:

Weeknotes: Week of Monday, 11-10-2025

• What I’m thinking about

• Personal NAS - I’ve been getting back to curating my personal library. I’m exploring renting e-books from the library to read myself instead of just buying a book I was shown on TikTok. I’m listening and refining my playlists instead of listening to generic playlists. I know it’s got to be a pain to set up, but I can’t wait to be able to archive all the physical media I collect.

• The Convenience of Cloud Computing - I’m working on a group project for my machine learning class. Exciting (read: sarcasm). I’m working on using Streamlit to add UI to our ML model, which is in Google Colab. I’m enjoying Google Collab for this use case because the last time I worked on a coding group project, my team opted to use VSCode. I thought it would be best to simulate a software engineer’s workflow at a company since we were all aspiring developers at the time. I love VS Code, but I definitely see how cloud computing can reduce headaches (no more merge conflicts!!!). I also think it’s pretty cool to be able to work on a resource-intensive project like creating an ML model using the cloud.

• Cybersecurity is Cool - I recently completed a lab for my cybersecurity class that discussed firewall functionality and firewall hardening. I was definitely being a big stinker about the bs estimated time required for the lab. My TA recommended 1 hour for it to be completed, and it took me, the HCI student, 5 hours. I still thought it was pretty cool. I used Cisco Packet Tracer to simulate different rules of the firewall.

• I have a love-hate relationship with cybersecurity. It’s definitely an interesting problem space to explore, and the topics I think are the coolest include ethical hacking, how hackers think, and the impacts of successful cybersecurity attacks. These interest me because I like to see where the gaps occurred, and how situations like this can be prevented in the future. However, it also seems to me that cybersecurity is a never-ending and forever-evolving problem. Which is exhausting. I can definitely see how experts can get pigeonhole’d into solving one type of problem because there is always a way for something to be exploited.

• What stuck with me

• A Big Tech AI Security Engineer’s Guide to LLM Privacy (Guest Post)

• The quote that stuck with me the most from this article: “The goal isn’t to stop using these revolutionary tools. The goal is to stop oversharing by default. It’s to use them with intention, understanding the data bargain you’re striking every time you hit ‘Enter’. You can’t be anonymous, but you can be deliberate.“

• This image by Yutong Liu, Better Images of AI, depicts the disciples of the “Last Supper” as the 12 animals of the Chinese Astrology system as they discuss different points in internet history.

• It’s pretty sick, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a huge astrology nerd. It’s also really interesting to think about how this can be applied to AI - who, or what, will betray us in the end?

• Questions I’m sitting with

• If cloud energy is expensive, wouldn’t the natural next step be investing in renewable energy to offset some of the financial and environmental costs?

• Making/doing

• Not much this week. A reminder to honor your body when it needs rest.