Kubernetes

Introduction Consider an agent running in a cluster or on a server that needs to read the news. The customary response is to provide an HTTP client and permit it to fetch URLs, perhaps through an egress proxy intended to impose a measure of network hygiene. The agent in question is an in-cluster assistant with material access to its environment. It can receive a projected ServiceAccount token, whose effective authority derives from Kubernetes RBAC; it can control home automation; and it can reach several important internal services. Giving a system with that degree of reach a general-purpose fetch(url) tool creates a direct security problem: every page it reads becomes a potential source of adversarial instruction, and every host on the internet becomes a potential destination for whatever information the agent can assemble. ...

Introduction Members of the United States Congress must disclose many securities transactions, and the resulting records are public. As a dataset, however, they are close to unusable: the House publishes a ZIP archive whose underlying filings are frequently scanned images; the Senate uses a separate system with its own irregularities; tickers are inconsistent or absent; and neither chamber provides an interface resembling a durable public API. Several commercial services solve this and sell the result. I wanted to see how much of it I could do myself, in-cluster, from the primary sources. ...

Introduction I use Claude Code for substantial one-off analysis, and its output is frequently a single self-contained HTML file. Examples include a flight-log dashboard, an interactive trainer derived from an audiobook transcript (described in Building Interactive Trainers From My Audiobook Library), a pedigree chart, and a client map. Each began either as a Live Artifact or as a file in /tmp that I opened with file://, inspected once, and subsequently lost. ...

Building Interactive Trainers From My Audiobook Library I listen to a considerable number of business and leadership audiobooks, yet retain very little of their content a month later. Listening is passive; useful frameworks blur together with time; and “I read that one” readily becomes “I think I read that one.” I wanted the retention without replaying seven hours merely to recover the one idea I needed. I therefore built a compact production process that converts an audiobook into an interactive trainer, in which each concept and example becomes a card supporting three modes: Browse, Flashcards, and Quiz. Each book receives its own self-hosted site on my internal network; during a single afternoon, I applied the process to seven titles. ...

Politics Dashboard: A Self-Hosted, AI-Summarized News & X Feed Reader I built and open-sourced a self-hosted news dashboard that aggregates political news from RSS or FreshRSS, summarizes individual articles with a configurable large language model (LLM), generates a 24-hour thematic digest, and presents X posts with per-account summaries through a self-hosted Nitter instance. The repository is github.com/RobertDWhite/politics-dashboard; it is MIT-licensed, and multi-architecture images are available at ghcr.io/robertdwhite/politics-{api,ui}. The production image is the same image GitHub Actions builds from main. ...