Perplexity & Proxmox Plans

With a heaping helping of Tailscale

OK people, Sunday I woke up to one of those Signal rooms going at it. What we are doing for Q1 2026 crystalized instantly.

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Those of you who are qualitatively inclined are going to get a great big dose of Perplexity. We will explore all the features of what might just be a “Google killer” for you. We’ll expand on the already potent base system by adding MCP servers. We’ll index documents with Parabeagle, we’ll improve access to Obsidian vaults, we’ll get *something* stable with regard to RSS. We’ll lace Perplexity and Claude Desktop together. You’ll get productive quickly, you’ll win back some time, so you can feel good about facing the slings and arrows of the learning curve.

There are at least three of us who are doing Proxmox related experiments. That’s a heavy lift, buying/rearranging hardware, we’re all going to keep at it. Three is a quorum in that space, so I’m going to publish a tech heavy series on this. We’ll virtualize, we’ll containerize, there will be clusterification. GPUs will be passed from the host to various VMs so we can experiment without spending a fortune on Nvidia gear. If things go as planned, I’ll bring in another HP workstation so I can record videos of various exercises.

And we are going to glue these two things together using Tailscale. This is a mesh VPN service, but it’s not at all like your “change/hide my IP” service. We use Tailscale so we can publish the stuff we’re hosting on Proxmox, like Parabeagle, to associates, without all the cost and drag of running a web site like I used to do with Disinfodrome.

Meta:

Right after the 2012 election I resolved to get free of conflict related work. Doing so required thirteen solid years of delivering etiquette lessons to various parties. That set of problems still exists, but they’re no longer MY problems.

My work depended on the rule of law and a functional fourth estate. Both of those have degraded to the point where wisdom dictates one must assume they are no longer available.

My work was preventative in nature. The value of such pursuits, at least to my mind, completely collapsed between Halloween and Guy Fawkes day of 2024. If not for the red sparrow sighted last summer, we would not even be having this conversation.

That Networks & Netwars stuff, as envisioned by Arquilla & Ronfeldt, is going to do nothing but escalate globally. But what Netwar Irregulars Bulletin once was is now winding down like a Sumerian epic, rather than having a neat 20th century movie closure.

The United States reached an inflection point fourteen months ago. My personal long tail ran out in the fall of 2025, around the same time dramatically improved health put me fully back into the workforce for the first time in nearly two decades.

And that’s the end of that …

Epilogue:

This Substack with the rauhauser.net domain associated is going to continue, but I think the changes are already abundantly apparent. The last vestige of what once was are morphing into what is to be. Specifically:

• Artificial intelligence infrastructure and tooling.

• AI enabled sense making focused on competitive intelligence and litigation.

• Shall We Play A Game? will provide a playground for advanced concepts.

I find myself having to adopt to a new writing standard - I’ve been evolving from imperative system management to declarative, and the same thing is happening for the integration and software work I do. Just as everyone else is starting to say it’s passé, I guess I’m going hard into this prompt engineering stuff.

And you, constant reader, are welcome to join me in this pursuit ..