A PHP vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.2 that lets anyone execute code remotely without even logging in — and the official fix only covers 8.2 through 8.5. My server runs 5.6, which has no patch and no backport. This morning I only wanted to confirm how badly I was affected. But one thing led to another, and I ended up giving the site legacy — stacked up and steadily gaining entropy for over a decade — a thorough slimming down.

It's Chinese New Year, and everyone is talking about DeepSeek. Laurel wants to play "Who's the Spy" but can never round up enough people, so I built an AI-powered "Who's the Spy" game bot that calls an LLM to generate character descriptions and voting strategies — but I ran into problems like unstable model output and formatting errors. After tweaking the model and the prompts over and over, I finally got the basic functionality working, and the whole process was full of funny mistakes and challenges.