- segphault parentI've attempted to switch to Orion on iOS a few times in the past and could never quite stick with it due to reliability issues. I'm giving it another try now to see if this 1.0 release gets it over that hurdle. Vivaldi is still a lot more polished than Orion on mobile, but Orion's support for Chrome extensions is a pretty compelling feature. I'm a very happy Kagi search user, so I'm rooting for them to succeed here.
- Strudel is fun. If you're interested in getting Strudel-like sequencing inside of a DAW, check out the latest version of Renoise, which added a Lua-based phrase scripting environment with support for Tidal Cycles notation. They also added it to their Redux plugin, so you can use it in literally any DAW.
- Yes, it relies on a Markdown note file for each row and the “columns” are YAML frontmatter and cached metadata for each file.
I am with you on this, I wish Obsidian would optionally allow you to use YAML or some other structured data directly in the fenced code block or base file.
I really, really want something that kind of takes an Obsidian-like approach to local databases, sort of like Excel/Airtable but with flat, human-editable text files that live on your filesystem with a schema driven property editor. It’s kind of a bummer that this gets so tantalizingly close but doesn’t take it to the logical conclusion. I hope they do it eventually or make it possible with plugins.
- >One legitimate reason to not think supply reduces prices is because of big financial companies buying up lots of houses
This just isn't true and isn't supported by the data. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/corporations-arent-the-reason-...
- Microsoft not being terrible was a zero interest rate phenomenon. The news today is a lot worse than just Github not being independent anymore. It sounds like literally the entire development division is being rolled into this "Core AI" business unit.
When Nadella announced plans to double the company's revenue by 2030, it was pretty clear that the enshitifiction was going to ramp up significantly, but it doesn't seem like it will ever relent now that they have to squeeze out more free cash flow to cover all of this AI capex. Windows is practically malware at this point, they've made extremely deep cuts to .NET engineering headcount, and it's just going to get worse.
- I ended up on Readwise Reader after trying a few different options. It unapologetically caters to power users and is clearly built by people who actually use and care about the product, so I'm finding it to be a pretty solid improvement over Pocket.
They also have put some effort into making their mobile app work reasonably well on eInk displays, so it's pretty great on a Boox tablet. It has real pagination, which is a feature that I was pretty annoyed about losing in Pocket when Pocket rewrote its mobile app.
- Custom GPTs don’t support a bunch of newer ChatGPT features like chat history and projects and they can’t be edited from mobile. There is no real advantage to using a custom GPT over adding a custom prompt to a project at this point, given that the latter doesn’t isolate you from the rest of ChatGPT’s feature set. It really seems like they stopped working on custom GPTs and just expect users to use projects instead.
- Instead of adopting JSX, I would really like the syntax for this to be more like the way Kotlin uses receivers and builders to provide a generalized syntax for DSLs that happens to be good for describing component hierarchies. It would be broadly useful far beyond just HTML templating, it would also be great for expressing configurations and all kinds of other things.
The actual semantics for templating and data binding could just be a set of standard functions that use those syntactic feature, much like what you see in Jetpack Compose.
- An alternative to Lottie that's seriously worth considering is Rive. This is personally what I'd choose for non-trivial use cases. https://rive.app
- I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app. When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company, I figured it was just a matter of time before they had to put Pocket out to pasture. A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction.
I'd probably be applauding the decision to shut this down if I thought they were doing it to free up resources to increase their focus on the browser, but Mozilla seems to be institutionally committed to chasing its own demise, so I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration and other stuff that nobody asked for.
Meanwhile, Firefox is still missing proper support for a bunch of modern web features like view transitions and CSS anchor points that are available in every other browser.
- My frustration with using these models for programming in the past has largely been around their tendency to hallucinate APIs that simply don't exist. The Gemini 2.5 models, both pro and flash, seem significantly less susceptible to this than any other model I've tried.
There are still significant limitations, no amount of prompting will get current models to approach abstraction and architecture the way a person does. But I'm finding that these Gemini models are finally able to replace searches and stackoverflow for a lot of my day-to-day programming.
- The quality of the content on YouTube has declined so aggressively that the terrible UX almost doesn’t even matter anymore. They optimize to promote the most cancerous, low-effort, viral clickbait trash and the algorithm makes it incredibly difficult for anything else to survive or be discoverable. The culture of YouTube is absolutely vile.
- Stripe has a humans.txt: https://stripe.com/humans.txt
- I don't find this persuasive at all. Mozilla wants to frame itself as the browser vendor that cares about privacy, but there are now popular independent browsers like Vivaldi and Orion that go much further than Firefox to protect user privacy, shipping tightly-integrated and fully-featured adblocking out of the box. Firefox on iOS still doesn't natively support adblocking, they weirdly segmented that capability out into a separate "Firefox Focus" product.
Mozilla becoming an advertising company unquestionably warps their incentives and brings them out of alignment with the end user. Tracking-based internet advertising is inherently adversarial and there's no silver bullet or technical approach that magically makes it less so. The fact that their chief partner for this is Meta is deeply disqualifying, given Meta's track record (e.g. Onavo scandal, among a multitude of other things).
There's a ton of real-world value in having Firefox, with a non-Chromium rendering engine, remain relevant in the market. But if Mozilla wants to retain any marketshare at all, they are going to have to compete with other independent browser vendors on UX and privacy. Becoming an advertising company is not the way.
- I routinely see ads for fake medical treatments that they refuse to take these down when I report them despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies. So many of the ads on YouTube are for things that are obviously sketchy that when I see a new product I'm not familiar with for the first time in YouTube ad I just assume it is a scam.
It's crazy because YouTube has probably more information about the sort of products that I actually want to buy than probably any other company besides Shopify. About a quarter of what I watch are literally just product reviews. They have a ton of high-intent purchasing signal for reputable products, and instead they are showing me ads for trash. I know it doesn't have to be this way, because Instagram somehow manages to show me highly relevant ads for stuff that I've actually gone on to purchase after discovering there.
- The idea of Wasm as a universal plugin system is very promising. But string passing is maybe not the best example to highlight, considering that Wasm is introducing stringref to enable zero-copy string sharing between the Wasm runtime and host language.
https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref/blob/main/proposals...
- Pocket isn’t a bookmark database, it is a tool for saving things to read later. The user interface is primarily built for reading, not organizing. I use Pocket extensively for reading, but I use Raindrop separately for organizing and managing content that I want to archive for future access with proper search, filtering, and categorization. To me, these apps serve separate functions and need different user interfaces for their respective purposes. Pocket isn’t really trying to be both things, and it seems odd to fault it for not being good at what it isn’t designed to do.
- Any plans to support the WebAssembly GC proposal? Binaryen supports GC structs and arrays now, but there aren’t a lot of runtimes that have it yet. It would be cool if Wazero could do it in a way where managed structs can be seamlessly shared across the Wasm/Go boundary using the native Go GC.
- Your comment makes me wonder if I should give the series another chance. I only read Consider Phlebas and didn't continue with the series because I found the book so frustrating. It felt like there was a ton of context missing. I kept expecting it to provide some details about the culture that would justify the protagonist's antipathy towards it, but a coherent explanation for his world view never materialized.
- Markdoc custom tag definitions can include arbitrary AST transforms on the child nodes, as in this example: https://markdoc.dev/docs/examples#tabs In order to do this, you need some API, so you can't just define the tags in JSON.
- The underlying problem is still highly relevant in relation to JavaScript build tooling. Let's say that you have a transpiler written in Rust and you want to write a plugin that performs a custom AST transform.
If you want to be able to write the plugin in JavaScript, you have to take the AST from Rust and convert it to a JavaScript data structure in order to pass it into the plugin and then you have to convert the output back into a Rust data structure on the other end. Or you have to provide a JavaScript API that can safely mutate a Rust data structure from JavaScript while converting primitive values each way on demand. This is exactly like the problem I described with my Markdown processor. There's a ton of overhead involved, and it can cancel out a depressing amount of the performance gain that you would otherwise get from moving things to Rust.
Ultimately, these build tools need to have some degree of programmatic extensibility, and people want to get that without having to write their domain-specific logic in Rust and recompile the whole binary. There needs to be a better extensibility story and a cheaper (ideally, zero-copy) way to share data across the language boundary.