brachkow

Passkeys work well when you have password managers with multi-device sync. While it is indeed trivial to get one, consumers don't like password managers in first place. And it is very hard to make person use password manager, instead of his john1988 type of password

Idea that AI is very expensive and will not be viable without "subsidization" for personal use is very shortsighted:

1. We measure "subsidization" in relation to API pricing. API pricing is very overpriced, to compensate for this "marketing subsidization", R&D, and everything else. A few months ago, Anthropic was close to being profitable

2. In general, OpenAI and Anthropic are US companies, and the US is known to have price disease, with all those huge salaries, multibillion note-taking apps, and fighter jets that cost too much to fly. China, and other countries in the future, could produce roughly the same output for way less money, as they did with everything else

3. Compute progress still happens. We can already run models better than GPT-3.5 locally on an iPhone

This month https://thingstohave.app, my calm and flexible wishlist app, reached a state I can call "feature complete". This iteration took two years of occasional work, so it's a big milestone for me. (I've posted updates on this app in previous threads)

Since the last update, I released everything that had been in testing since April, like gallery view, custom avatars, birthdays and, most importantly – autofill from link.

Now I'm preparing for a big launch – working on the landing page, SEO and onboarding experience. Here's what I've done so far:

1. I updated the landing page to actually tell users about the app and look presentable. I already see a big improvement in conversion

2. I added SEO crap to the landing page. This is painful for me, but sadly that's how Google Search works (it doesn't). It's paying off, too

3. I overhauled the onboarding experience, to make it smoother for new users

Two more features are still in testing; I plan to ship them before the release, but currently i'm not completely happy about them.

Switch from widely supported unified/rehype to own rehype-incompatible markdown tooling just for build time speed improvement is quite upsetting

Good that they added a tool to keep using rehype, but I’m unsure that it will last

Hono is a) de-facto new express with proper typescript support b) the way to write serverless code that is not nailed to current platform quirks

So, yes, it’s very widely used backend for modern typescript backends

"beginner friendly format" looks inside math

Kazakhstan decided to do so, but Poland always had Latin alphabet.

Ukraine always had Cyrillic alphabet. There is no way, they will reject their culture just to punish foe. Also Cyrillics is tied to orthodox Christianity which has very big role in Ukraine.

In that context is more interesting that way more pro-russian Belarus, has some use of Latin (mostly in geographical standards) based on Latin variant, heavily inspired by Polish language.

By the way, parent of Belarusian and Ukrainian, the Ruthenian language (not related to Russian, Ruthenian was the second language of PLC), has a lot of alphabets including Latin and Arabics. First was caused by spread of Polish language, and second by large number of Tatar Muslims settled there.

Mullvad does more for internet privacy than any other company. There are a lot of people saying that they will not use Mullvad anymore. What are they going to do? Support ExpressVPN or some spyware VPN with unknown owners? To achieve what – reduce the roster of companies fighting for a free internet to 0?

Remember, currently individuals elected by you, from parties ranging from goodest to kindest, are voting for passport internet and chat control, with little to no well-funded opposition.

I dislike that Mozilla is spending their money sponsoring random political organizations while asking for money here and there. I dislike that EFF is sometimes busy with American politics more than internet freedoms, and I dislike that Alexandra Elbakyan believes in some kind of esoteric stalinism.

But despite all that, I still support all of them! Because they are doing good things that nobody else does.

There is a "what kind of American are you" meme that is usually applied to people who have zero tolerance for people with different political views. Of course, it applies only to evil people???

No! If you think that "canceling" organizations on the matter that their leadership is kinda suspected of maybe supporting something that doesn't 100% align with your last ballot is a good deed, this meme is actually about you!

Another good idea for posts, is instead of arguing* on the internet you can post your opinion as post. This will help you to structure your opinion, validate it, and may come handy if you will have argument again:) Also arguments usually happen on popular topics, which can bring attention to your blog.

* Of course I mean professional arguments, not political opinions or other 4chan stuff

One of the most frustrating experiences building my app was that search engine discovery doesn't work by itself.

My expectation was that I would make an SSR-rendered website, with sane content and meta tags, and my app would appear at least on the 1-3 page of search, because clever search engines would parse it.

In reality, I need to do all the JSON-LD, landings proposed not for sales but for SEO, fighting with Google Search Console, getting proper backlinks, etc.

And only after that could I hope that my project would appear at least somewhere.

Just checked what your claim, and... its even worse – 1000$ in my part of EU (m4 + 16gb, aka base configuration)

It is interesting to know how it compares in terms of performance to 500$ Mac Mini with Crossover?

Of course Crossover support is worse than Proton, so it will not be viable alternative in real gaming scenarios. But Proton is made by Crossover team.

And Apple hardware is 2x cheaper.

The biggest effect of AirPods was that people stopped asking you to pull out the earphones when they talk to you.

At early college age I was dealing with stress that I for some reason had in a crowded city, and my main help was listening to rhythmic music all the time.

What annoyed me a lot that people from a coffee shop workers to beggars were making me more stressed by insisting that I must get my headphones out before the conversation began.

With release of wireless Apple EarPods this behavior completely disappeared in a following year.

BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes

Like everything else in finance...

Saying this is not to defend all sorts of crypto-bros. The economy, especially one overly focused on publicly traded companies like the Western, and especially the US economy, is a meme economy.

Coffee, flats, healthcare, military spending, etc., of comparable quality in the abstract East, cost multiples less than in the EU/USA because they and their currencies are weak on memes.

I'm continuing my work on https://thingstohave.app – a flexible and social wishlist app.

Usually, I barely report on this thread once every few months, but this month was highly productive:

1. I changed how lists appeared in the UI to fix a very annoying pattern where users were confusing lists and things. 2. I finished adding image uploads. Now you can add and view image attachments.

This was quite a challenging task because there are a lot of security implications, and Cloudflare Workers don't support sharp. So I was implementing all the pixel bomb detection, optimizations, and other stuff by myself. Also, self hosted https://imgproxy.net came in handy as a price-efficient image processing solution.

While images are seen in List view (with a layout I'm very proud about!), gallery view is still under testing, as I'm still not completely happy with how it integrates with previous UI decisions. 3. I developed, and delivered ton of small QoL features and bugfixes. Also a few bigger features are in testing. 4. Generally, the app is close to being feature-complete for V1, so I'm slowly starting to work on marketing. It is way less entertaining than reiterating on the same for 2 years straight:(

I don't understand the whole Framework thing (not 12, but in general):

1. For why would everyone want to use their laptop longer than MacBook lifespan? I'm typing this on a 5+ year old MacBook, which I expect will work for 3 more years. At this lifespan, it will be outdated by all means. I can replace it with a new one at the cost of $1-1.5k. If I had a Framework, I would gradually replace this with new parts? Well, only the mainboard takes a huge portion, or even more, of that. Screens became outdated too, by the way!

2. Repairability. Apple has bad repairability, in terms it glues the laptop from three parts. That means you can't do anything by yourself, but you can get a repair in a day or two in any point of the world. Can you fix your Framework in Tbilisi, Georgia? Last time I replaced the screen on a Mac, it cost me $300 including human work, the same as a Framework display costs.

3. MacBooks are just better in terms of performance and battery life per buck. They also tend to have the best screens, sound, and input. All of these are quite important for a laptop.

I like the Framework premise; I would like to own a Framework as a Linux machine. But we should remember that these are hobbyist laptops with a product/cost ratio, and gimmicky features.

All this discussion, amplified by voices of Apple-quarreled people like DHH, is stupid and kind of harmful – unexperienced people are ending up with expensive enthusiast devices (...or worse, with Dell XPS, you know).

P.S. Please don't bring "computer ideology" into this – there is no walled garden on MacBooks like on other Apple devices. There are no services actively sold to you. I don't know where this argument is coming from. It is just a Unix-based computer, with good hardware and a nice-looking GUI.

That said, I would definitely like to see comments of peope who actually used a MacBook and switched to Framework.

Funny that my app already uses custom feature flag solution built on... Cloudlfare Workers

Here are the things I don't like in React. Keep in mind that React is a framework to draw interactive HTML on screen, not for some crazy programming.

1. Over-reliance on complex concepts and terminology. Let's compare with Vue: `useEffect` vs `watch`, `useMemo` vs `computed`.

2. This useless "clever" stuff also slips beyond terminology: many years ago, Redux was considered the go-to state manager, and it required writing a lot of code across multiple files even for incrementing a number, because its author liked a lot of clever CS concepts. VueX at the same time allowed just to increment that number. Thankfully, nowadays, the React ecosystem is full of sane state managers.

3. React ships without any tools to work with CSS. That said there is no chance you would use React without CSS.

4. React doesn't bother optimizing anything for you. You need to know how and when to properly use or not use these clever `useEffect` and `useMemo`. There is a lot of stuff to know, and there are a lot of folk legends about optimizing React. This is while rerendering is its main purpose. In Vue, the framework makes you always use its tools, and does most of the optimizations inside them. I never thought about manually optimizing a Vue app.

5. The folk legends. React API and the "correct way" to write React radically changed so many times, so it is very hard to understand what is still true today and what is not.

All of that can be summarized into one – React is overly focused on ideas, computer science, and being high-level. And not very focused on actually making drawing interactive HTML on screen simple.

I do write a lot of React, Vue, and Svelte. And when I write React I always need to think about stuff, of which I never would think about with Vue and Svelte, because they already took care about it. And performance wise they are on par.

btw, I wrote a related post some time ago https://www.brachkow.com/notes/what-i-like-in-vue/

I'm working on requested features for my social wishlist app https://thingstohave.app: image uploading, passkeys and more clear list organization UI. Everything is in polishing stage, and I hope to release these before June.

Big thing I made recently is moving it from SvelteKit to Hono + Inertia + Vue.

I like SvelteKit, but I was struggling with stability in active development periods, and writing proper tests was very hard due to mocking all the magic, especially outside trivial testing tools.

Now the whole app is straightforward Hono MVC with Vue powered UI. Logic is easy to test, and all UI states exposed in Storybook.

I wrote a custom adapter that makes Inertia run on Hono, and coincidentally same thing was released by Hono author itself as official module, which is great sign for adoption!

So, try Inertia – it is a best of both worlds. You write MVC backend as you like, and use modern JS frameworks for templates.

https://inertiajs.com/docs/v3/getting-started/index

I believe it is common for governments to do wiki editing as PR strategy.

I actively browse Wikipedia in English, Polish and Russian, and see a lot of traces of government efforts.

For example in Poland related topics:

- Russian articles usually have negative stance, and articles have a lot of very strange quotes like wiki editor interviewed some person from 1920 in a bar with a drink. Most of these quotes are either folk anecdotes or made up by author.

Not related to Polish topic – Russian editors are also dominating Russian Wikipedia, and significantly affect important articles for other russian-spoken countries like Belarus, Ukraine and countries of post-soviet east.

- English articles about PLC are actively edited by Lithuanian editors. Polish nobles are renamed into Lithuanian manner, despite they definitely didn't knew Lithuanian and had absolutely slavic names, only by the fact they had any position on territory of modern Lithuanian or participated on event that considered "good" by Lithuanian historicans

While I annoyed by these events, I think it's big win for a country if it can do that. Being able to shape opinions via "neutral" source is a big PR win. And country PR is very important – just look at "nice" Switzerland or Japan, catastrophic PR failure of Israel in recent years, or what oil-rich Arabic world does right now.

As many others I had negative (not good as before) feeling about Claude Code lately

What I don't understand is these loud "voting with money" comments. What they are canceling is very subsidized plan to buy something that delivers a lot of value.

There are only two providers that can provide this level of models at very subsidized price - anthropic and openai. Both of them are bad in terms of reliability.

So I wonder what these people do after they "cancel" both of them? Do they see producing less result at same hourly rate as everyone else on the market as viable option?

My usual reminder that actually Mozilla has a lot of money (mostly from Google), and, for example, donates six figure numbers to random political organizations not related to browsers and internet (not EFF)

Here is a breakdown, which was posted on HN few years ago – https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

LittleSnitch for Mac is a good looking app.

I always thought that ugly UIs on Linux are because of good designers do not intersect well with programming enthusiasts.

But looking how ugly same app looks on Linux, I’m starting to think it could be a technical limitation. Can someone elaborate?

Epic Games partially owned by Tencent and already was caught of including spyware [0][1] in their launcher, but “Tim Sweeney is the anti-corporate robinhood who will dismantle hegemony of Valve and Apple” is very popular narrative on every western tech site

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19394399

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...

I understand that US has a weird tipping culture which results in such UI.

But these UI's are occasionally slipping into a countries where tipping is not expected.

This leads to a strange situations like "transaction isn't approved by me because instead of ApplePay and walk away, I need to solve some quiz on a payment terminal or payment will not pass".

Every time this happens, it annoys me a lot which affects my wish to visit this place again.

So, it was a marketing stunt?

It is great because game preservation isn't what game industry shareholders usually interested.

CD Project makes great games, but gaming industry is all-or-nothing. They already had colossal flop at their previous release. If another flop happens shutting down GOG is clearly would be on a table as a cost cutting measure.

Laptops are compared to other laptops availiable on market. Apple sells a entry line of their premium laptops at 1000$. And these are VERY good laptops.

pdf is just a computer version of laminated paper

This is very important point, that people from US and EU oversee.

I live in EU for many years, but due to my birth country being sanctioned I can't use any financial instruments like investing or even simplest savings deposits. Getting mortgage or loan is also much more harder for me, even tho I have much better financial situation than average person in that country. Apart of that I need occasionally go to the bank in person to proof the bank that i'm good person with valid documents under the threat of freezing my funds and closing my accounts.

Funniest thing in that is all these sanctions are issued by EU and US, and not by the country I live, where i'm pretty welcomed.