jarym

Enjoyed reading the article and I am sad as well to read about any failed startup but especially British ones.

I've tried at various points over the past 2 decades and can confirm: trying to sell startup software into the UK (and European) market is much harder than in the US.

Most businesses are not open to buying from an upstart even if the proposition seems attractive. There is a 'safety in numbers' mentality (markedly less so in the UK than in other parts of Western Europe but still much more than in the US).

It makes securing the first 10 customers ever more challenging. It is not a trope I'd say, its just a lesson that keeps being relearnt.

Love it

Bandwidth costs money not to mention if it was truly free it would probably be an abuse vector. Cloudflare offer 1000Gb free per month - https://www.cloudflare.com/products/turn-sfu/ and pricing beyond that isn't bad either.

2 things: a) Government plays a part in the cost of things - especially years of mis-investment around energy generation has sent British prices to the stratosphere and employment taxation levels greater than those 'cheaper' producers. b) The 'cheaper' producers are still _producers_ and thus have control - if they need to hoard their own supply they will, or if they need to leverage it for some political gain they might.

Yep, same can be said of manufacturing capability in general. If you don't have a manufacturing base then inevitably when there's a war you may find yourself unable to build defense components.

Yes, first of all its fully web-native and works over WebTransport + WebRTC plus uses hardware encoding (on host) and decoding (on client) to minimise latency and CPU usage. Plus I'm adding a lot of support for mobile/tablet/VR devices.

A Remote Desktop tool for Mac and Windows https://forge.emrul.dev/agents/portal-desktop/releases

Still a few weeks away from getting everything working but it’s functional already and I have a half dozen regular users who’re my beta testers :)

Quite amusing we have decades of human written code much of it sub standard and yet no one demanded proof till now of Open Source projects having to ‘demonstrate’ anything.

If ya don’t wanna use it, don’t. Simple.

Europe learnt nothing from the 1910-1950 era it seems. If the Stasi were around to see their dream rebuilt twice over....

Iroh can use multiple discovery methods, one of them is DNS. When a node comes online it publishes its addresses[1]. Another node can resolve from the node id those addresses and attempt a direct or hole-punched connection. If that works, relays aren't needed.

So agree not serverless, but also does not NEED a coordination server (unless you class DNS as a coordination server which is debatable).

[1] https://docs.iroh.computer/concepts/address-lookup#endpoint-...

Thank you!!

The one thing this website seems to make difficult finding: what EXACTLY does it do?

Does it take my containerised app and turn it into WebAssembly?

Running in firecracker is fine but if you want density you can run them in containers.

https://hub.docker.com/r/kasmweb/chrome

End goal of complaining that no one pays for their efforts.

Agree on lack of ACME but the codebase is far cleaner than nginx. In theory it'd be easier to audit?

This. This I believe is what it's all about. US government is going to create identity verification through the backdoor using AI as the reason (at least its not 'think of the children' again)

Markdown is the defacto format for LLMs and humans to interoperate. And I agree not everything can be represented well but that’s missing the point - it seems to win because markdown is the lowest common denominator for both human and AI models.

A desktop markdown editor for design docs in git repos with markdown diff highlighting. Has been a time consuming but super fun experience https://github.com/emrul/md

Protection from the risk that the tide might turn on them despite their extensive political lobbying? Just taking a guess here but probably not far off.

I love seeing stuff like this that would probably not exist if not for LLMs making exploring these kinds of ideas relatively cheap and quick to do.

My takeaway from this though is that nginx is pretty impressive on its own. Also this stuck out:

It's meant to be an alternative to nginx and Caddy, and the design bet is about configuration. Those servers give you a declarative config language - location blocks, rewrite rules, map directives, try_files - and then, once the declarative language hits its limits, an optional scripting runtime bolted on the side (Lua, or Caddy's plugins). Behavior ends up split across two layers: directives that quietly grow their own control flow, plus scripts that run somewhere in the request lifecycle you have to keep in your head.

I think the bet is misplaced - people prefer configuration over code and long have. The built-ins meet enough peoples needs entirely and they don't need to write C code.

I started similarly with it. I'm of the opinion that its a tool that behaves like a tool - how well it works depends on who is using it and how.

I don't have a good analogy but the immediate one that comes to mind is treating AI like a junior developer that you're mentoring. If you know what you're doing you can iterate quickly; if you don't then its a whole other story.

Claude built me a Markdown editor - I designed it, set coding standards, etc. It coded it to my spec. The output is in my opinion not bad and is very usable (for me - I use it daily now). Probably would have cost me north of $50k to get a team of seasoned devs to build it to the current level of polish. https://github.com/emrul/md

I've been coding for over 2 decades. I love it, I've always loved it and I likely always will.

I was an AI skeptic some months ago but truly Claude and Codex have changed my development style and velocity in a way I never imagined would ever be possible. With that, yes, I produce more code and am finding more bugs.

So looking over at comments in HN articles the amount of polarising hate to anything produced with AI is quite surprising. Just because some AI helped or even produced entirely doesn't suddenly make a project 'vibe coded' as if that's meant to be some insult levelled at users of LLMs.

It reminds me a lot of when offshore outsources started getting more software development work from the mid-90s with all the derogatory remarks made towards 'Indian developers'. Now we're in the mid 2020s and similar remarks are made towards AI.

I don't get it. I really don't. What I do know for sure is more and more code will be AI generated with or without the detractors.

I concur. I had Claude try it out on a project I'm working on:

  Headline so far (nested, 10k, p50/p95/p99 µs):

  ┌─────────────────────┬─────────────┬────────────────┐
  │         op          │   SQLite    │   SurrealKV    │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ getattr             │ 1.1/1.4/1.5 │ 65/92/120      │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ lookup              │ 1.4/1.5/1.8 │ 73/102/138     │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ readdir_page        │ 45/51/59    │ 1458/1678/1843 │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ create_child        │ 34/55/74    │ 190/272/339    │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ record_write        │ 8/14/19     │ 124/157/183    │
  ├─────────────────────┼─────────────┼────────────────┤
  │ apply_remote_object │ 9/12/17     │ 137/172/206    │
  └─────────────────────┴─────────────┴────────────────┘

  SQLite is ~15–60× faster on every op — and SurrealKV's reads are properly indexed, so this isn't a setup artifact.

This! A hundred times over. It's hard enough having to review one serial set of changes managing parallel changes into a single code base has been a nightmare load on my brain so I avoid that unless I'm trying to prototype something quick and dirty.

Over 96% of registered small businesses sell NOTHING in a typical month. I hope the other 4% are raking it in large otherwise there's a real question about why any business even bothers!

What do you mean - WebTransport can do a lot...

I've been doing more and more Rust. Even with sscache the compile times are not great so for any moderately sized codebase that requires frequent rebuilds I don't know how everyone else is doing it

Dunno, AI was quick to prove it could be done. I’ve found while it’s initial attempts might be slop, with good direction it can really tidy things up

I like it, and I’m not bothered if it was made with AI or not. Good work as far as I’m concerned

So?