judah

This was really encouraging to read. Appreciate the honesty and vulnerability. Keeo going, keep sober, and I hope your future stays bright.

Same. I've been running a personal blog for over 20 years. Last year, I couldn't find any links to my blog on Google. Went to Google Search Console to find all my links are "Crawled by not indexed", with no reason given.

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides once said, "You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes."

This runs counter to today's tribalism which says we must reject truth if it comes from someone who voted for our political opponents.

Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app?

I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?)

Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't make sense.

Just build for the web. You can package web apps for all the major app stores using PWABuilder[0], no Electron needed. Just fast, lightweight apps distributed by app stores and accessible from the web.

[0] https://pwabuilder.com. Disclaimer: I work on this

FYI, Microsoft Store doesn't need an account. You can install apps without being signed in to the Store.

Source: I work on the Microsoft Store.

Everyone thinks they're the good guys, even the bad guys.

Increasingly, there just aren't enough incentives to write native apps.

This isn't a criticism of the article, but rather a tangential observation about why so many people turn to the web instead of using native toolkits to build apps, and why so many of native toolkits feel uninspired and lacking any real innovation.

If I choose to build an app using web tech, I get:

- Universal distribution

- No download and install process

- No "please wait while we update this"

- Users can easily share my app

- Users can link to individual pages within my app

- Users get autofill for forms and passwords and credit cards

- Users can block ads

- Users can scale and zoom my content

- Users can find text on any page in my app

- No "SmartScan couldn't verify if this app is safe" because it wasn't signed with a cert.

- A clearer security model: web apps prompt the user for access to e.g. microphone, camera, or secure disk locations. Native apps can kinda do whatever they want.

Why would I give up all those things to write a native app? A knee-jerk answer is often "performance", but honestly, most web apps load faster than their native counterparts these days.

Another common answer is app store distribution, but web apps can now be published to the major app stores without Electron or other frameworks. Google Play and Microsoft Store both support PWAs, and iOS App Store supports web apps via web view.

There are some scenarios where a native app is warranted. For example, hooking into some native component or OS API; e.g. HealthKit on iOS. But for many apps, the web is good enough.

More than a small kerfuffle. A supply chain attack by a state actor, believed to be China, resulted in undetected malicious code executions from June 2025 to December 2025.

I upvoted it after reading it. I thought there were a number of amusing, counter-intuitive studies in the post. Worth the read.

Yes, I concede the US is partly responsible for Iran's economic collapse. What a wonderful outcome should it result in the Ayatollahs losing their grip on power.

"Random, anonymous sources"

Time Magazine is reporting[0] that local Iranian health officials have given that number.

[0] https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...

Iran's government is an Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship. It has imprisoned and killed protestors[0], it hung over 700 political dissidents last year[1], it has imprisoned and executed people who have left Islam[2], it has beaten and imprisoned women who refused to wear hijab[3]. As for LGBT rights, Equaldex lists Iran 190th out of 197 nations[4]. Time Magazine reports[5] that some 30,000 people were killed in January for protesting the government.

Even the parent article reports first-hand that the Iranian regime is now labelling protesters as terrorists and calls for their arrests.

This, combined with the drought and economic collapse, has pushed the Iranian people towards revolt.

This is not the fault of Israel, America, Trump, Greenland, white people, or any other boogeyman. It's a feature of Iranian government, and the Iranian people want change.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/27/i...

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/iran-horrifyi...

[2] https://persecution.exmuslims.org/countries/iran/

[3] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/10/14/iran-new-hijab-law-adds-...

[4] https://www.equaldex.com/region/iran

[5] https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...

Jake Archibald has an excellent post about progressive image rendering, including some metrics on JPEG XL compared to AVIF[0].

"I was also surprised to see that, in Safari, JPEG XL takes 150% longer (as in 2.5x) to decode vs an equivalent AVIF. That's 17ms longer on my M4 Pro. Apple hardware tends to be high-end, but this could still be significant. This isn't related to progressive rendering; the decoder is just slow. There's some suggestion that the Apple implementation is running on a single core, so maybe there's room for improvement.

JPEG XL support in Safari actually comes from the underlying OS rather than the browser. My guess is that Apple is considering using JPEG XL for iPhone photo storage rather than HEIC, and JPEG XL's inclusion in the browser is a bit of an afterthought. I'm just guessing though.

The implementation that was in Chromium behind a flag did support progressive rendering to some degree, but it didn't render anything until ~60 kB (39% of the file). The rendering is similar to the initial JPEG rendering above, but takes much more image data to get there. This is a weakness in the decoder rather than the format itself. I'll dive into what JPEG XL is capable of shortly.

I also tested the performance of the old behind-a-flag Chromium JPEG XL decoder, and it's over 500% slower (6x) to decode than AVIF. The old behind-a-flag Firefox JPEG XL decoder is about as slow as the Safari decoder. It's not fair to judge the performance of experimental unreleased things, but I was kinda hoping one of these would suggest that the Safari implementation was an outlier.

I thought that "fast decoding" was one of the selling points of JPEG XL over AVIF, but now I'm not so sure.

We have a Rust implementation of JPEG XL underway in Firefox, but performance needs to get a lot better before we can land it."

[0] https://jakearchibald.com/2025/present-and-future-of-progres...

Nifty, but I see they don't support Facebook or X? That's a showstopper for a lot of people, including me.

What a remarkably misleading copypasta you have there.

Rav Kook was not Israel's first rabbi. He died in 1935 - a full 18 years before Israel's rebirth.

Nor was Kook the founder of Zionism. The belief that Jews should be able to return to our historic homeland has been a belief and conviction for religious and secular Jews for at least two millenia.

That you can find individuals, such as a R. Friedman (not even an Israeli!) with extreme views should not surprise anyone. Nutpicking is easy. Jews, like any other group, have fools and extremists in their rank. Israel is a plural democracy with 2 million Arabs, 7 million Jews, thousands of Christians and Druze, all with representation in the multiparty Knesset.

Hamas's evil, however, is not nutpicking. Hamas' founding charter in its opening paragraphs calls for the destruction of Israel and its conquest of the land in the name of Islam. It is genuinely intrinsic to the organization.

"Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows? No."

Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.

To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA

I run PWABuilder.com as well, and I can tell you that many, many PWAs get published to the Google Play Store, including some very popular ones.

I agree there is some confusion around PWA installation. There are some proposed web standards with Google and Microsoft's backing to help with that, e.g. Web Install: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...

Gaza (Hamas), the West Bank (Fatah), and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are the reason this technology is needed in the first place: violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred. Over 16,000 rocket attacks on Israel last year alone.

Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives.

This new Iron Beam technology is more precise and cheaper, and will likely save even more lives.

Israel saw over 16,000 rocket attacks last year from fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen. The Iron Dome intercepted ~90% of them, resulting in thousands of lives saved.

Iron Beam is the newer incarnation of this technology that uses lasers to intercept incoming rockets and drones with precision and much lower cost. Wonderful technology.

Merry Christmas!

"An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”"

-Luke 2

Not exactly. Here's the quote[0]:

"He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission."

The article doesn't give an exact quote from Enzor-DeMeo.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enz...

Fatah does rule the West Bank. That Israel has security checkpoints only reinforces the reality that Palestinian self-determination is undermined primarily not by Israel, but by its own violence against Jews.

If there weren't some 50 terror attacks per month coming out of the West Bank, Israel wouldn't have need for security checkpoints. If Hamas didn't invade Israel on October 7th 2023, Israel would have zero military presence in the strip like they did for 20 years prior.

Pro-Palestinian folks need to stop blaming the Jewish boogey man for Palestinian problems and start looking at the violence and hatred of Jews within their own camp.

Ah, the "Nakba", the catastrophe: the 1948 war where Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Islamic Holy War Army invaded Israel, despite being legally partitioned by the United Nations.

Yes, what a catastrophe that invasion was for Arab nations and Arab population in the land.

Perhaps if those nations had not invaded Israel, and perhaps if local Arab communities had not committed violence and massacres of local Jewish communities leading up to Jewish independence in 1948, things could have turned out better for them.

And maybe things can be different tomorrow, too, if Palestinians turn away from terrorism and seeking the destruction of the world's only Jewish homeland.

Sure. Just tell me how Israel should prevent the hundreds of terrorist attacks per month coming from the West Bank. There were 214 terrorist attacks per month in 2023, now down to 57/month today; thanks primarily to new security checkpoints.

Perhaps if Fatah would redirect its funding away from terrorism, there would be fewer security checkpoints and more self-determination for its people.

Israel does have a military presence in the West Bank due to the monthly terrorist attacks on Jewish citizens in the West Bank and Israel, currently at 57 attacks per month this year.

As for settlers, I ask readers to observe the double standard: Jews who live in Palestinian areas are "illegal settlers" and "stealing land", but Arabs who live in Israel are entitled to free education, healthcare, citizenship, voting rights, and representation in the government.

Why the double standard?

Perhaps there would be more freedom and self-determination for the West Bank if the Fatah government redirected spending its resources from terrorism to infrastructure and services for its people?

In 2023, there were 214 terrorist attacks per month. Israel instituted more security checkpoints, which has resulted in a decline to 57 attacks/month this year.

And yet, 57 attacks per month still ridiculously high. What nation would tolerate that? Is it any wonder that there are security restrictions in place?

As for Ariel University, it is within a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, so Palestinians are generally opposed to its existence. (And indeed, opposed to the existence of Jews in the West Bank, which is a true form of racism and apartheid.) And yet, Ariel University does have a minority of Arab students among the Jewish majority.

Thank you for acknowledging that 2 million Arabs live in Israel with full citizenship and rights. That undermines the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.

As for the West Bank, it's ruled by Fatah, not Israel. Israel provides for its own citizens -- regardless of ethnicity -- but it's not responsible for the citizens of foreign territories and their governments. Israel is under no obligation to provide services to foreign governments, especially those compromised by antisemitic terrorist organizations.

Israel doesn't administer the West Bank; Fatah does.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005[0], evacuating every Jewish citizen and dismantling homes and synagogues. Today, there are zero Jews living in Gaza.

Gaza is run by Hamas and the West Bank by Fatah. Israel does not "control [that] territory" it does not block "other particular ethnic/cultural groups from becoming citizens", nor does it "govern [it] by military law." Israel does not govern or occupy either territory.

[0] https://www.britannica.com/event/Israels-disengagement-from-...

"It controls other territory in which only people of a particular ethnic/cultural group are citizens and everyone else is stateless and governed by military law."

This is simply not true. There are over 2 million Arab citizens in Israel, a full 21% of Israel's population. Another 4% are Bedouin.

Israel has 2 million Arab citizens with full voting rights, free education, free healthcare, and representation in the Knesset.