skwee357

Author here.

I agree with you. Rust is rock-solid. I had zero crashes with Rust. But, having said that, I so-far have zero crashes with Node.js as well. Maybe because I'm a one man team, and I'm very pedantic, so everything is wrapped in try/catch, schema validations, and strict typescript/eslint rules.

I would agree with you that *by default*, Rust makes it harder to write bad/bug prone code compared to others, but with discipline (which big teams in "fast moving environments" usually don't have), you can get similar assurances with Node/Typescript.

I found VM to be on-par with Docker. Sure, the initial provision takes time, but this is true to for initial Docker build as well. I know that worrying about sharing kernel with the Docker container, is probably light paranoia, but I really don't trust agents to not run malicious code.

Few people posted here about the "intent" behind such content, i.e. today, most people are motivated by money because "this influencer told me I can make 10$k by writing blogs", so while you might find a blog you like, it's not immune to starting to accept "just put our link here for $$$ and we link back to you".

Something similar happened in the Podcast and YouTube spheres, where every creator seems to be "sponsored" by these shady companies that allocate 70% of their revenue for creator payouts, for the sake of affiliate marketing.

I really don't know what's solution though.

On the other hand, take LinkedIn for example, and you get the bottom of corporate AI-slop.

I agree that anonymization makes people more hostile to others, but I doubt the de-anonymization is the solution. Old school forums and IRC channels were, _mostly_, safe because they were (a) small, (b) local, and (c) usually had offline meetups.

Ha! Despite the fact that I tend to proof read my posts before publishing, right after publishing, and sometimes re-reading them few months after publishing, I still tend to not notice some obvious typos. Kinda makes you feel appreciation for the profession of editors and spell checkers. (And yes, I use LanguageTools in neovim, but I refuse to feed my articles to LLMs).

I remember participating on *free* phpBB forums, or IRC channels. I was amazed that I could chat with people smarter than me, on a wide range of topics, all for the cost of having an internet subscription.

It's only recently, when I was considering to revive the old-school forum interaction, that I have realized that while I got the platforms for free, there were people behind them who paid for the hosting and the storage, and were responsible to moderate the content in order to not derail every discussion to low level accusation and name calling contest.

I can't imagine the amount of time, and tools, it takes to keep discussion forums free of trolls, more so nowadays, with LLMs.

Fine, I accept your point. You don't have an obligation to disclose the tools you've used. But what struck me in that particular thread, is that the author kept claiming they did not use AI, nothing at all, while there were give away signs that the code was, _at least partly_, AI generated.

It honestly felt like being gaslighted. You see one thing, but they keep claiming you are wrong.

The thing with em-dashes is not the em-dash itself. I use em-dashes, because when I started to blog, I was curious about improving my English writing skills (English is not my native language, and although I have learned English in school, most of my English is coming from playing RPGs and watching movies in English).

According to what I know, the correct way to use em-dash is to not surround it by spaces, so words look connected like--this. And indeed, when I started to use em-dashes in my blog(s), that's how I did it. But I found it rather ugly, so I started to put spaces around it. And there were periods where I stopped using em-dash all together.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless you write as a profession, most people are inconsistent. Sometimes, I use em-dashes. Sometimes I don't. In some cases I capitalize my words where needed, and sometimes not, depending on how in a hurry I am, or whether I type from a phone (which does a lot of heaving lifting for me).

If you see someone who consistently uses the "proper" grammar in every single post on the internet, it might be a sign that they use AI.

That I'm a real human being that is stupid in English sometimes? :)

Personal website (+ everything-else-blog) -> https://kudmitry.com/

Technical blog website -> https://yieldcode.blog/

Probably should unify them... or not...

The currency conversion can be whatever you want. I have a python script to bring conversion rates for European Central Bank because I need to report my business earning according to ECB rates, but you can specify any rate you want both during transaction entry (for example `100 USD @@ 95 EUR`), and as a global rate.

I have a git setup and I commit once a week, but don't currently push it anywhere. I do want to install a git server on my home server at some point, as I don't intend to push my financial data to any of the SaaS git offerings.

I dont mind paying for a personal finance tool, but I feel like most of them are made for an average consumer who spends in one currency and needs budgeting. I operate in at least 3 currencies, don’t care about budgeting, and need support for tracking stocks and automatic currency conversions.

The only tools that were able to provide that were GnuCash and PTAs like beancount.

My point is, there is a big segment of people who are not served by existing personal finance tools simply because they operate in more than 1 currency, or have a slightly more complicated setup than envelope budgeting.

I have 14 years of personal (and 2 years of sole proprietorship) finance data in beancount. I tried all the available personal finance apps there are, from cloud/online offerings to offline apps. Eventually, I settled on beancount because it is the most versatile file format. In addition to tracking finances, I can track stocks, unvested RSU grants, vacation hours, and even personal training I have paid for but yet to use.

It's cumbersome at times, and I do miss the (G)UI of entering transactions, but with (neo)vim I got used to it and I breeze trough my finances in 15-20 minutes once a week.

It's Stripe, and I'm happy with them. What did you not like about Stripe?

Yes, I use another service + add a ton of stuff on top related to reliability, payments, and file formats. However, I have toyed with the idea of implementing my own fax sending. Maybe when I will be able to live off my side projects, I will explore this idea further.

Thank you! I appreciate the feedback!

Thank you very much. I try to focus on making usable software without enshittifying them.

It's a very tough market. Before I started I found a handful of services, and saw some services appear after I started.

I focus on SEO mainly. Most users come from search engines and LLMs. Some users are returning customers.

I use this in one of my products. The biggest problem with it is that it lacks any tooling around it. There are no tools to verify that the file itself is not broken / malformed. And tools like POedit do not support it for translations.

I run a dead-simple, one-time, online fax service called JustFax Online[0]. While I don't have a recurring revenue as I operate one one-time payment, for the past months I have been consistently grossing over €500/mo.

This also brings tears to my eyes, as I remember[1] browsing these threads and being amazed (still am) by all the people who make side projects and make money from them, and at the same time thinking that I will never reach this milestone, and yet, here I am.

[0] https://justfaxonline.com [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194#39141819

I truly don't understand how people can make such comparisons, and in general defend social media. Is this some sort of Stockholm syndrome?

Social media has ruined my mental health, when I fell into a deep hole of propaganda. It took me a year to recover, and I'm still not fully recovered, and I'm still trying to separate between what I truly think, and what social media "made" me think. People underestimate the power of echo chambers created by the algorithm.

I saw how friends and family got radicalized thanks to social media. Social media is currently fueling at least one war and multiple regional conflicts, where people who know nothing about the events, get "educated" by social media. Social media is fueling hatred and bigotry, further diving already fragile societies. Social media disinformation campaigns were behind Brexit. And social media is used as a tool by government to spread misinformation or influence social opinions. All these in addition to everyone being an influencer and showing their phone into the faces of people in public places, while selling crap from AliExpress for 500% markup, as if you drink electrolytes, put a nose tape, and clean your face every day -- your life will become ten folds better.

I can't name one good thing that came out of social media. None. And even if there are things, and I'm sure someone will name them out, they are minor comparing to the negative sides, or could be achieved in a more sustainable way.

No, it’s not. It’s a link aggregator and a discussion platform, it is not centered around social aspects like user profiles and followers.

The next step is to outlaw social media in general, and maybe the world will become a bit better.

Edit: in case someone decides to disagree with me, here is a non-exhaustive list of issues that social media has created: isolation from the real world, unrealistic expectations in terms of looks/status/success, dehumanization by turning people into likes-dislikes, dehumanizations by creating influencers whose sole purpose it to pump cheap crap to their "followers", a vessel for state actors to spread the current flavor of propaganda/racism supported by "the algorithm" that creates echo chambers rather than promoting diversity of opinions, dopamine producing machines that glue us to the screens.

There is nothing social in social media, in-fact, it should be called the "anti-social media".

Well, there are two aspects from which I can react to this post.

The first aspect is the “I don’t touch AI with a stick”. AI is a tool. Nobody is obligated to touch it obviously, but it is useful in certain situations. So I disagree with the author’a position to avoid using AI. It reads like stubbornness for the sake of avoiding new tech.

The second angle is the “bigtech corporate control” angle. And honestly, I don’t get this argument at all. Computers and the digital world has created the biggest distopian world we have ever witnessed. From absurd amounts of misinformation and propaganda fueled by bot farms operated at government levels, all the way to digital surveillance tech. You have that strong of an opinion against big tech and digital surveillance, blaming AI for that, while enjoying the other perils of big tech, is virtue signaling.

Also, what’s up with the overuse of “fascism” in places where it does not belong?

I think Stipe is one of the best designed APIs I ever had to work with.

But to reply to your point, there is no way out of this. You either understand the tools you work with, or you end up vendor locked to tools like vercel/next (the target audience of OPs tool, as it seems), which promise simplification, but end up being their own monsters.

I feel like fullstack engineer was a BigTech manufactured title designed to save costs compared to hiring two experienced engineers, one in frontend and one in backend, but ended up leaving the fullstack engineers in a limbo state where they are neither good at frontend, nor good at backend, hence they require a bunch of (VC funded) tools to "simplify" their development life.

I'm sorry, but seeing the words "dev" and "struggling with webhooks" in the same sentence makes me cringe.

I mean, I have nothing against higher level abstractions, but I'd be worried to ship (as a dev) and use (as a customer) a product that was built by someone who does not have deep understanding of what they are doing.

This is insane!

I got 2 sticks of 16GB DDR4 SODIMM for €65.98 back in February. The same two sticks in the same store now cost €186

People who live on the edge of updates always risk vulnerabilities and incompatibility issues. It’s not about node, but anything software related.