Vibe coding. Not even once.

Some VPNs like Mullvad have the option of padding out the flow of data to thwart traffic analysis, at the expense of speed.

Being able to set up personally hosted RSS feeds would be useful. If the feeds are fetched periodically, that could also allow archiving of accounts.

Or even if it could provide RSS feeds of accounts, for following in a RSS reader.

Though excellent work!

I can vouch for Mythic Beasts

Surely when number goes up far enough, it magically gains sentience and godlike powers

X11 was nifty, but limited by low ambitions. Its client/server model was simple: the application ran entirely on the UNIX host, and the terminal was just a dumb graphical display device: drawing commands went one way, and key/mouse events the other way. If only Sun had seen fit to open up NeWS, we could have ended up with apps’ UI layer running on the terminal, handling events and showing the interface, and the communication down the bottleneck between your terminal and the big UNIX machine running the business logic of the app being more structured (like, say, view-model objects and business-logic events). Of course, you’d have to write your UI code in PostScript, at least until someone invented Lua or something.

The problem is that GPS signals are weak, and generally need a line of sight to the sky. Phones don’t rely on GPS alone, but also get location data by triangulating base stations and/or querying databases of WiFi SSIDs over the internet. And AirTags don’t contain either a GPS receiver or an internet connection: they’re just simple, low-power Bluetooth beacons which send an encrypted ID to any nearby iPhones, which add their locations and forward it to Apple.

Basically, all the smarts are in Apple’s infrastructure (including the numerous privately-owned devices running Apple’s location services). Replicating this without a network of roving receivers is a nonstarter.

“It was for our team-building circle jerk”

Horny and stingy is not a good look.

The inability to roll windows up into just the title bar, or to get Firefox to place each of its windows on the same virtual desktop as before, are major annoyances. Otherwise, Wayland runs better than I expected.

Given his leading role in AfS (a party to the right of the far-right SD party, whose role in the ecology of the Swedish far right appears to be to be the ideological shock troops who float extreme ideas and see which of those are ready to be laundered into the mainstream by the “respectable”SD), it’s probably safe to say that this guy was a piece of shit.

The downside of this is that it involves giving money to Bezos in the first place. If there are similar techniques that work with, say, Apple Books, Kobo or other stores not owned by a literal Bond villain, they’d be even better.

(Also, everyone else seems to use the EPub format, while Amazon have their own proprietary fork of an old PalmPilot ebook format. Meaning that you’re probably going to need to convert it to EPub for reading, which is one more step and could, in theory, go awry.)

I have historically gone with PostgreSQL and had no complaints. The licensing issues concerning MySQL also give one pause (Oracle are greedy bastards who will use any excuse to extract money from captive customers, so depending on their properties is to be avoided). Having said that, these days, SQLite is probably sufficient for many workloads and has the advantage of not requiring a database server.

Free as in puppy

Drew DeVault recently wrote a simple but functional UNIX kernel in a new systems programming language named Hare in about a month, which suggests that doing something similar in Rust would be equally feasible. One or two motivated individuals could get something up which is semi-useful (runs on a common x86 PC, has a console, a filesystem, functional if not necessarily high-performance scheduling and enough of the POSIX API to compile userspace programs for), upon which, what remained would be a lot of finishing work (device drivers, networking, and such), though not all of it necessary for all users. Doing this and keeping the goal of making it a drop-in replacement for the Linux kernel (as in, you can have both and select the one you boot into in your GRUB menu; eventually the new one will do enough well enough to replace Linux) sounds entirely feasible, and a new kernel codebase, implemented in a more structured, safer language sounds like it could deliver a good value proposition over the incumbent.