not really. using WASM as your full stack for your front end is just adding to the complexity and jank. WASM is there for compute heavy stuff. you can use it that way if you want.

i know i’m in the minority here so i’m not going to bury myself in this hole, but i do think those are addressable problems. many of them have been addressed. replacing Javascript is exactly what i’m talking about.

there may be a little angst from reading and rereading the “Max-Age” portion of the cookie RFC that caused this trauma

this is my most controversial take in computing in general:

i’ve always hated the browser. the reason there are only a few working browser engines is that HTTP and the HTML/CSS/JS tech stack is a gigantic pile of tech debt, and even using Chromium and Firefox you run into edge cases where, for certain edge cases, they don’t always follow the specs as defined in these ancient RFCs. and these specs: why tf are they treated as gospel? which software product specs drafted 50 years ago get this kind of reverence? why is it that other GUIs have had tons of iteration, not just of their spec but their full stack implementation (Wayland, .NET, Kotlin Compose, SwiftUI, etc), but we’re all just fine with this mess of janky boomer protocols cuz it lets startups get to market faster? why is downloading an entire app (less some caching) every time you want to use it feel less cumbersome than installing something native to the runtime environment where the protocols can be tightly controlled by the developer and not subject to whatever security and storage protocols whatever browser implementation decides is good for you? cookies? really? the browser should be reimagined with a tighter set of protocols that allow you to look at brochure sites and download content, ie apps. even the best web apps are a janky mess and have never worked better than properly developed desktop GUI. /rant

ngl, sometimes it is. it depends on the game. usually the problem is anti-cheat, but Valve has been working on improving that with many games working out of the box today. i’d say if you’re playing single player games, once you get Proton installed it’s virtually the same experience.

check out https://www.protondb.com/

if your games are gold or above on there, i’d go ahead and pull the trigger.

yeah i have friends who are medical technicians, and i’ve heard some things

right so we should continue making smart investments in cutting edge tech, which is probably the point they were trying to make, even if the wording of it is informed by a pop culture zeitgeist more than an understanding of the tech and ethics that are currently being scrutinized as part of the development of what is called “AI”

i’m definitely not advocating for that. it’s just a bit strange to talk about it like that on a policy level. should the US, as a policy, defund AI research?

why focus on the AI boogeyman? investing in AI is important in this context because it has the potential to increase overall productivity. which, like, don’t we see that as a good thing? also, AI might suck right now, but it’s stupid to think that we should just abandon that research. AI is clearly an innovation, and if you don’t think so it’s time to touch grass.

easily said

i doubt the recent uptick in traffic is from “stealing data” for training but rather from agents scraping them for context, eg Edge Copilot, Google’s AI search, SearchGPT, etc.

poisoning the data will likely not help in this situation since there’s a human on the other side that will just do the same search again given unsatisfactory results. like how retries and timeouts can cause huge outages for web scale companies, poisoning search results will likely cause this type of traffic to increase and further increase the chances of DoS and higher bandwidth usage.

bruh i know people in their 40s making 6 figures that couldn’t read an error message if it would save ten generations of their family.

member when all the big cool web 2.0 companies had public facing APIs?

this is just combining existing data scraping tools with LLMs to create a pretty flimsy and superfluous product. they use the data to do what they say. if they wanted to scrape data on you they can already do that. all they get from this is your interest and maybe some other PII like your email address. the LLM is just incidental here. it’s honestly not even as bad privacy wise as a “hot or not” or personality quiz.

i’ve used Chezmoi for years now pretty successfully. works on my Mac and Linux machines. it probably could be made to work on Windows. i am transitioning to NixOS, but i’ll probably keep using it anyway, since i still have Macs for work (and because they’re great laptops don’t @ me). the only real downside is that it only works for the home folder, so i have to manually control stuff for /etc, but i generally prefer user configuration for most tools anyway.

i had messed around with Ansible for this in the past, but i didn’t really like it for this use case. it’s been a while tho so it’s hard to say why.

not to pile on, but you might also look at GNU Stow. i decided against it, but it’s there.

obligatory i s’pose: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles

most Zionists i’ve met are white Protestants, and most Jews i’ve met aren’t Zionists…

ah yeah. maybe less well known, but i had a dev kit from Qualcomm that came with Ubuntu

always? Android runs a linux kernel, and they support all kinds of embedded systems that run Linux.

nushell is excellent for dealing with structured data. it’s also great as a scripting language.

not sure what you mean by expensive. i run language models on my laptop that are pretty good at this type of task. and, yes, these models are infinitely easier and cheaper ultimately than trying to change the human proclivity for attention seeking behavior.