aryonoco

OCaml is nice. I like it a lot.

But arguably F# (whose original name was OCaml.NET) is underrated. It improves on OCaml in a number of areas (better pattern matching, computation expressions, namespace support) but more importantly, F# solves OCaml’s biggest problems: lack of decent libraries and subpar tooling.

With F# you get instant access to thousands of high quality NuGet packages which includes everything from fast web servers to highly performant json deserialisation, and you can use some of the best IDEs, tooling and debugger around (JetBrains Rider is outstanding IMO).

F# suffers from the Microsoft association unfortunately, even though Microsoft barely cares about it and provides minimal support for it, most good things about F# are developed and maintained by the community. But the perception exists, and many think it’s still Windows only

I’ve recently been doing a lot of F# development, I do my work on a Mac, using Rider and OCI dev containers, and the code is deployed on Kubernetes, and honestly I don’t remember the last time I enjoyed a programming language and development tooling so much.

I ran into some problems with Zed and Nim which I eventually solved by enhancing the LSP’s settings. This might be useful for anyone interested https://blog.ameri.coffee/using-zed-for-nim-development

My experience has been the same. I have found it much easier to write good Nim and F# code with Claide Code, than say modern Python with type hints everywhere.

Both Nim and F# have strong types and strict compilers (arguably more strict in case of F#). These factors matter a lot more than how much code there is for the LLM to train on. And there probably is less ostensibly bad Nim and F# code out there than old Python code written by people who were not really developers, so the training data set is higher quality.

Far to break it to you but OOo install base still dwarfs Libre Office. Nearly all on Windows.

deepseek r1 understands mermaid very well and can correct all the mistakes of Gemini and Claude

Isn’t that Supabase?

Using Proxmox with lxc containers, there is no second kernel. It uses the host kernel’s native cgroups and namespaces for process isolation. You can actually achieve the same with just systems and namespaces.

Having said that, I think if you prefer traditional distro packaging, you should absolutely stick to that.

The FSF considers AGPL Free Software (of course).

The OSI considered AGPL, Open Source.

Debian considers AGPL to be compatible with Debian Free Software License Guidelines.

FreeBSD considers AGPL acceptable in its ports.

So when you say AGPL is non free, could you clarify exactly what you mean?

Considering that Kagis’s results are actually useful and google just brings up listicles and ads, I’d say no.

Ah ok gotcha. Your issue is with the ‘family’ nomenclature not the functionality, and I fully agree with you.

For what it’s worth Bitwarden doesn’t use that term, they call it Organisation. Personally I feel like ‘Group’ is actually the better term.

I don’t have amazon or steam so don’t know how any of that works. But for a password manager, family sharing is extremely useful.

Bitwarden doesn’t have families per se, it’s got “organisations”. You can setup unlimited number of organisations and users can get invited and join them. Which is very handy for example my wife and I can login and order our groceries from the supermarket using the same account. Or that we can both login and use our electricity company’s web portal which only allows one account per household. All without needing to send each other passwords and updated passwords back and forth.

Proton pass is a poor man’s attempt at a password manager, with horrible user experience (oh we thought just a browser extension was enough!) and random limitations to fit in with Proton’s tortured business model.

I was a Protonmail founding member. I used and evangelised them for years until I realised that they are more interested in chasing the next shiny thing (hey we have a crypto wallet now!) instead of fixing longstanding bugs and performance issues in their mail client.

As for hosted outside the US, I’m pretty sure the vaultvarden instance running under my desk is also hosted outside the US (unless I’ve somehow been magically transported to the US). Plus, I get to physically lock the door when I leave the house and my cat usually sleeps on top of the sever which adds a level of furry protection which proton pass could never achieve

Since I’m talking about reliable long term archival of critical encrypted data here, let me again ask: in your opinion, what is the likelihood that in 50 years time, with 1Password long gone, my grand children would be able to run that local 1Password client and successfully decrypt the data?

Because I feel pretty confident that gpg will still be around (though hopefully long deprecated), that gzipped files would still be able to be opened, and everyone would still be able to open a csv file. Without any specialised software, sdk or whatnot.

If this scenario doesn’t concern you, that’s fine, 20 years ago it wouldn’t have been my concern either. But the older I’ve become, the more I think about this stuff.

The likelihood that someone would be able to do this in 50 years time, without your company still around? Close to zero.

Passwords, even ssh keys and passkeys, are little pieces of plain text. If you think needing a specialised sdk or cli to retrieve plain text is a good software architecture, I think we see the world quite differently.

A hugely underrated platform. Thankfully at least for now Google is leaving the Angular team alone and the platform has really matured in wonderful and beautiful ways.

If you like TypeScript, and you want to build applications for the real world with real users, there is no better front end platform in my book.

Bitwarden truly doesn’t get enough credit for being completely open source and having independent implementations of the server code (Vaultwarden) with which the official clients are fully compatible, which I can run on a vm on a server under my desk.

In 50 years time, who knows if any of these companies will be around. But I’m pretty sure that my grandchildren, should they want to, will be able to open a gpg encrypted gzipped file (with the passphrase I’ll leave them) containing my passwords in a csv file.

I used to think Gmail’s interface was excellent until I moved to Fastmail.

It doesn’t require believing in conspiracy theories to see a clear conflict of interest.

Ad blocking was one of the original reasons people switched from IE to Firefox in the 2004-2008 era. Hopefully, history will repeat itself again.

In the long run, the answer will not be Chrome. The world needs a browser engine that’s not tied to an ad company

It’s funny/tragic how Firefox used to be so far ahead in these areas which it has now fallen so far behind. Before PWAs or installing web apps was a thing, Firefox allowed you to basically achieve the same using “chromeless” tabs. Then they gave up on that and disabled it

Before anyone had ever heard of Electron, you used to be able to embed gecko into other apps and it could render html in other applications (that’s how Firefox itself started cause the old monolithic Mozilla suite separated the engine into gecko so other apps could use it, and then a bunch of Mozilla engineers started developing a new UI around it as their side project). Of course they gave up on that, and look where we are now.

Testament to its engineering team really that despite so many own goals and false directions from its leadership (Remember Firefox OS?) the project is still alive.

Anyone looking for a new browser on the desktop, also give Floorp a look.

It’s a fork of Firefox by some young developers from Japan who seem to have good values and ideals. It’s been my daily driver for 6 months now (on Mac, Windows and Linux).

I originally found it because I wanted to easily have vertical tabs in Firefox (without the horizontal tab bar being left over) and got tired of manually editing Firefox’s chrome.css file (which acts differently on different platforms). Floorp allowed me to do this out of the box with no dramas.

I then discovered its many other cool features and Mozilla’s telemetry and their other sneaky advertising are also disabled by default. As a Firefox fork, it of course supports all Firefox extensions including proper uBlock origin.

But a lot of Apple users who use things such as Kagi and Orion (i.e., the hacker news crowd) also use other platforms. I have a MacBook but run Linux on my desktop and I know I’m not the only one. The ability to have the same browser on all platforms (with synced tabs, bookmarks etc) is really useful.

After 17 years of using Android, with building my own kernel and ROMs in the early days, I finally gave up on it and finished my de-Google journey and reluctantly switched to iPhone.

The fact that Orion on iOS existed was a major reason I was able to this. On Android I was a Firefox user since Firefox was the only browser with the ability to run proper uBo.

Orion is not without its bugs, but it does support a lot of Firefox and Chrome extensions. But you don’t even need to install uBo as an extension,it’s got built in ad blocker with the ability to add or remove filter lists. Even without installing uBo, in terms of ad blocking, it instantly matched Firefox on Android. That I can install things such as Tapermonkey or Bypass Paywall Clean as extensions is a huge bonus.

It’s amazing how Google is pushing its early adopters and cheerleaders away by one anti user move after another.

I still wish Apple would remove some of the restrictions on iOS, allow other browser engines etc. Installing unknown software from unsigned developers on macOS is really difficult these days but still doable if you know where to look. If only iOS was the same. The potential lost revenue from loss of control would be more than made up by new people who would be brought on to the platform.

If my memory serves me right, Rust was initially created FOR Servo. Rust came into existence because Mozilla wanted a memory safe browser engine and couldn’t achieve that with existing languages without garbage collection.

Minor nitpick: browsers used _blank as a special directive to open the link in a new “window”, not a tab. Browsers didn’t have tabs back then, well other than Opera 4.x which was a paid software which never cracked 3% marketshare.

Stay strong my friend. The world is more beautiful with your son here, and I hope it stays beautiful for a very long time.

The way I feel about Kagi reminds me of how I felt about Google circa 1999.

The cynic in me wants to stop myself from becoming a fanboy because we all know how the story of tech startups goes and it's bound to repeat itself again; the optimist in me still wants to believe that there can be forces of good on the web.

And that's why Kagi has simultaneously rolled out their service availability on tor: http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6...

Tor has its flaws and criticisms, but it's really not on Kagi to fix them. With the combination of tor and their privacy pass, Kagi has gone further in allowing their paid users access to their services than anyone else.

Disclaimer: Not associated with Kagi in anyway other than being a very happy user.

I don't understand what "broken away a bit" means. We use C#/.Net pretty much exclusively to build the backend of our web apps).

Most of the devs use Mac, with some Linux. Everything is run in Kubernetes (OpenShift). we use JetBrains Rider as our IDE.

C# is a very nice, very performant (faster than Go) language, the platform is mature and robust. the tooling is excellent. It gives you good garbage collection, strong type safety, etc. All the things you need to build out the logic of business applications. And it's fully open source.

I have looked at Swift. By comparison, the tooling is 10 years behind and the performance is not even close. I struggle to see what Swift brings to the table over C#.

Oh yes; I'm old enough to remember the Halloween papers. Or Balmer frothing at the mouth calling Linux 'cancer'.

I guess plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

In 2014, that certainly was true. Every open source Bluetooth stack (i.e., Android, Linux and FreeBSD) was buggy and unreliable. Since then they rewrote the Bluetooth stack in Android twice, and finally what's in AOSP is quite comprehensive and reliable. It's now been merged into ChromeOS as well.

I feel like it's the same about many of the items mentioned above, the free/libre offering in that space are a lot more polished than was the case 9-10 years ago. Back then the audio codec was still a patent encumbered minefield, now you can just use opus. The quality and diversity of free fonts is ordered of magnitudes above what it was 10 years ago.

In short, it should be much easier for Eric to fill those gaps with free/open offerings than it was 10 years ago.