buildbuildbuild

Open weights, not open source.

The weights have permissive licensing, but the data and training pipeline are not published to reproduce them from their proprietary Qwen starting points. Weights are not "source."

Absolutely love Fastmail.

I badly wish that they added a few key enterprise features: mandatory 2FA, SSO, provisioning, and more robust audit logs. If you’re reading we would pay for this! Fastmail makes SOC-2 a bit tedious for us to maintain.

I realize it's not a pure-Rust UI, but building with Tauri has been a joy. I recently built a GUI for one of my side projects and being able to use standard Typescript client-side development approaches, with a locked-down IPC, was surprisingly smooth. Love the "Wails-style" approach to a smaller release size than Electron as well.

It's nice to be able to use existing design systems and components, and to be able to validate in a web browser in quicker build loops before doing the full Tauri builds. I still manually QA across platforms pretty aggressively but Tauri's "cross-platform from day one" really isn't much of a stretch. The project if curious: https://github.com/zecrocks/zkv

The unannounced web collaboration platform in-progress might be.

User friendliness. I’ve seen several less-technical people able to quickly access, create, and understand “llms.txt”.

It’s not ideal but representative of the tension between user experience and technical correctness.

This was mostly funded by Zcash Community Grants. Good things can come from crypto R&D.

Cable failed at millennial+ user experience.

Many on-demand viewing experiences still play ads through atrocious “cable box apps.”

Entrenched cable bureaucracy disrupted by app culture. For the better.

Netflix also will some day be disrupted, as the wheel turns.

I loved my AstroCam as a kid. I think dad and I tried six launches. When a photo finally came out it was the best day. Thank you for sharing, a great reminder of how far we’ve come. Also of how short attention span has eroded patience during many of today’s prescribed “STEM” activities.

This happened to me in college. They never refunded my $7k balance. It was devastating to me at the time. The experience has played no small role in me becoming a cryptocurrency believer and advocate for the unbanked.

See also Obscura's approach of QUIC bridges to Mullvad as a privacy layer: https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/

Easier: I can earn or spend real money 24/7 without anyone’s permission, at any age, in any location.

Faster: Payments settle lightning fast compared to ACH/Wires, permanently and internationally.

Better: I don’t need anyone’s approval to be “banked” and I don’t have to operate in fear of clawbacks. Programs are the ultimate unbanked, and that’s the “agentic economy” that is emerging.

At minimum all of these rules should be inflation-adjusted.

I’ve been curious to try starting an Aftok: https://aftok.com/

Perhaps the author would consider open sourcing if they received financial compensation for their work to date? Crowdfunding or retroactive grants can liberate code.

Context: a big chunk of my 2024 income was from grant money to build open source software that I may have tried to monetize otherwise. It’s possible.

Sometimes you have applications that should not be able to access an entire database. There are other various scaling reasons, and PG extensions that can be helpful. But I agree that for small to medium sized projects, SQLite is highly underrated.

Yes. And they accept cryptocurrency natively (without using gift cards), extremely practical for believers in the space.

Uber also owns a significant share of Grab.

The “someone hates Tor relays” theory doesn’t sound worth the effort. This could be an entity running malicious relays, while also trying to unethically take down legitimate relays to increase the percentage of the network that they control.

Imitating science fiction is great marketing for a space company.

Brand association with familiar depictions of “the future” is the goal, not realism.

Beware the edge case: I responded STOP to a message years ago, then was unable to receive SMS from a popular money transmission app during the signup flow to claim funds that a friend sent me.

After over a month of troubleshooting, it turns out that I had sent "STOP" to that number years ago on a different device (no longer visible in chat history) and now had to send "UNSTOP" in order to receive the phone verification SMS required to sign up for the service. It was a shared number between multiple apps.

Context: these users were not paying, were using stolen credit card numbers.

Will you ever have regrets about your words and activities?

Will your logged activities of today be acceptable to every regime in your nation’s future?

I hear you but caution against such oversimplification. Advanced Data Protection for iCloud is a thing. Our culture of cloud reliance is truly dangerous, but some vendors are at least trying to E2E data where possible.

There are big risks to having a cloud digital footprint, yet clouds can be used “somewhat securely” with encryption depending on your personal threat model.

Also, it’s not fair to compare clouds to wiretapping. Unless you are implying that Apple’s infrastructure is backdoored without their knowledge? One does not simply walk into an Apple datacenter and retrieve user data without questions asked. Legal process is required, and Apple’s legal team has one the stronger track records of standing up against broad requests.

It amazes me that people really believe that AWS logs nothing in its backend when logging is disabled on a bucket/feature.

I’ve often wished I could show an “I know what I’m doing” badge to support to guarantee escalation.

“I’m a three star infosec General, if I’m contacting you it’s not to waste your time.”

Wails is great. Also, see Tauri for a similar lightweight approach in the Rust ecosystem.

I badly wish that chip manufacturers were required to produce single board computers with their outdated inventory. Or at least offer the chips for sale with documentation to reduce e-waste.

Apple’s A* and M* chips for example should all be on SBCs.

If you’re going to consume earth’s resources to produce these things, tell humanity how to repurpose them.

Shoutout to the Zcash Foundation for funding a large portion of Arti’s development.

Local RAM may see a comeback with local/private LLMs.

In practice this often means requiring a photo ID scan.

Context: Kraken is the only US-based cryptocurrency exchange which supports Monero, the top untraceable privacy coin of today.

Binance, the world's largest exchange by volume, yesterday announced the de-listing of Monero, triggering a price crash of 38%.

Kraken's post is in response to a Monero tweet. Privacy coins are akin to cash and legal in most jurisdictions, but are facing aggressive de-listing by exchanges with low regulatory risk tolerances. Kraken stands strong following explicit US laws rather than the extra-judicial whims of compliance teams.