sylvain_kerkour

One word: Alignment.

It's a Buddhist concept that says that to achieve tranquility (end of suffering) you need to have what you value, what you think and what you are actually doing aligned and going in the same direction.

When you're feeling lost, ask yourself these 3 questions:

- What do you really want?

- What do you really value?

- What are you really doing with your life?

I've wrote a longer post that you can read here: https://kerkour.com/alignment

At the end of the day, what really matters for most people is

1) Certifications (FIPS...)

2) Speed.

SHA-256 is fast enough for maybe 99,9% of use cases as you will saturate your I/O way before SHA-256 becomes your bottleneck[0][1]. Also, from my experience with the different available implementations, SHA-256 is up to 1.8 times faster than Blake3 on arm64.

[0] https://github.com/skerkour/go-benchmarks/blob/main/results/...

[1] https://kerkour.com/fast-hashing-algorithms

Honestly? I believe that the new hype of Server Side Rendering (SSR) frameworks is only a matter of vendor lock-in: when you have SSR, you *NEED* edge rendering, which only a few vendors can provide today.

Single Page Applications (SPA) are totally fine. My blog is an SPA (https://kerkour.com) and has no problem being indexed by the major search engines.

It's actually way faster than most webapps using new shiny new SSR frameworks as I can cache with precision the different chunks/assets.

Finally, everything is served from a server than barely uses more than 50 MB of RAM even under high load. Last time I looked, Next apps needed around 500MB-1GB of RAM to serve only a few visitors.

Hey,

I've wrote a few books (https://kerkour.com/books) with only markdown, https://excalidraw.com and https://figma.com

I've detailed my complete setup and shared the Dockerfile that I use to convert the markdown into ebooks (EPUB, PDF and Kindle) on my blog: https://kerkour.com/book-self-publishing-pandoc

Great to finally see this here! Cloudflare is the 4th major cloud platform that (almost) nobody is seeing coming, and I believe that they will even surpass Google Cloud Platform's sooner than expected.

The only problem that remains is their support...

I'm writing a book about Cloudflare (launching very soon) where I share this and many other things to scale faster all while saving big on your cloud bills. You can join the waiting list here: https://kerkour.com/subscribe

Great work, but I'm note sure it will be enough. Rust crates are insecure by design and we need to face it. Here are at least 8 methods to backdoor Rust crates https://kerkour.com/rust-crate-backdoor

Blocking macros might be, in my opinion, one of the best defense that you can have today.

Neurotechnology is coming way faster than most people expect, especially with AR/VR headsets (EEG) and wristbands with electrodes (EMG), which are pushed hard by Meta, Apple & co.

I wrote a few notes about it: https://kerkour.com/nobody-cares-about-the-metaverse-neurote...

The best way I have found to prevent the piracy of my book (https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust) is to inundate pirate platforms with only the first chapter and with a discount code inside for those who can't afford the original price.

My hypothesis is that if they enjoyed the first chapter, most people would want to support my work instead of being freeriders.

So far it worked really well.

Thinking that you can prevent bits flowing from internet is delusional, it's better to think about how to align incentives.

You need to deeply understand who your potential clients are.

By that I mean where they "hangout". How you can reach them.

How? Talk to them. Build relationships. Maybe online if there are specialized forums, or maybe at the bar, or maybe by first visiting them physically. Not with an hidden agenda but with the sincere goal of helping them to solve their problems. Then you will see if your product is a great solution to their problems and if it can leads to a business relationship or if you need to iterate on your MVP.

Selling a new product is all about doing things that don't scale in order to get as much sincere feedback as possible.

Finally learn to not take rejection personally but as feedback.

You may want to read this article by a couple living on a boat https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html

Personally, no. I've completely switched to ebooks.

That being said, I'm the author of an ebook about Rust and Security (Black Hat Rust[0]) that sold thousands of copies, and I've been asked a few times for a physical edition: some prefer to have the hardcopy version on the desk when studying and programming.

[0]https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust

Yes :) https://kerkour.com/rust-crate-backdoor

I'm the author of a self-published book about Rust and offensive security: Black Hat Rust[0] that sold thousands copies.

I received a few offers for jobs at small startups using Rust, where the ones making the decisions regarding recruitment (CEO/CTO) have a technical background.

But, I believe that a book is not the best way to have the edge that you are looking for. Building an audience (blog/newsletter/YouTube/twitter...) would, in my experience, bring better results. An audience is composed of people. Some of these people work in big companies. So the day you are looking for a new job, they may help accelerate the HR process as they already know the quality of your work.

A book, on the other hand, is almost static, you cannot use it to your full advantage at the RIGHT moment (when you are looking for a new job).

[0] https://kerkour.com/black-hat-rust

While I think that state owned tech companies is far from desirable, I believe that one kind of law can make internet a pleasant and competitive place: interoperability.

Now we need to find a way to:

1. Convince law makers that it's important

2. Find incentives not to make bloated standards like we have today (OpenID Connect, HDMI, USB C...)

3. Find an appealing model so we can move on the web3 craze where the protocols' designers get all the $$

Here is a link to the spec for those who, like me, found weird that it was missing from the announcement: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/

The passivity against monopolies has more to do with international competition and the fear of losing world domination.

While I like the idea, I feel the that this announce is wrong.

First the pricing is outrageously high.

Second, why not provide a link to try it? And screenshots to see how it looks from an agent's point of view. Because Most embedded chat widgets come with advanced customer support features, and Element applications are not designed for that.

Don't tell, show!

If you serve the files directly from their S3-like service. If you have a proxy instance then it's free :)

Internet -> instance -> S3 = free egress

Internet -> S3 = $$ egress

I would put the files on a S3-like service (scaleway, backblaze...) and setup a small VPS to serve the files.

By using Scaleway you would pay ~12€/m for 1TB of storage and ~7€/m for the smallest instance (can go even cheaper if you manage to get a stardust instance at ~1.5€/m). Also, Scaleway does not charge for egress (bandwidth) so it seems the perfect solution to your problem :)

Alternatively, you could enable the website feature[0] on the bucket to save you from setting up a web server, but then you would pay for the egress.

[0]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/docs/storage/object/how-to/use-b...

Disclaimer: I'm just an happy customer

Hi, author here.

Thank you very much for this very precious feedback! I think it way better explain what I wanted to say in "3rd Poison: Momentum".

But, there is an important distinction to make: The China you are describing seems to have way more "available energy" (people and resources) than needed and no really specific goals, while in my experience it's rarely the case for smaller organizations, teams and individuals.

So, how to innovate and avoid starvation while operating on limited resources? This certainly deserves its own post :)

That everything is so fucked that selective ignorance is the way to live an happy life :)

Interesting!

Thank you for sharing. Did you notice that some language are more affected than others?

For example Go vs. Node.js?

I don't have linkedIn, and I usually get messages after an article got some attention on social networks :)

Also, sometimes, my website is directly mentioned in the emails.

If it can motivate you, I received more job offers than I can accept thanks to my blog https://kerkour.com/

Shameless plug: https://kerkour.com

Rust, Go, Security & Cryptography :)

Decentralization (and federation) is about choice.

Choice to host your own data or delegate to a trusted party, not to have to follow the rules of a single company, with a single culture and within a single jurisdiction. In one word: feodalism.

An interesting snippet from the linked paper:

  At the time of writing, Hive has been in production on the Scaleway S3 product for around a month. In that time, 5 billion entries have been written, with an average write P90 around 1ms and an average read of P90 around 150us. The aggregate availability (return_code != 5xx / total_requests * 100) is 99.9998%,

The answer lies in entropy.

A mix of misaligned incentives (users are not the customers), tyranny of metrics and the fact that developers use overpowered machines (compared to the rest of the world) [0].

Add on top of that the inevitable bureaucracy and conflicts of interest of any large organization, and you end up with these bloated apps. Developing good software and fighting entropy (apps bloat) require a lot of efforts, and you can't achieve this when nobody is accountable (high churn), or even have that goal.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/qzoxp0/mobile_de...

Good question!

I will add a conclusion with an explanation of the security of the system.

TL;DR: You can play with Argon2's parameters to use the resources that fit your requirements.