The closest thing to the middle is something distributed and content-addressed like IPFS or Iroh’s recent experimentation with pkarr. Though, what you get is persistence of the content when addressed by its hash, so if you only had a human-readable DNS that was aliased to the content-addressed URL, you can still lose the content when the original host goes down.

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This one has ~fzakaria’s work for relocatable Nix binaries!

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I like iroh’s simplicity from the user-facing marketing angle: it provides you a primitive, dial by public key instead of IP, and everything else is built on top of that or serves it in some way. Networking is not my area, so when I read about most networking/p2p projects, I’m suitably impressed but don’t walk away with a good understanding of what they really do or how I would use them. But iroh is simple enough that I can understand what problems it solves and how I could use it.

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I am already starting a consulting company based on enabling this experimental feature by default.

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I read the title and immediately thought, “it’s in the CI isn’t it”.

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One hiccup with this is that, if someone really did use curl to browse the Internet, they probably have curl piped to something that expects HTML, e.g. readability --text | less. But if you serve text with ANSI to curl, then it won’t parse as HTML and the page shows up as unreadable. Like LSP, the MxN problem of user agents and websites is usually solved by having one common format, HTML, and having each user agent adapt HTML to its idiom.

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This site tags with vibecoding for LLM contributions much smaller than “the entire website is vibecoded”. It’s hardly unfair by Lobsters standards.

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Nice video. I like how the final result is built out of applying several layers of simple adjustments, rather than one single very complicated process. Deriving the whole voiceline from just the character parameters and the actual text of the dialogue is smart because then you can just write more dialogue without any additional cost to get the voiceline. You could even translate the dialogue and get new voicelines in the new language for free. It warms my procedural-generation-loving heart.

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curl -L follows Location: headers.

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Preventing arbitrary code from containing a syscall invocation seems like an uphill battle, but if the school controls the execution environment, it would much easier to just run the program through strace with the offending syscalls blocked.

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It is no longer possible to produce software that is free of LLM output, even if you don’t use it yourself, even if you use a language that doesn’t use it itself.

You could use the last version before LLM output was introduced. Businesses run EOL software all the time for ordinary business reasons, so you’d have good company.

If you think that using LLMs retroactively taints the project, your concept of “ethical contamination” may be too strong. If you apply it to other questionably ethical practices, I think you might have to stop using software entirely.

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Network effects and other kinds of inertia. Whether a piece of software is good is only one component of whether it succeeds.

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I am skeptical of building this entire argument on “I keep seeing videos about this”. For one, that’s how the algorithm works; if you watch “this sucks I quit” content it will find more of it for you. Secondly, people whose jobs don’t suck and who aren’t quitting aren’t making videos about that fact; and if they were, it’s well known that the algorithm prioritizes negative content, so you wouldn’t see it.

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Yes, that was what I had in mind.

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I was just testing out sorcery on my own repos as a potential successor to my little-used Gitea instance. I chose it over stagit and git-arr but hadn’t found depp or gituwa, I’ll have to evaluate those too.

although I worry about people taking down / not wanting to maintain their hosts long-term causing some software to be lost to time

I think Radicle is trying to solve this problem by creating a network of mirrors, allowing people to contribute their own resources to keeping source code online. I’m not sure it’s ready for prime time yet, but I hope they get there or a successor project picks up their torch.

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Unfortunately, rsync updates are vibecoding related

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I wonder how many systems communicate via HTTP that would see a non-trivial performance increase if they implemented a custom protocol. I don’t think it would really change much, since HTTP overhead isn’t going to be what makes the difference in the number of packets you have to send for something. So maybe this is a good thing, because having a standard, even if it’s a standard that was originally developed for hypertext documents, is still worth something.

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