The technology argument is the most convincing one to me. I worked with a Japanese client a few years ago and the internal tools they used were wild by western standards. Like full-on frameset layouts in 2020. But it wasn't ignorance, it was continuity. The tools worked, people knew how to use them, and there was zero appetite for redesigning something that wasn't broken.
The font thing is also underrated as a factor. When you only have a handful of web-safe CJK fonts and you can't rely on weight/size variations to create hierarchy the way you can with Latin text, you compensate with color and density. It's a constraint that pushes you toward a specific aesthetic whether you want it or not.
I think the framing of "peculiar" is a bit western-centric though. Dense information-heavy pages are arguably more respectful of the user's time than the trend of spreading three sentences across five viewport-heights of whitespace.
Been running a handful of dedicated boxes on Hetzner for about 5 years now. Even with the increase, the price/performance ratio is still way better than anything comparable from the big three US clouds. Their AX-series auction servers especially.
What concerns me more than the price hike itself is the trend. Memory prices spiking, hard drives selling out, and now this. If you're running anything with serious storage or RAM needs, it's worth locking in what you can now. I grabbed an extra auction server last month just because the specs were good and I figured prices were only going up.
For anyone panicking about alternatives: OVH and Netcup are decent in Europe but have their own tradeoffs. OVH's network has been flaky for me, and Netcup's support is basically nonexistent. Hetzner's support has been solid every time I've needed it, which is worth something.
The insight that a blank status area means "the house is healthy" is the best part of this whole project imo. Most smart home dashboards try to show you everything all the time and you just end up tuning it all out. This is basically the opposite approach and it makes way more sense for something you glance at 50 times a day.
I tried something similar with a Kindle a few years back for just weather + calendar and ran into the same jailbreak maintenance hell. Ended up giving up. The Visionect displays look great but $1000+ per screen is brutal. Curious if the author has looked at the Waveshare e-paper panels driven by an ESP32, they're like $40-80 for a 7.5" screen and you can do partial refreshes. Obviously way smaller than the Boox but might work as a cheaper bedroom/mudroom option for people who want to build something like this without spending $3k.
The byte-for-byte identical output requirement is the smartest part of this whole thing. You basically get to run the old and new pipelines side by side and diff them, which means any bug in the translation is immediately caught. Way too many rewrites fail because people try to "improve" things during the port and end up chasing phantom bugs that might be in the old code, the new code, or just behavioral differences.
Also worth noting that "translated from C++" Rust is totally fine as a starting point. You can incrementally make it more idiomatic later once the C++ side is retired. The Rust compiler will still catch whole classes of memory bugs even if the code reads a bit weird. That's the whole point.
Banning "length" from the codebase and splitting the concept into count vs size is one of those things that sounds pedantic until you've spent an hour debugging an off-by-one in serialization code where someone mixed up "number of elements" and "number of bytes." After that you become a true believer.
The big-endian naming convention (source_index, target_index instead of index_source, index_target) is also interesting. It means related variables sort together lexicographically, which helps with grep and IDE autocomplete. Small thing but it adds up when you're reading unfamiliar code.
One thing I'd add: this convention is especially valuable during code review. When every variable that represents a byte quantity ends in _size and every item count ends in _count, a reviewer can spot dimensional mismatches almost mechanically without having to load the full algorithm into their head.
The part where they blame users for not changing the default password is infuriating but unfortunately very common. I've seen this exact same attitude from companies that issue credentials like "Welcome1!" and then act shocked when accounts get popped.
What really gets me is the legal threat angle. Incremental user IDs + shared default password isn't even a sophisticated attack to discover. A curious user would stumble onto this by accident. Responding to that with criminal liability threats under Maltese computer misuse law is exactly the kind of thing that discourages researchers from reporting anything at all, which means the next person who finds it might not be so well-intentioned.
The fact that minors' data was exposed makes the GDPR Article 34 notification question especially pointed. Would love to know if the Maltese DPA ever followed up on this.
Which seems trivial in English, but gets messy once you support languages with multiple plural categories.
I wasn’t really aware of how nuanced plural rules are until I dug into ICU. The syntax looked intimidating at first, but it actually removes a lot of branching from application code.
I’ve been using an online ICU message editor (https://intlpull.com/tools/icu-message-editor) to experiment with plural/select cases and different locales helped me understand edge cases much faster than reading the spec alone.
I tried building an RSS library feature for a side project (https://beavergrow.com), mostly as a way to curate feeds I actually enjoy reading. It quickly highlighted how fragile the RSS ecosystem has become Feedburner gone, Google slowly de-emphasizing RSS, and discovery being the hardest part now.
RSS still feels like one of the few genuinely user-controlled ways to follow the web, but keeping it usable today seems to depend almost entirely on community curation. Curious how others here handle feed discovery now.
I built https://poker.beavergrow.com to solve the problem of playing poker with friends when you have a deck of cards but no physical chips. I wanted something that felt as fast as a native app but required zero setup for the players.
it has no bs, no signup, just create a room and play. players can join instantly by scanning a qr code on the share screen.real time activity feeds that stay perfectly in sync across all devices.
Also includes custom avatars, themes, and fun message/reaction to it.
its a fully functional PWA, so it can be installed on a home screen for a full-screen, native-like experience at the table.
i have made https://codekeep.io for storing snippets, have similar features to evernote. all users will get free pro membership now. if you are thinking about moving , please consider codekeep too.
I had some success with side projects a while back, but I haven’t been able to spend much time on them lately. The anxiety is still there, especially with the current layoffs and the state of the economy. My plan is to go indie again once I reach lean FIRE, so money isn’t something I have to worry about and I can focus on building things I enjoy.
Monetization is always the tricky part, since most of the ideas I’m drawn to aren’t things a large audience would pay for. But working on projects I’m personally interested in is what keeps me motivated long enough to actually finish them. It’s easier now too, because AI lets me go from an idea to something usable in just a few hours.
Totally agree with you I have had the same experience. Most of the bookmarks I saved over the years, I never went back to. These days I usually just copy content, run a quick summary through ChatGPT, and if its useful I keep it as a note. That way I dont have to keep deferring things in an endless bookmark pile.
Now I mostly keep two kinds of bookmarks: quick-access ones for work (like repos I contribute to or PR sections I need to check often), and then more organized notes for ideas, projects, or interests I want to revisit later. To make that easier, I use a little tool I put together (beavergrow.com) where I can group bookmarks into blocks and keep notes alongside them—it’s been handy for giving some structure without overcomplicating things.
Really neat work! I’ve been experimenting with something similar running a local Whisper model for quick transcriptions, then organizing the notes in a tabbed interface so I can keep different topics separate without switching windows. Vertical tabs have been surprisingly nice for keeping ongoing transcription sessions alongside reference material (I use beavergrow.com for this, but anything with a good tab system would work).
Looks futuristic! I really like the modular “building blocks” idea. I’m working on something similar in a different space with BeaverGrow, a productivity tool where you can drag and drop blocks to build custom dashboards with the widgets you need. you can checkit out here - https://beavergrow.com
This brings back so many memories I still remember having a cd with the serial key written right on it. Even now, that key is stuck in my mind qqwd7-8gr47-x9rcp-jjwh7-qpgqq
The incremental improvement reminds me of iPhone releases still impressive, but feels like we’re in the ‘refinement era’ of LLMs until another real breakthrough.
i made https://storyforu.com which generates stories for children, based on topics you select with vibrant graphics and an interactive and quiz mode.
it was fun to build it.
at this point, can i purchase the subscription directly from the model provider or hugging face and use it? or is this ollama attempt to become a provider like them.
This looks incredibly promising not just for AI research but for practical use cases in game development. Being able to generate dynamic, navigable 3D environments from text prompts could save studios hundreds of hours of manual asset design and prototyping. It could also be a game-changer for indie devs who don’t have big teams.
Another interesting angle is retrofitting existing 2D content (like videos, images, or even map data) into interactive 3D experiences. Imagine integrating something like this into Google Maps suddenly street view becomes a fully explorable 3D simulation generated from just text or limited visual data.
The font thing is also underrated as a factor. When you only have a handful of web-safe CJK fonts and you can't rely on weight/size variations to create hierarchy the way you can with Latin text, you compensate with color and density. It's a constraint that pushes you toward a specific aesthetic whether you want it or not.
I think the framing of "peculiar" is a bit western-centric though. Dense information-heavy pages are arguably more respectful of the user's time than the trend of spreading three sentences across five viewport-heights of whitespace.