Focus on open protocols, simple formats over complex vendor-specific cruft. Then you can always "fork" away from an enshittified saas.
I bet a small team of the quality of the kind developers who are attracted to hacking on Ghostty could recreate the subset of GitHub functionality they actually need in ~six months. It's just the problem of how to pay for the ongoing care, maintenance and hosting? Maybe another opportunity for Mitchell's particular brand of philanthropic OSS.
The difference here is _creative_ work vs consumption. Craftspeople like Mitchell feel passionately about the tools they rely on to build. Github has also been a social place for builders.
I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...
There's a whole spectrum of options between super-fat React-in-Electron and expert-optimized platform-specific (perhaps GPU-rendered) apps. VS Code and Zed are close to opposite ends of this spectrum.
- slim down to a more efficient, non-virtual-DOM web stack (e. g hypermedia)
- move to a wrapper around native webview (Tauri)
- use one of the excellent cross-platform frameworks (Flutter, or that new one just open sourced by Snap)
For WhatsApp specifically, I don't understand why a company with the size and resources of Meta can't support native versions for Windows, Mac _and_ Linux. I think many people would accept non-feature-parity with the web/mobile versions, in exchange for a tight, reliable desktop messaging app...
There's a world of difference between saying "our stuff sucks" vs "here are the specific ways our stuff isn't ready for launch". The former is just whining, the latter is what a good PM does.
If you're interested in this space it's worth looking at data-star.dev. who takes hypermedia in the opposite direction - one endpoint per page, then push updates to components over SSE.
My worry with MESH is that many endpoints might become a (sorry) mess...
Street parking doesn't have to be horrible. Look at some of dense super expensive inner suburbs of London for examples - pretty little flower baskets hanging from beautifully painted Victorian wrought iron street lights, hewn stone gutters etc. Charming++
Poorly _maintained_ (cleaned, resurfaced, policed) streets are ugly. Streets are poorly maintained when the property tax base is insufficient.
Increasing density can amortize the cost of maintaining the streetscape over more households.
Have a look at what explosive drones are doing in the fight for Ukraine.
Now tell me how you counter a thousand small EMP hardened autonomous drones intent on delivering an explosive payload to one target without AI of some kind?
Nice work, but you might find it's not super unique - video codec people have been thinking about how to apply face recognition ML tech to this use case for 5+ years.
I bet a small team of the quality of the kind developers who are attracted to hacking on Ghostty could recreate the subset of GitHub functionality they actually need in ~six months. It's just the problem of how to pay for the ongoing care, maintenance and hosting? Maybe another opportunity for Mitchell's particular brand of philanthropic OSS.