However, I think there is no reason at all that a system that is decentralized is not far _far_ simpler to instantiate for a user (not to mention far more secure and private). Crypto gets a lot of hate on HN, but it seems that it is mostly due to people's dislike of anything dealing with 'currency' systems or financial that touch it. This is a despised opinion here, but I am still actually excited for crypto systems that solve real world problems like TLS certs, DNS, et al.

Iroh seems like a _fantastic_, phenomenal system to showcase this idea. It allows for a very fast decentralized web experience on modern cryptography such as Blake3, QUIC, and so on but doesn't really touch any financial stuff at all. Its simply a good system.

I hope we can slowly move to a system that uses the decntralized consensus algorithms created in the crypto space to remove the trust in (typically big, corporate, and likely backdoored) centralized entities that our system today _requires_ without any alternative.

While for most of my jobs I ended up being able to evade the use of HPC by simply being smarter and discovering better algorithms to process information, I recall like pyspark decently, but preferring the simplicity of ballista over pyspark due to the simpler installation of Rust over managing Java and JVM junk. The constant problems caused by anything using JVM backend and the environment config with it was terrible to add to a new system every time I ran a new program.

In this regard, ballista is a enormous improvement. Anything that is a one-line install via pip on any new system, runs local-first without any cloud or telemetry, and requires no change in code to run on a laptop vs HPC is the only option worth even beginning to look into and use.

More seriously, even 16GB was essentially the 'norm' in consumer PCs about 15 years ago.

Most developers work with a Unix mindset (do one thing well, with focus on simple and easily managed code), which tyically means telemetry is _wildly_ out of line (offers no real benefit for the basics while adding huge complexity), so privacy and security are naturally far better. Lynx like TUI browsers are a nice idea, but unfortunately sometimes an image is desired to be manually viewed, or javascript is required. It would be wonderful if javascript were simply dropped from most websites, but we don't live in that world, so we're stuck with the next best thing (disabling all js until explicitly allowed by the user).

These are the types of things people in software devs typically care about, which there are many in HN.

Servo is upcoming, but so far it is fantastic in comparison to any other browser out there.

I tend to focus on any software that does not require 12 teams of people 6 weeks to determine how to build a single binary because of the use of 20 different programming languages and mixing and matching of paradigms and solutions to subconponents. I very much appreciate simplicity and look for highly secure and private programs that highly discourage JavaScript from ever being run.

Servo is finally a breath of fresh air in that regard.

It would be nice to have a completely open source browser that can be built with a simple one liner from cargo. Having several thousands of eyes on the code daily to check for telemetry violations, privacy issues, security, and performance daily in mostly a single language, small, and well structured browser repo would be phenomenal compared to the disjoint jumbled messes we have today.

It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript than Twitter, not more.

The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant, and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to twitter

Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just works'.

I bought a macbook a while ago specifically because I can get it to last about 45-50 hours non-stop usage on one charge, so getting a system tailored for even better performance and a longer battery life (macbooks could probably double or triple battery life if they bulked up and stopped trying to be so petite) would be incredible.

>100 hour battery lifes should be very achiebable for developers, as limiting screen brightness and using only terminal with a black background can increase battery life _enormously_.

If one is very interested in security and privacy however, using VMs for isolation of different apps or services is important, so having an OS that helps that is useful. Bare arch _can_ do this, but requires quite a lot of script development.

Qubes seems to be the answer many grab for, though much is still written in C, which comes with all of the vulnerabilities mentioned constantly. So, something like https://diosix.org/ (a Rust-based hypervisor for Risc-V) is a great option to make a start towards decently secure system. Of course if your threat model includes state actors or something, you're SOL (change your perspective or what you're doing) since they always have an easy backdoor into any hardware, but sometimes things like diosix can protect against the constant script kiddies and other individual hackers.

A very minimal Rust-only browser with security and privacy in mind at every single step is completely missing from browsers today. Things like waterfox et al are enormous projects that take far too long for one person to audit the entire code base to ensure correctness. Something like the 'wireguard of browsers' in this regard is needed (single repo that one person can read over in a day and can be built with a single cargo build command). Even servo unfortunately falls just barely shy of this goal, but one can dream.

It probably depends on what "modern" means here. If updating from tons of COBOL to {Julia, Python, Rust, or some other well known language} with an update to an SQLite backend (or perhaps postgres is acceptable for very specific scenarios), that is likely a good choice due to being able to fix old cruft and add maintainability for the future. If it's a switch to some nosql database backend with everything switched to some cypher-based lang or anything that touches javascript in any way, it's probably a mistake.

As it has been for decades now, the 'Nan' type of answer in NLP is important, adds great capability, and is often glossed over.

I think your argument is about specific implementations of WM. While the argument of "I deal with X11-based WMs because it's fine when I don't care about security at all" may be valid in very narrow cases (such as air-gapped systems), the argument more generally is pretty weak.

Its not surpising that x11 based WMs, such as the almighty [awesomeWM](https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome), have more features implemented than, for instance, [jay](https://github.com/mahkoh/jay) due to the enormous time it has had to develop (though I am _very_ excited to see `jay` develop more fully, and expect it to be well used by the more tech-savy devs).

However, some WMs in the Wayland space are doing quite well on that front. I recently had some substantial problems arise in my system which (surprisingly to me, but perhaps some are getting used to this) would have been prevented by using a memory safety language for my WM, so I have made the switch to (for better or worse) only ever consider Wayland+Rust WMs. In this space, [niri](https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri) is actually quite good, and to the point - it is developing correctly _and very quickly_. So, any issues on some WM not implementing some desired feature are quickly disappearing.

IIRC, all the major 'gateway' linux distros, such as Ubuntu or Fedora, are all on Wayland by default now - so I don't imagine x11 will stay relevant much longer.

Ai-folio or academic pages is basically my use case or target, but I want something with zero javascript, which tends to be a bit hard in todays age.

Only a few years more of my life lost to check all of the code of Linux and ensure I know what is running. I'm not bitter about and looking for better solutions to that at all.