The list is missing Lakeman's recent travels in Afghanistan: https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/

They can, they will be available on the black market along with every other widely used illicit recreational drug.

Banning tobacco won't make the problem disappear, people want their poison, including sensible rational people who accept the risks and use in moderation.

Banning tobacco will push it underground, giving criminals a new revenue stream which can fund more harmful activities.

Not only will the govt lose out on tobacco tax, they may have to ramp up law enforcement expense to crack down on the now illicit tobacco trade and ever more empowered criminals.

Users of the black market products will have no guarantee of quality assurance, products may contain additional harmful additives.

There's an optimal level of tax and regulation to keep distribution out of criminal control, educate the general public, and offer support to the serious victims, all the while collecting tax to fund these activities.

This is precisely what many countries are already doing to varying degrees.

And the same argument can be made for many vices, including gambling and alcohol.

Do you have a source for this?

> All HTTPS traffic was decrypted and logged. No modifications were made to the traffic. The app was used as any normal user would use it.

Is it really that simple to inspect network traffic on an iPhone, namely to get it to trust the user-installed cert? I do quite a bit of network inspection on Android and I find it to be painful, even if the apps don't use certificate pinning.

Regardless, it highlights the importance of having control of our own devices, including the ability to easily inspect network traffic. We have the right to know where our data is being sent, and what data is being sent.

I recall during COVID it was discovered that Zoom was sending traffic to China. There was also the recent case of Facebook tracking private mobile browsing activity and sending it to their servers via the FB app. Imagine how much questionable traffic goes unnoticed due to the difficulty in configuring network inspection for apps.

Maybe describe why you're interested in Netherlands & Estonia.

.store .online .tech .site .fun .pw .host .press .space .uno .website

https://radix.website/

The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?

1. manifest.json: a JSON file that defines the app's name, icons, theme colors, and how it should launch when installed.

2. Service worker: a JS file that controls things like resource caching for offline usage

Unfortunately PWAs don't receive first class support compared to native apps. Still, I still hope to see wider adoption. I think for many not-too-complex apps, they can significantly lower the cost of development, and the development experience could be as simple as

- Building with HTML + JS + CSS. No clunky SDKs, reduced need to test on painfully slow emulators or expensive physical devices

- Installable from a browser. No need to maintain a listing in the Playstore/App Store, avoiding policy headaches, rent, etc.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

Their top 3 priorities:

1. Apple's ban of third party browsers on iOS is deeply anti-competitive

2. Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.

3. All artificial barriers placed by gatekeepers must be removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent functionality with greater privacy and security for demanding use-cases.

Website: https://open-web-advocacy.org/en/

Whilst this was mostly true, it was still a very unpleasant experience, and my service was hanging by a thread for much of the time. I recently moved an important part of the stack from EC2 to Fargate, with two services: a single task to post jobs to a queue, and another service running many tasks to process jobs from the queue.

The incident knocked out the job posting service, which would not come back up. Had I left it to AWS to resolve automatically, my service would have been out for maybe 12 hours.

Fortunately the worker tasks were still available and waiting. I tracked down the old "job poster" code that used to run on an ec2. I sshed into an old ec2, and "deployed" the code by copying and pasting onto the server. The service came back up, although I had to edit the code directly on the ec2 to slow things down, since the ec2 had 1vCPU and an upgrade was not possible during the incident. Furthermore, Fargate workers would not scale out if they had too much work.

This was at about 2 or 3 AM my time, and was carried out whilst customers were emailing in, and cloudwatch alarms were going off all over the place. Once the service was back up, even with my unnerving hacky solution, I got a couple hours sleep.

What I've learnt:

- When the incident was first reported, I thought it would last 2 hours max. A 12 - 16 hour disruption to AWS resources is absolutely possible.

- Maybe don't use us-east-1 for future projects, but I'm not convinced there's much logic to this. Despite past issues, it's impossible to predict where an outage might occur and the affected resources, as well as spillover into other regions.

- Think of ways to make my service more portable, to other regions, even other cloud providers, but the motivation to do this will be gone by tomorrow. It's way more valuable for me to focus on customers, new features, etc, rather than bomb-proofing the service. I don't write airline or medical software. An outage of my service isn't going to kill anyone, and most users are understanding. I'll accept the hit.