beorno

I made a website to be the caniuse for terminals, and it also includes some history/fundamentals stuff. I thought it was useful background if you want to dive into the capabilities of modern terminal and trying to make sense of the alphabet soup that is SGR, OSC, ANSI, etc:

  https://terminfo.dev/fundamentals/tty-architecture

I've been using Defang to deploy a sync server, and I'm loving it! I guess I'm partial to the simplicity of compose files. The cloud APIs are just way too bloated for the typical usage case of deploying a few services. Defang feels like what Docker Swarm/Cloud should have been.

I guess it would be nice to see a comparison with other CRDTs (Automerge, Yjs, Loro) and syncing frameworks/databases (PowerSync, RxDB, SignalDB, InstantDB).

Time wasted filling in forms and talking to service staff should really be tracked and associated with the business or government agency, then it's possible to actually assign a "bureaucracy/red-tape tax" based on the hours they waste for people using the service.

Without externalizing the cost of all the time wasted, it's just too easy to push time-costs on to the consumers/citizens. It's already a huge problem, and I suspect a major cause of loss of productivity in the western world.

By Evan Wallace (creator of Figma, esbuild) apparent solving one of the stickiest problems with CRDTs: working with trees/hierarchies (e.g., objects, JSON blogs).

My take after 20+ years in China living with WeChat and Alipay:

1) Green field: no or few incumbents or legacy platforms or regulatory capture to deal with - infrastructure in the West is antiquated and fossilized in comparison.

2) Open to change: People and businesses are living in a world that's extremely cut-throat and dynamic, and so they expect change, and are willing to try new things - the West is more conservative in comparison (e.g., the proliferation of QR code use cases seamlessly bridging offline/online that never took off in the West except when force by CVOID).

3) Free pass from platforms: Due to "be nice to China" Apple has turn a blind eye towards WeChat and Alipay running an app store inside of an app (which has always been against their regulations, and which MANY companies would like to do).

4) Hard work and (used to be) cheaper labor: 996 super-hard work ethic means they churn out features and blitz scale really well - they're just more aggressive.

5) In touch with the offline world: Companies in China have to deal with the reality of an extreme variety of users, from cities to countryside, from young to old, from rich to poor. They often build out big sales and support orgs of people walking around from store to store, across the country, whereas I think many startups in the West (often due to cost reasons) tend to do almost everything online.

And increasingly:

6) Government support. WeChat is pretty much the ERP system of China today. You can do everything through/on it. In some ways it's a utility. I guess every country could benefit enormously in terms of control and efficiency by having an platform that provides authentication, authorization, and payments as a base layer for all other apps. The government puts people / teams / divisions inside of organizations to ensure things are "running smoothly", but this works best if they have a few big companies to deal with - not a myriad of small startups. WeChat and Alipay are becoming more and more nationalized, and are already "too big to fail".

I miss not having WeChat in the West, though I'd of course wish it was done in a less 1984-ish way. Life has ballooned in complexity, and bureaucracy has gotten out of hand in the West... We need a radical streamlining in order to regain back our productivity (and not waste time filling out checks, waiting in line, calling/faxing, filling out forms, etc). Super apps, if done well like in WeChat's case, can offer that .

(I grew up in Europe, spent 20 years in China, and now living in North America.)

I wish they'd also implement IBAN and get rid of all the routing/transit/etc crap.

Good on Justin!

Didn't know log4js needed a canner? (Ok, couldn't help it)

The Space X impersonation "live event" is still ongoing, btw... It must have started 2h+ hours ago. That's some very slow reaction. (Btw, do report it as "mass advertising", and the channel as impersonating the SpaceX channel - I just did, and I presume lots of others before me.)