shayanbahal

Totally with you.

The same refusal/frustration made me start Mother of all VPNs (moav.sh) early this year.

A talk I gave about the experience and what MoaV came out to be:

Rage-coding the mother of all VPNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYygWN1MZDE

> Amidst the Internet shutdowns in Iran, as a technologist and member of the Iranian diaspora, I felt so much frustration, helplessness, and anger because I couldn’t do anything. After a few days of processing the initial shock, I was able to get to work and rage-code MoaV -- still ongoing at the time of writing -- which is a modular anti–internet censorship stack, able to run 10+ internet censorship circumvention tools on a small VPS or Raspberry Pi, with the goal of democratizing VPN provisioning. In the first two weeks, the project received tens of thousands of views on X and gained more than 200 stars on GitHub. This talk will be a case study of the project’s development and how to find these niche corners of the internet that can have massive social impact if done right. I’d like to invite the audience to reflect on the daily challenges faced by people in their countries or regions and how we can use our passion to vibe-code useful tools into existence.

Here's also the medium article (same copy as the X thread): https://medium.com/@sbetamc/moav-v2-is-out-ab2fff44a9d8

no time for X thread or articles: - https://moav.sh/docs - https://github.com/MotherofallVPNs/MoaV

Great to hear that. Are you aware of any grants or bounties for Arweave? I'd like to have a more resilient backend/setup, but don't want to spend from the pocket even more :)

This is so cool, thank you for sharing. I'm diving on the website and code and see what you got there. would be great to join and chat further about this.

RE Hello taking 18s, yes that is long, but one caveat is that with longer text it doesn't get longer linearly due to compression, the more repetition the better compression.

For those interested to know more and discuss the protocol, here's my attempt at documenting what worked at the end: https://github.com/shayanb/Nedagram/blob/main/docs/PROTOCOL....

I had to make sure the sound could be transferred on phone calls so it has lower baud rate than let's say dial up modems and many other methods (e.g. minimodem), I'd love to find a way to make it better.

Also got a suggestion to mix this with songs so it's less dodgy to play something like this on the phone. something that I want to look into as well.

Mother of All VPNs, Internet Freedom Stack

- https://moav.sh/ - https://github.com/shayanb/MoaV

Basically a one command installation of 8+ protocols with easy user management.

My idea is to make it easy to run your own battle tested VPN server for yourself (when traveling or not) and your family and friends. Pretty useful in national internet shutdown situations

Looks great, although I'm still not convinced to install it :) what can you say to make me be like hell yes I want to move from vscode to thicc?

I love coding, but I love vibe coding even more. I look at the code, do proper git commits manually and review the changes mostly. Vibe coding helps me do in a few hours what would have taken me weeks to make/debug/document.

Basically: Rage Bait is winning :/

> The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait

> Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”.

https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...

this is a gem from the past I believe

Human coders utilizing LLMs are better

Vibe coding a few apps I always felt humanity deserves (a bit exaggerated but kind of not :) )

- https://padsnap.app/ : PadSnap is a simple web app that adds customizable padding to your images so they fit Instagram’s/custom dimensions — no cropping, no quality loss. All on browser, no server uploads. Also no ads or login.

- https://shiryakhat.net/ : redid my podcasts website last week: Shir Ya Khat podcast, which translates to "Head or Tails" in Farsi, began its non-profit journey in 2016 with a mission to make blockchain and cryptocurrency technical knowledge accessible to Farsi speakers worldwide.

- life timetime visualizer, still WIP, feedback welcome: https://shayanb.github.io/timeline/

wise words, I feel less lonely after reading your comment, so thank you :)

I did a quick test and seems like the full admin access that I used to get is slightly fixed/changed. I'm wondering if there was an issue and I have enough data to show there were full compromised of all users data, but it is changed now (might still be vulnerable but let's say it's not). should I still release something? they should have notified their users of such an issue right?

I think it took so long that I moved on, but you are right and I should have done that. Probably I'll take a look again to see if I can do it now :)

I had a similar experience with another dating app, although they never got back to me. When I tried to get the founders attention by changing his bio to contact me text, they restored a backup lol

years later I saw their instagram ad and tried to see if the issue still exists, and yes it did. Basically anyone with the knowledge of their API endpoints (which is easy to find using the app-proxy-server) you have full on admin capabilities and access to all messages, matching, etc.

I wonder if I should go back and try again... :-?

Exactly, that was my point of frustration for years, but not anymore :)

> Posting my shots on instagram was always painful, so I created an app to fix the padding issue. (padsnap.app)

I "vibe coded" this app last week for my own sanity, and got a fascinating reaction and feedback from the only places I shared this app in (2 photography subreddits). The amount of positive feedback was beyond my expectations. Also got really good direct feedback and feature requests that made the experience much more fun to do.

Open to any suggestions, comments, feature requests, or simply if this tool is helping you I'd like to know.

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- /r/AnalogCommunity https://www.reddit.com/r/AnalogCommunity/comments/1keqwmv/po...

- /r/photography https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/1keq0sf/postin...

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The feature list is now much bigger than the post from reddit.

> PadSnap is a simple web application that pads your photos with customizable borders so they fit Instagram's recommended post dimensions without cropping or quality loss. Supports batch processing, custom colors, and instant previews.

Key Features:

- Modern, intuitive interface with light & dark themes

- One-click photo processing for Instagram-friendly dimensions

- Customizable borders or blurred image backgrounds

- Batch load and preview with ZIP download

- Works entirely in your browser – no photos ever leave your device

- Progressive Web App (PWA) support for installation on any device

- Works Offline too.

- Will always be free and ad-free.

-----------

## Technical Features

- Responsive Design: Mobile-optimized with adaptive UI for all screens

- Browser Compatibility: Works across all modern browsers

- Image Processing:

  - Lossless PNG output for maximum quality

  - Smart blur algorithm optimized for different devices

  - High-quality image resizing with proper smoothing

  - Zoom/scale controls for perfect framing

- Performance:

  - Client-side processing with no server uploads

  - Adaptive processing for mobile devices

  - Memory optimization for handling multiple images

  - Timeout safeguards to prevent UI freezing

- Installation:

  - Complete PWA support with offline capabilities

  - Small footprint (less than 100KB core files)

  - Installable on iOS, Android, and desktop

- Customization:

  - Custom color picker for borders

  - Adjustable blur strength

  - Custom dimensions support

  - Dark mode support with system preference detection

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* technically not my first, but the first that actually finished and I spent a lot of time arguing over tiny CSS issues with Claude :)

So... it's not just me that see the world as a collection of broken tech/tools that I know how to fix but won't have the capacity to do everything myself and it feels frustrating...! I really liked framing it as "Technical Capability as a Moral Weight"