tmcw

Yes, exactly: I'm not saying everyone loves to paint or cook or whatever, but that a lot of people do, and it's weird and bad for the response to this kind of article, in which someone shares that they are losing something they enjoyed, to be some form of "well, not everyone enjoys that."

Unironically this: isn't writing on paper more fun than typing? Isn't painting with real paint and canvas more satisfying than with a stylus and an iPad? Isn't it more fun to make a home-cooked meal for your family than ordering out? Who stomps into the holiday celebration and tells mom that it'd be a lot more efficient to just get catering?

Isn't there something good about being embodied and understanding a medium of expression rather than attempting to translate ideas directly into results as quickly as possible?

All right, I got nerdsniped into writing a "yes and" sort of thing even though I agree with the gist of this article :) https://macwright.com/2025/08/21/why-d3-is-so-verbose-anothe...

Development Seed did this a long long time ago in Drupal: https://web.archive.org/web/20130430031803/http://managingne... https://www.drupal.org/project/managingnews

I did consulting for the first 8 months of development, and then the company roughly broke even for operational costs since day one. I built most things myself which led to lower costs. My main cost was just rent and health insurance, which in America, self-employed, is both expensive and useless. I had savings from working for a decade in tech and minimized other costs. So, lucky position to be in, but also your average startup's monthly burn is enormous compared to what you can do by being scrappy.

Placemark was built around that idea - all the data is easily exportable & importable in many open formats. It should be straightforward to move to the open source version or other tools.

That's a fair assumption. There were some customers who benefited from real-time editing, but it was a big tech bet and led to a design that was harder to scale for larger datasets.

Yes, that's the rationale. A customer has asked about getting access to the source ahead of time and I'll try to make that work.

Personally I like both projects, as I hope I made clear in the OP - I sense that there's some history and strife here that I'm not clued into as an outsider.

[op]: Render is a web host, on which we host other applications. They offer a managed Postgres version, which is in my experience pretty similar to Heroku, RDS, or other managed databases.

Maybe the sentence makes that confusing - we're using other stuff on Render, which are basically "web servers" in the Heroku-ish sense, and we're also using their managed database, which is just a database. And it's nice that Render, like some other managed hosting providers, lets you boot up and connect those services.

I guess it's more than a database in some sense because it networks to our web servers and can be booted up in a preview environment, but it is mostly just a database. There are cheaper options that would be more work to wire up in such a convenient way, but the pricing difference between a database on AWS and one on Render is not the highest priority right now.

We switched to Clerk.dev. Thankfully we had only supported magic link auth, so there wasn't much information to migrate over. Clerk has been pretty good - they have a great Remix integration and solid admin experience.

Sure! I think Kysely is great too, but went with Drizzle for a few different reasons:

Kysely is a little more established than Drizzle, which I think is one of the major reason why it has broader adoption. My bet is that Drizzle is moving really fast, gaining adoption, and might catch up at some point. It's also - in terms of performance - super fast, and nicely layers on top of fast database clients.

Some of the differences that I liked about Drizzle were the extra database drivers being core and developed as part of the main project. It supports prepared statements, which is awesome. The Drizzle API also covers an impressive percentage of what you can do in raw SQL, and when there's something missing, like a special column type, it's been pretty straightforward to add.

I prefer the way that it lets us write parts of queries, and compose them - like you import expressions like "and" and "eq" and you can write and(eq(users.id, 'x'), eq(users.name, 'Tom')) and you can actually stringify that to the SQL it generates. Or you can do a custom bit of SQL and use the names of table columns in that, like `COUNT(${users.name})`. I can't say scientifically that this is superior, and it's almost a little weird, but I've really found it a nice way to compose and debug queries.

That said, Kysely is also a great project and it'd be possible to build great products with it, too. I just found the momentum, API, and philosophy of Drizzle to be pretty compelling.

Amazon, Microsoft, Esri, and others whitelabeled their code and did a better job selling it to AWS/Azure/Esri existing customers. And the OSS licenses made it easy for customers to switch off or DIY it when they wanted to cut costs.

The idea was to grow revenue by building services, and support the OSS components with that revenue and that growth. That didn't pan out, so here we are.

Subjective and arbitrary is exactly how the law works.

I mean, I get it, like I can't imagine being new to the scene and starting with "Unlimited Love" or something as your first listen, but of course - if you were there for the "Mothers Milk" era, it's obvious why you'd like the peppers.

The answer is: nobody knows, because nobody pays for anything with FileCoin. The services that get pointed to, like estuary, have the price of "free," and most of the incentives in the system are pumped in automatically to "reward suppliers" rather than there being any value transferred between people paying for storage and those providing storage.

Happy to adjust this conclusion - I've spent some hours trying to figure out how to pay for anything with FileCoin and come up empty-handed. Does anyone want to do a walkthrough of buying the coins, installing the software, storing data in exchange for FileCoin, and retrieving it?

In the meantime, you have to wonder: is this a sort of "you get what you pay for" scenario, and you pay nothing, so you get… no reliability?

I’m totally fine with folks trying - plenty of companies want to build self-driving cars and investors want to buy into those companies, and all that can just sort itself out and win or lose.

The problem is when folks - and I’m not saying just like this thread, but this is a phenomenon in some governance - when folks say that self-driving cars mean that we should reduce public transit or rail investment now, because those problems will be solved, right around the corner, as soon as the cars work.

If/when self-driving cars happen, sure, that’ll be great! People who are skeptical about the technology aren’t going to stop Tesla or Waymo from forging ahead. But car-centric planning does, currently, reduce public transit investment, and self-driving car hype does reduce the political will to build rail.

I agree. My town has a certain saving grace: it’s really old. The initial town plan was made before cars, so it was, at one point, a sort of walkable place. It isn’t anymore because of redesigns that favor cars and incredible sprawl, but there are still some of those bones in there.

“Modern” car dependent suburbs are beyond saving. We should save the towns we can and resist this suburb-style development in and around cities.

Sure, so the most direct answer is that a belief in self-driving cars that are safe and reliable and accessible isn’t grounded in any current evidence. We’ve spent a few billion on development and spun up dozens of companies and so far accomplished - relative to expectations - almost nothing. No self-driving trip across the country, like Musk thought we’d do years ago. The self-driving fleet in SF keeps breaking down.

Maybe in the future it’ll suddenly go from bad technology to good, but in my mind it’s like betting on generalized AI or small-scale cold-fusion nuclear: it could happen, but not a great idea to bet the farm on it.

Second. Car form factor is inefficient. Are we doing 1-seaters? 4 seaters with 3 empty seats usually? So every car has four wheels, its own computer, its own engine, and so on? In intersections, even with self-driving technology that does not exist currently and is showing no signs of existing any time soon - even with that technology, you’re still threading individual cars through each intersection? It’s not great.

Third. I’ve seen no evidence that the people talking about self-driving cars as a shared or car share-like resource actually believe in it. Remember Musk talking about how public transit is gross because other people breathe on you? Or the tendency of Americans to treat their cars as sacred property, so much that they’ll get in a fistfight with anyone who touches them? Transforming self-driving cars to some sort of public-ish transit requires just as much worldview shifting as actually using public transit, but none of the benefits.

So: if self-driving cars suddenly exist, sure. But right now, there is no baby. There is only bathwater.

Sure, so I’m from a tiny town in New Jersey. I was used to having to drive 30 minutes to the train station as a kid, and there are no buses there, so car ownership is mandatory.

Took a long time to realize that next to one of the buildings in town was a train station. And twenty years ago there were buses, too.

Anyway, solve the last mile by funding transit and rebuilding trains. We had them before, we should have them again.

Really liked the post! I really admire the attitude & intention that's there – at least from an outside perspective it seems like you've made the most of the experience and sort of had fun with it. Hope to take some inspiration from that.

CodeMirror powers a ton of editors that people use: https://codemirror.net/5/doc/realworld.html

It's exhausting to tailor language to the comments section. I once wrote a post called "the best programming font" and all the comments were about how it was not provably scientifically the best and it was just "my opinion." We're not writing math proofs here, let people express thoughts.

CodeMirror is one of the most important pieces of software, period. This thing is powering everyone's editors - heck, Chrome DevTools uses it.

CM6 has a steep learning curve, in exchange for being even more flexible than 5. It's worth it.

This list of requirements is long, specific, and narrow enough that it's really unlikely that what you're looking for exists, and if that did exist, it'd probably be extremely niche. At the end of the day, you'll probably have to build your own thing and be the sole maintainer or settle for an application that is not exactly what you want.

The author is 17 and writing code (and posts) at this level? The kids are all right.

Post on whether returns are correlated to inflation: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/10/inflation-vs-stock-...

tl;dr if there is any correlation, it is weak

Hope this kind of thinking becomes the norm! There are different tools for different problems, and SPA-like architectures are a good fit for a bunch of hard problems.