I keep hearing that "the web is broken". But how exactly? What parts are broken in a way that makes it worse than it used to be at some point? I think people who write this just glorify the past. I don't want to go back. Not to the age of Flash ads that crashed the browser. Not to the age where people overused HTML frames and basic stuff like opening in a new window didn't work. Not to the age when every site used tables for layout, and they didn't work half of the time. Not to the time when every non-trivial application required Java and the whole computer froze even if you were one of the lucky ones who got it working. Not to IE-specific hacks and ActiveX. Not to image maps...
And content-wise, there is more content than at any point in time. So what's the issue?
Nobody thinks HTML tables need a comeback. They think the days where individual people hosted individual sites with their own content, and formed communities around them through BBS or mailing list, was preferable to the one where Meta's algorithm decides 99% of what 99% of people see, optimized for "engagement," and applying their own censorship.
I'm not saying whether or not that's better I'm just explaining the point. Obviously nobody expects a Flash comeback. They miss the smaller-scale, more human-centric (or at least less corporate-dictated) web. Maybe they're nostalgic for something that didn't really exist, but obviously it has nothing to do with browser tech of the era
1. The JWT expiration depends on the user. Admins get only 1 minute or so, but regular users 1 hour. If I had an SaaS for enterprise customers, I would use very short expiration times for paying enterprise users, but long for non-paying users.
2. When 95% of all requests are reads, and it's not sensitive data, only validate the JWT. For dangerous operations, always require validation of the user status.
3. I prefer to let the server control the JWT lifetime. So the server can respond to any request with a 'token too old' error, and the client knows it must renew it and retry. That allows you to configure the expiration date of the token depending on the operation and how critical it is.
Recently I've been thinking about the nerds/hippie dichotomy from that book. Really missing the anti-authoritarian streak that was so formative in the early computer industry.
I wonder whether there is any tool that can prevent npm from downloading any package that has been published in the last month. While I miss out on possible fixes, this would prevent downloading some 3rd level dep that takes over my machine.
NPM seems to have introduced the flag `minimumReleaseAge` for this exact purpose. However even though are many recent references to it[0][1][2] I don't see it anywhere in the NPM documentation.
They probably didn't even think about that. Admittedly, 4GB is quite big, but if I were in their shoes, I would have expected that people are thrilled about using a local LLM instead of sending data to a cloud-based LLM.
I am still stunned that there are people who hate AI so much that they have a problem with the weights of an LLM being on their computer. To me, that sounds rather esoteric.
Disk space is one thing, but the actual download size is higher than some people's data allowances altogether!
It baffles me that a lot of people don't seem to be aware of this
As soon as everybody is paying spot prices, balcony power stations are not economically viable anymore. Even today, on a sunny day, spot prices for electricity are either very low or even negative. The more solar power is available, the lower these prices will be. So your balcony power station is replacing electricity you could get for free anyway. At night, when you are not producing electricity, you still need to buy the expensive electricity from fossil plants.
The reason why personal solar installations are profitable is that you can buy electricity for fixed prices from your local power company. You pay the average of the vastly different low (or negative) prices during the day and the extremely expensive prices on windstill nights. Solar allows you to use your own electricity when the average is below spot prices, and get power for much less when the price you pay is cheaper than spot prices. It's like a state-approved scheme to play the market in the name of decarbonization while actually increasing everybody else's prices and possibly even CO2 emissions.
Which is never, because even then you are still paying some sort of taxes on top of the spot prices and also network fees.
The price of electricity from the network also has to include the price of delivery, while homemade electricity only has to recoup initial investment.
Of course this means given enough home installations (in places with enough sun) the price of electricity from the network will rise, more people will install their own stations, some will even disconnect, rinse and repeat. I read somewhere this exact situation is already playing out already in Pakistan.
There are various good websites for showing the UK generation mix, but pricing seems less public. A lot seems to be done on day-ahead, which is pricing for the whole day not minute by minute. Is there a minute-by-minute ticker? Tariff?
(the reason I'm asking is that I'm skeptical as to how true this is for places that aren't California)
You can see spot prices at the top of grid.iamkate.com for example.
It would be nice to have some belated insight into how the bids look. Like maybe a few random hours released from a week ago?
Oh, and it's half hours. You can't buy or sell five minutes of electricity, just half hours, which is why your smart meter also thinks in half hours. 48 periods per day.
Aha - that led me to https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/system-prices , which shows that for the last week prices have been hovering in 80-180 range, and there was only one period of negative pricing during the day.
Wow, £100 per MWh and 12% is fossil fuels in the mix at 10:48am ... a bit more Solar adoption and maybe that 12% could go away, it's morning after all.
To me this illustrates that with renewables (solar and wind) the key is storage. You want to grab all you can during excess production/very low prices periods and then use that for the rest of the day.
You can do exactly that by buying battery packs but (1) they are more expensice pieces of kit than solar panels and (2) capacity and output of DYI/plug in systems is very limited.
A quick check online also says that (in the UK) peak spot prices are usually 7am-10am and 5pm-9pm, which are basically when demand picks up or hasn't dropped yet while solar panels are useless...
> You want to grab all you can during excess production/very low prices periods and then use that for the rest of the day.
Batteries help, but even that is limited in northern countries like the UK. If you look at the data, in July '25, solar produced 2.36 TWh. But in December '25, it was only 0.535 TWh: the output in summer is >4 times the winter output. So either you need to discard 75% of the electricity produced in summer, or you need truly gigantic batteries that store power produced in summer for winter. Both is not economical. Solar is far less efficient in the UK than in, for example, Florida.
In the UK wind contributes more to the grid that solar (not unexpected). Overall the issue with either or both is still that production varies widly over time including within a day.
With solar specifically you have the obvious day/night cycle, which makes storage required to make the most of it.
This is why smart meters are important to providers, they can more accurately model the spot pricing adjustments which means that you actually use LESS fossil fuels. Also most new meter installs support bi-directional metering
Over the last 12 months, AI agents have become dramatically better. And in the last 3 months, they have reached a point where, with some light guidance, they can write 100% of the code. Most skeptics have been convinced and are now realizing the impact. That's what you see in the stock market.
I don't know where the ceiling is. And how much of the improvement was due to better context engineering, and how much to better models. I would expect the context engineering to plateau very soon. Not sure about the models.
An even more dramatic change for the whole economy will be when non-IT, non-creative office clerks are replaced. This is mostly a matter of redesigning the interfaces around them. AI could probably do already most of the work, but getting the tasks to the AI, using their output, and communication with third parties are still a major challenge. Like someone processing insurance claims. AI needs a way to get the claim, to contact third parties (write emails to humans, communicate with other AI agents, maybe even call humans), and then to initiate the payout. It's already doable with today's technology, but still a lot of work.
True, but junior developers used to provide a lot of value while doing this. Now their value, while they are still figuring it out, has gone down immensely. For a company, there is no value in letting a junior dev write code anymore. And for reviewing the AI output, you need someone more experienced.
And content-wise, there is more content than at any point in time. So what's the issue?
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