An independent developer writes opinionated posts on software, privacy, messaging, and the web, and builds small CLI and TUI tools.
HN commenters like the personal site design and the CLI tools, and cite it for pieces on Gemini and Omarchy.
As a tangent, this site will overwrite its <title> and favicon if your browser changes tab to one of many random options, as well as showing an overlay highlighting the risk of keeping javascript enabled for once you're back.
I dug around and found them listed within the `kill.js` file[0]. It uses the visibilitychange[1] API and swaps it to one of the following:
Official Church of Scientology: Difficulties on the Job - Online Course
Ask HN: How could I safely contact drug cartels?
The internet used to be fun
am I boring - Google Search
what is punycode - Google Search
arguments for HN comment - Google Search
how to hack coworker's phone - Google Search
censorship on hacker news - Google Search
rust programming socks - Google Shopping
Adult entertainment clubs - Google Maps
Pick up lines suggestions - ChatGPT
Online debate argument suggestions - ChatGPT
The Flat Earth Society
Amazon.com: taylor swift merch
Amazon.com: waifu pillow
/adv/ - topple government - Advice - 4chan
r/wallstreetbets on Reddit
Infowars: There's a War on For Your Mind!
birds aren't real at DuckDuckGo
Lincoln MT Cabins For Sale - Zillow
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell | Goodreads
Fifty Shades of Grey | Netflix
jeff bezos nudes - Google Image Search
zuckerberg nudes - Google Image Search
bigfoot nudes - Google Image Search
Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - YouTube
Pennsylvania Bigfoot Conference - Channel 5 - YouTube
Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom - Linus…
Correction: Zulip is 100% open-source software, and has been for a decade now. (I lead the Zulip project). Zulip's protocol, which is used for client/server communication by all major clients, has extensive documentation including the complete change history for the last several years on https://zulip.com/api/ and https://zulip.com/api/changelog.
As far as I know, there is no mechanism through which Zulip could bait-and-switch a customer that Element could not also do. And I think that as a practical matter, it would be a lot easier for a new team to pick up developing Zulip if the Kandra Labs team were to disappear than the similar question for Matrix/Element.
The core reason is that Matrix is far less simple and self-contained than Zulip. I've talked to multiple groups who tried to build apps on top of Matrix and found it too difficult. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg/ may be a useful third-party reference.
This isn't to say Matrix is bad. It's just targeting a different niche. Matrix was designed around the requirements of a global social network, where you want to be able to keep writing in channels even in event of a network partition. As a result, Matrix is far more complex and less self-contained than a Zulip server is. If you are doing internal communications with some external guests, you are far safer from technical risk with a robust self-contained system like Zulip than something like Matrix that is also a social network.
Zulip's…
list of tab titles from https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js for entertainment:
{ "Official Church of Scientology: Difficulties on the Job - Online Course", "Ask HN: How could I safely contact drug cartels?",
"The internet used to be fun", "am I boring - Google Search", "what is punycode - Google Search", "arguments for HN comment - Google Search",
"how to hack coworker's phone - Google Search", "censorship on hacker news - Google Search", "rust programming socks - Google Shopping",
"Adult entertainment clubs - Google Maps", "Pick up lines suggestions - ChatGPT", "Online debate argument suggestions - ChatGPT",
"The Flat Earth Society", "Amazon.com: taylor swift merch", "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "/adv/ - topple government - Advice - 4chan",
"r/wallstreetbets on Reddit", "Infowars: There's a War on For Your Mind!", "birds aren't real at DuckDuckGo",
"Lincoln MT Cabins For Sale - Zillow", "The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell | Goodreads", "Fifty Shades of Grey | Netflix",
"jeff bezos nudes - Google Image Search", "zuckerberg nudes - Google Image Search", "bigfoot nudes - Google Image Search",
"Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - YouTube", "Pennsylvania Bigfoot Conference - Channel 5 - YouTube",
"Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom - Linus Tech Tips - YouTube", "MrBeast en Español - YouTube", "FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange" }
From [0]:
> What Gemini is doing, is saying “we don’t need no videos, images, stylesheets, nor JavaScripts, because we want to have a lightweight web experience, so we throw all that crap out!”. Fine, sounds great. But why does it require a new protocol for that? Why couldn’t one simply build on top of existing HTTP infrastructure, throw away all the baggage and instead implement a new Content-Type, which existing browsers then could parse?
[0]: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/gemini-is-solutionism-at-its-worst/
If you click to another tab, the site changes its title and favicon to a random webpage like:
- Pick up lines suggestions – ChatGPT
- Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - Youtube
- Amazon.com: waifu pillow
When you go back to it there's an overlay chastising you for allowing JS on an untrusted website. I thought it was pretty funny. You can see the list of fake pages in the source (which has the sketchiest URL ever due to punycode + the filename):
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/ an earlier piece on why no one should be using Omarchy. Setting the technical reasons aside, the creator of this distro is an open racist and using his products (even if they were excellent) increases the platform for spreading his dangerous views. There's plenty of excellent desktop software for Linux (Plasma, the up and coming Cosmic Desktop) developed by actually competent people, so I see no reason why anyone should be using Omarchy.