Alexa or Facebook: their usefulness is only a byproduct of privacy invasion. They need these information in order to complete their services.

In tech, there’s no way for a big company to not lie because marketers have no real understanding of they are selling.

Every relation with a commercial entity is, by essence, temporary. I pay for a service with strings attached. If the service degrade, if my conditions are not respected, I stop paying.

Androidification is not about degrading the user experience. It’s about closing doors, removing special use cases, being less and less transparent. [...] Android was, at first, an Open Source project. With each release, it became more closed, more proprietary. [...] Besides the Linux kernel, Google was always wary not to include any GPL or LGPL licensed library in Android.

Chesterton’s Fence is the principle that one should not remove a fence until they understand why it was put there in the first place.

On the contrary, Admiral Grace Hopper’s maxim states “The most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘We’ve always done it this way’”.

if you do any sort of cost/benefit analysis of whether to make a change, the status quo always has a built in advantage: there’s no additional costs to adopting the status quo.

I find the strongest arguments in favor of making a change, and the strongest arguments in favor of keeping things as they are, and then I weigh those and make a decision.

the reason we should care about Chesterton’s Fence is that part of finding the best arguments for the status quo are finding the arguments that produced it.

The replacement of the GNU coreutils is not for the sake of security or performance. The expérience will allow to integrate more Rust code in the long term.

Local-first allows users to enjoy all the benefits cloud apps bring (like seamless real-time collaboration, syncing, auto backups) while keeping the data ownership aspect from traditional desktop software.

An ejectable app allows users to "eject" at any time:

• get a zip of all the data
• download the binary to run on a backend sync server or locally
• able to import to the app again

and a comment from Sebsauvage:

• the data format must be open and free

(via https://sebsauvage.net/links/?b3epNQ)

it means that when you're working, you're there, you're present and you do the best job you can. But you need time away from work for what's most important - living your life.

About the web of the 90s:

Many people had personal web sites, usually published on GeoCities, where exploring the web was a fun adventure that was not fuelled by algorithms.

The Web 1.0 died because search engines prioritzed other contents. In some ways it is good because we get far more accurate search results. On the other hand, it's all about the money and tracking.

How to turn it positive?

Use social media sparsely: quit Facebook, Instagram and others. Look forward for decentralised alternatives like Mastodon. Break the dopamine addiction and turn off all notifications from social media. Familiarize yourself with POSSE and make your site the single source of truth for all your content online.

Discovering Web 1.0 through neocities: a modern implementation of GeoCities.
There are also other website aggregators such as personalsit.es.

Look for a blogroll on personal websites you come across. If you own a website, add one!

TL;DR;

Everything built in 24 or 48 hours is not well functional

Sur le principe:

Si tu n’as pas pris le temps d’écrire ce texte, je ne vois pas pourquoi je devrais prendre le temps de le lire.

Poslovitch y décrit son utilisation des outils d'IA, et des raisons qui le pousse à ne pas les utiliser.

HTML is complex:

• 111 elements
• Developers don't know the difference between HTML tags and elements (so this one begs the question how well developers understand HTML if they’re not sure about the difference between elements and tags)
• To reduce HTML payload is not to write HTML that can be left out without a document turning invalid.

Jens Oliver Meiert is writing a book about it.

Instead of politic, all the action now is happening in mainstream culture—which is changing at warp speed.

Culture is often reduced between art and entertainment, with entertainment eating art.

We’re witnessing the birth of a post-entertainment culture.

Move business examples are provided and the scripted series has started to shrink.

In 2024, musicians are actually worth more old than young, dead than alive.

Example of Sony with Michael Jackson catalog.

The new model replacing the cutural food chain is "distraction".

The end goal is addiction.

Instead of movies, users get served up an endless sequence of 15-second videos. Instead of symphonies, listeners hear bite-sized melodies, usually accompanied by one of these tiny videos—just enough for a dopamine hit, and no more.

This is the new culture.

Just listen to the words people use to describe their toxic online interactions: doomscrolling, trolling, doxxing, gaslighting, etc.

This culture brings fun, but not happiness.

Just telling the truth about the dopamine cartel would be a major step forward for the culture in 2024.

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.

In some cases, yes. Mostly not.

Aujourd’­hui c’est Google Chrome qui a la main et on voit appa­raitre le même schéma que par le passé. [...]
La situa­tion n’est pas exac­te­ment la même que celle des années 2000 mais elle n’est pas si éloi­gnées que ça.

Il y a plein de navi­ga­teurs mais en réalité Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Inter­net Explo­rer et les autres sont des déri­vés de Chro­mium. Chro­mium c’est la base open source de Chrome, contrô­lée par Google.

Une fois qu’on a retiré tout ce qui se base sur Chro­mium, il reste Safari et Fire­fox.

Why Firefox forks is not a solution.

1. No fork is doing large-scale engineering work on the browser.
2. Some forks keep insecure APIs
3. Mozilla code is still running under the hood. They must be trusted as for the Firefox browser.
4. The fork is still 99.99% Mozilla code contributions
5. The fork can need more time to apply fixes

Le soucis c'est la portée: une très faible partie de la population vont lire Sebsauvage ou LeHollandaisVolant.

Il faut pour cela que ces habitudes soient à la portée de tous, partagé massivement.

Le raisonnement se tient. Avec les évènements actuels, on peut justifier que la licence MIT est une licence conservatrice.

Voir The Value of Open Source Software

Le soucis avec la licence MIT et autres très permissive peut être réduit au paradoxe de la tolérance:

le paradoxe de la tolérance : en étant tolérant avec tout le monde sans limite, on tolère aussi des intolérants qui vont nuire à la tolérance générale.

Concernant les entreprises produisant des services numériques

On estime que les firmes devraient dépenser 3 fois plus en logiciel si l’open source n’existait pas.

Concernant l'IA, la position actuelle est partagée par AI Industry is Trying to Subvert the Definition of “Open Source AI”.

Mon rêve en ce moment, ça serait d'avoir un note pour chaque outil numérique qui évaluerait si les données sont revendues ou non, si c'est sécurisé ou non, le risque que ça soit acheté par une multinationale peu scrupuleuse...

tosdr.org/fr ya ce site qui pourrait ressembler un peu a ce que tu voudrais

Yes tosdr et @exodus sont des supers ressources !

(Exodus Privacy)

The browser provides a default text size based on user preferences, and our text should be relative to that preference. Establishing our root font-size with an em value helps keep that relationship intact.

About the definition of one rem:

I really do want sites to usually just give me text around 24px (or ‘large’), because that’s a pretty good default for me.

Sites with smaller body text would ideally increase their font size, but sites with the same size or larger text certainly shouldn’t get even bigger.

Yes I share this assumption.

I slightly better approach:

html {
  font-size: clamp(1em, 0.9em + 1vw, 1.5em);
}

A love letter to the personal website

A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it's your space and you can do whatever you want with it. It can be a single-joke website.

On the other side, it is now intimidating to be a newcomer now with all these frameworks. They skip right over the basics.

The website we use today for fun are also businesses. They need an account to view the content. They have a barrier to entry.

Your website, your rules. There's no reply guys on your own website if you want to. it doesn't have the downsides of Twitter.

You can be a creator anywhere on the internet these days, but there's only a small handful of places where you actually own your own content. Your own website is one of them.

Now AI is generating slop. During the talk, Maggie asks: is there a future in which we need to have some kind of "reverse Turing test" to prove our humanity on the internet?

The whole point of WWW is to be decentralised and independent. It was released as an open standard so that access could be as democratic as possible.

To bring the WWW spirit back, we can carve out our own individual spaces on the web. HTML is accessible, and there are many web services to build websites nowadays. So why aren't we doing it? we don’t build websites for ourselves like we used to, we build them for the audiences we want.

Try something. For the nerds: try out. The site deploys in less than 30s. Try new CSS things as lomng as you rely on progressive enhancement.

The personal site isn't dead. It's just been forgotten in the commercialised, capitalist web of today. We owe it to ourselves to rediscover this lost art. [...] So, once again my digital call to arms: build your own website. Make it fun. Make it pointless. But most importantly: make it yours.

Appendix: look at these cool websites

Greg Morris started Micro Social: https://gregmorris.co.uk/2025/02/12/micro-social-the-launch.html

As I wrote about right at the start, I wanted Micro Social to be very targeted in the way it worked. Providing something that I wanted from a micro.blog app, and not becoming all things to all people. It’s easy to get side tracked, though. The app is already a long way away from what I intended it to be, with features and abilities that I didn’t even dream of when I started.

Saying no to these users is hard, but it has to be because he can not do everything.