I think if you really want to build something like that,
you need real momentum. Perhaps the ladybird folks can
succeed here, the future will tell. I don't think Mozilla
has enough momentum left.
The number of people using web browsers has gone up massively though over the past 15 years. 2%-3% right now isn't as bad as it would have been in the past
Well, you read one of their goals and visions here. That part is ok.
The question is: how is that goal turning out once it meets reality?
Tons of great ideas failed for various reasons. Alan Kay keeps on
pointing out how sad he is that Xerox PARC failed in many ways. Reality
is a strong selector - and the evil Google empire will make competition
really, really hard here.
The enterprise case can make a dent in distribution monopolies. I mean, even if Chrome is bundled all over the place for consumers, if an enterprise says "use Firefox" it can distribute it and enforce it.
At my unit of my Uni we have Windows desktops managed by central IT. As a software dev they gave me a bypass to get administrator access but they do enforce that we use Firefox ESR -- I recently got a brand new Firefox but after a while my Firefox does fall behind the times. I develop Firefox-first and let my tester find Chrome bugs, I think we find one less than once a year, over decades I've found that if you develop with the off-brand browser you have very little trouble with the dominant browser whereas if you develop with the dominant browser your product won't work with off-brand browsers. Developers like me have been keeping Firefox viable and probably cumulatively we create more enterprise value for Mozilla than Mozilla's own developers. I think Mozilla is the epitome of the badly run NGO and can criticize just about everything about it but... the cause of competition for browsers is one of the most important tech causes and it's one that isn't entirely lost. I try to only use Firefox except for YouTube which seems to be punishing Firefox users, for a long time I found Firefox compatibility was great but I have seen an increase in problems in the last year which is concentrated in banking and certain e-commerce sites, hotel booking and such. The only trouble we have with it is that we have an internal app that (for better or worse) loads 40,000 rows into a data table and performs really well on Chrome but feels pokey on Firefox.
I tried to be careful with a caveat, but you're not wrong. I think it's a good thing to chase and I hope Mozilla makes a stable long term commitment to it and doesn't expect instant results.
re: youtube, I really think it's a place where the fediverse is needed the most, and is unfortunately the weakest. I have seriously been considering something like an outreach campaign for niche categories just to build up the fediverse video universe (e.g. asking bands if they are okay with their live show videos being mirrored to fediverse, educational content, and maybe even something like a fediverse friday). Maybe a convo for another time but I think it's a huge issue where, unlike the browser wars, there's not even an obvious second best option.
So my take is that video hosting is pretty expensive and that it's hard to compete with Google because: (1) Google owns tons of fiber everywhere and has peering agreements with everybody so it has a better cost structure and (2) of course Google has a great advertising system to turn views into $ so (3) they can kick some money back to creators and still profit in a big way.
I have looked at the question of building something YouTube-like based on AWS where people could upload videos, they get re-encoded, hosted in S3, and sent out through CloudFront. It wouldn't be that hard and the system would be bulletproof and not require a lot of operational attention but it would be expensive... You could build something cheaper in terms of hosting costs but you'll pay it back in development and ops expenses until you get big.
And then there's the moderation issue: if you run an image hosting site people will try to upload CSAM and it's not hard to to enforce a no-ero policy but between that and hate speech and other problems who wants to deal with it?
DHH is like a script that runs permanently in a loop, promoting AI now.
Before that it was rails, though the old rails promo made a lot more sense
than the AI promo. But as long as you feed these people money, they do whatever
you want them to say. An even more hilarious example is Sebastian Kurz - dude
got insta-rich after politics. Like +100 million euros in a year. Tell me this
is not corruption to the max ...
The AI companies and security companies buy legislation. Everywhere. And their
financial kickbacks are AMAZING - otherwise you could not so easily change a few
top-influencers into tools to influence other people.
> Much has been said about the DHH keynote that he gave at RailsWorld.
First, it has to be said that Ruby on Rails is not Ruby, in that the
two communities at best are overlapping, but in reality, they are
separate communities. I never managed to get into rails; I bought two
books and did not complete either one. Despite all the promo, I always
found rails horribly boring. I also did not see the need for it. At that
point ruby itself already handled all my web needs (I wrote quite a lot
of stuff in PHP; my latest project called "web", originally "cyberweb"
when I was still using rubygems.org, came from the things I used and
learned back then in PHP), so I never really fully understood the hype
train. It took me a while to realise that this is how DHH operates -
he is a business man first and foremost, not a programmer. He tries to
build up hype. That's largely how rails got successful in the first place,
in 2006 or so, give or take. So when he now promotes AI and Rust, I have
a deja vu - he is on the promo tour again. (Note: I am not saying there is
zero value in rails. Evidently there is, but I am focusing here on the
promo, and DHH is a business man, not a programmer.)
> To me, it was the voice of a person in an existential crisis, but also a very jaded one.
DHH is annoying, but I don't think he is in any existential crisis. Now I think he lost the plot after his hate-entry against wolves, and casually linking shooting down animals to hunting down immigrants here:
And no, I am not interested in any right-wing nuts trying to sugar-coat this. Before I used ruby I studied countless books about strategies (strategems, in particular chinese one, from Senger in particular), many psychology books too (various influence-centric books, both with a positive connotation and a negative one, e. g. "how to win friends and influence people", as well as the six core aspects of manipulation and so forth) - so I am not interested in white-washing campaigns about DHH anymore. His dislike of wolves showed it too clearly: he switched sides and is now on the Big Tech Bros side. This was already made clear when shopify rampaged through the ruby ecosystem - see how numerous devs were expelled by the ruby core team (Hiroshi Shibata, who acted under command by someone else, we all know that; and the reason for that move, was due to financial influx into the ruby ecosystem, which brings us back to shopify and its evil influence on the ruby ecosystem. byroot will soon say "no, we need more shopify companies!!!" - and while that has some logic in it, no, we really don't need MORE financial addictions and kick backs in the ruby ecosystem. Ruby needs more independent developers, and unfortunately it is now stuck in a death spiral. I don't see how it can escape it, even though ruby, as a language is really well designed - people need to separate the criticism, including criticism of DHH. DHH is a nut; ruby as a language is well-designed)
> “Look how I don’t care anymore, and you should not care either” is not a great message when you are the headline speaker at the conference - let’s call it CareConf - that you have, yourself, lobbied for.
The thing is: DHH's promo tour is logical if you connect the fact that DHH is now an AI promo agent. That's why he has no problem promoting Rust. It just sustains the AI agenda now. DHH is like a tool for AI promo. I pity the man - he is just a shell of his former himself now. He talked about things other than rails. You know all know that rails is dead. DHH did a post-portem here on rails. It's one of the more surprising things to witness. AI is the new rage - rails is dead.
> The message from the supreme leader was clear: we vibe-rewrote HEY in a more performant way, it worked great, we neither need nor care about Rails anymore.
That was not the main message though. The main message was that DHH joined the AI hype train. Rails is not relevant anymore. Even Omarchy is just a promo tool for AI.
And, interestingly, the promo by DHH actually works. I am fascinated by that. Some of the clowns promoting it are paid shills clearly, but many people genuinely like Omarchy, for whatever the reasons. I don't fully understand it, but again, it reminds me of the rails hype. People LOVE hype. I don't know why; for me it never worked since I could not care less about what others are interested in (for the most part; I do "follow" some clever people. Follow is also such a strange word coined by antisocial media).
> he could have just left the toy he no longer loves - including its community - in peace.
But he is now an AI agent. So he promotes AI. He no longer cares about rails, that is true, but to him rails is a platform to promote AI. Same with Omarchy.
Big Tech Bros already pumped in millions here. It is a promo tool, similar to Anthropic claiming all problems in biology have been solved by claude (or will be, soon). They infect EVERYTHING now. It is the ultimate skynet slop. Just look at the ruby core team: claude is the main designer now. Does anyone feel like contributing to this AI slop? And, surprisingly: some people do. It's really interesting how AI changes people's mind. It's like in the old (two) movies Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But shit.
> But here is the thing: the rich and famous losing interest in the good stuff does not oblige the rest of us to. If anything, it frees up the room.
That is partially true, but ... can you generate as much hype and interest?
Many projects by solo devs fail here. Not everyone has the patience to do what, e. g. DHH does. You can dislike his methods but at the end of the day you will rate success somehow. One is by money. The other (or an additional one) is by interest by people.
I think DHH, as much as I think he is an AI tool, succeed in both. I am not interested in what this ultra-right nut has to say, but you have a bubble here of influencers and people listen to them a lot. Or, at the least, some do. Even matz said "I see no issue with blog entries of shooting down wolves and then randomly talking about migrants". Well, I have an issue with that, but it kind of means that politics and money infiltrated a lot of the discussion - on both sides, by the way. I am not so naive to assume that all criticism against DHH is genuine or honest either.
Edit: Hackernews has text restriction in place, so I have to continue via the reply here.
> It is abundantly clear that the LLMs are here to stay, that typing every single line by hand is no longer sustainable, and that the scales have shifted profoundly.
I disagree.
Ultimately via LLMs you become dependent on those who control LLMs. Not everyone wants that dependency.
And there is value for knowledge to be had regardless of LLMs as well. I agree that LLMs shifted the situation a lot in their favour, but I don't think AI skynet has won yet. You can find many people who really dislike LLM and are motivated to not get assimilated by the AI slop.
> What made me depressed was just how little care there was about the Ruby ecosystem and community, and the disdain with which David flushed the entire Rails and Ruby culture down the drain for the sake of “running it on a single Raspberry Pi”, as he put it.
That is true. It was clear when Hiroshi Shibata nuked all prior developers from rubygems.org. They built https://gem.coop/ in response - I am not sure how much momentum the latter has (remember that ruby right now is in-fighting more than gaining grounds, you can also see that on TIOBE, as bad as TIOBE is), but time will show.
This is not all DHH's fault only, though; neither only of Shopify. There are clearly people who never thought about the issue of money tainting an ecosystem, but it became more apparant the moment money became scarce suddenly. Why does a community need money, anyway? I am not paid by any of these companies. I don't want to, either. I want them to stop tainting the ecosystem via money and blackmail. Sadly shopify already tried so, and I think it is time to expel shopify from the ruby ecosystem as counter move. Unfortunately this alone won't really fix things; a lot of damage resulted from this. It'll take quite a while to recover from this.
> The “Roaring Twenties” of Weimar Germany also produced an incredible number of great, whimsical, fascinating artistic movements.
Weimar lasted from 1918 to 1933. 1933 was when the Nazis already took over effectively in power. See Trump's ICE idiots trying something similar but
failing hard (other than, of course, shooting down US citizens willy-nilly
style - no civilized democracy would tolerate Sturmtruppen kill citizens
like that, remember the ICE guy who stepped before the car, to have a casus
belli to shoot; the other ICE guys stood next to the car. This is a 100%
dead give-away of intention to kill someone).
So what did he omit? Well, the Nazis operate via psychology too, and people
could feel a financial backlash and depression, in part due to reparation
and other financial contributions they had to do, in part due to poor planning
and execution of the government. The Nazis made everything worse, but they
lied to the people about it, e. g. "we built roads like nobody did before",
and many more propaganda shows. You can all read it up how they operated
systematically via lies. I mean, the "Brausebad" disguise as gas chamber alone
is a dead-give away. But people are easy to fool. So, no, the Weimar republic
was not all that great. If it would have worked better than the Nazis would
not have had a real chance. (They organised their coup well though: Night of Broken Glass in 1938 required those ~5 years or more. The time before 1938 is actually
MUCH more interesting if you think about it. Hitler in 1938 already committed to
war and eventual failure, but the main turning point came a few months before
Stalingrad was cut off by the russian army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad - the loss came in 1943, but
IMO the battle there on the whole front was already lost in late 1942. Stalingrad was just more the obvious defeat, but the defeat came mostly due to logistics issues.)
> I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after.
So he acknowledges how his own analogy is tainted. If Weimar worked so well, why would the Nazis have had success? Yes, people are stupid, you see it with Trump voters or ultra-right voters in Europe; many vote because of having lost in other areas, in particular the economy right now (very similar to 1933 in many ways), but the main point is that Weimar nowhere near as much was a success model as the author of the article tries to show. And I don't see why any of that has to do with DHH and his Kool Aid preaching style. I find it a lame style but that may be just me.
> Why, of all the things we now can do in Ruby, do we choose to do Rust vibe-
> rewrites?
I don't. Then again I am not a DHH fanboi so ...
> It would be a pain to generate a PDF with layout - there were no libraries
Prawn was ok. hexapdf is even better. I regular try to get the hexapdf to
improve the pdf-autogeneration part. Hexapdf is very good, so ... there were
no libraries? Well, when exactly? Prawn is old: at the least 2008
> You could no longer build native GUI applications - there were no libraries
Well, ruby-gtk worked, even on windows by the way. Since then it has decayed.
My modifications of GTK core classes no longer worked. I tried to get kou to
think about this problem some years ago. Nothing changed, all my old code is
dead. So I decided to call it quits and no longer use ruby-gtk. Also because
of GTK5 going to abandon xorg-server. I fail to see why I want to support
their wayland-only crap future. Let's see whether this will succeed though:
Granted, there may be a lack of developers for both, but do we really want
to be locked down by corporate hackers that try to control the downstream
situation? Both QT and GTK have this problem, for different reasons. I am
absolutely tired of corporate shenanigans leaking into ecosystems and ruining
them.
> And a lot of people would just throw up their hands in desperation and
> utter The Spell Of Dread:
> Nobody does this sort of thing with Ruby anyway.
Thankfully I could not care what others say. Unfortunately, Ruby is also
declining, and has been in the last years. There is no way to deny it. The
numbers are strong here. If you google for "ruby is dead", you will find
things such as "no, it is aging like fine wine". People simply try to deny
the reality - that's interesting. But it is not an analysis.
> a Rubyist willing to produce PDF files from their Rails app would be facing a choice of a number of options, all equally unappealing
Interesting how he does not mention hexapdf. Now, I am not claiming hexapdf may
be able to solve all rails issues here, but what is interesting is how he does not even know all possibilities in ruby. Is he a rails guy or something?
He mentions:
Gotenberg, Ferrum, Prawn and wkhtmltopdf.
I stopped reading there. IMO if you critisize DHH, and this is well-deserved after the damage he caused in the ruby ecosystem, followed up by him hating on wolves and then casually ... mentioning how immigrants are like wolves (I have no idea what DHH is thinking; I think he is roleplaying the promo-role and in reallife probably acts totally orthogonal to the crap he writes in general), then you really really need to be super-sound in all arguments. Be it the comparison to Weimar (and then kind of wanting to omit how Weimar in some ways, not all, but some, helped build up the Nazi idiots) or not knowing hexapdf ... I am sorry, but that means you failed at doing your prior research.
Personally I already find hexapdf to be better than prawn. And you can also try to convince the hexapdf author to improve hexapdf; he was willing to do so when he has time and the suggestion made sense.
Thank you for stopping to read my article and yet mustering the energy to write such a long rebuttal. The point about hexapdf is duly noted, my omission.
I deliberately refrain from the whole DHH racism/faschism/nazism/oligarchy axis because that is not something I would like to convey nor discuss where I post.
You are right that he is primarily a businessman - and a very successful at that, specifically in marketing and creating hype. The very point that I am making though, is that of all the application points he could choose for applying his hype prowess he chose to dunk on the community that got him where he is.
And one of the things I have enjoyed immensely - and I know I am not alone in this - is writing Ruby commercially, also with other people. Simply due to DHH being such an influencing figure - the markets do notice, so whoever already was yelling "Ruby is dead" now gets more ammunition. I do believe this was an absolutely unnecessary, harmful gesture. But hey - it happened.
> And you can also try to convince the hexapdf author to improve hexapdf
The days of spending months to convince anyone of anything like that are largely over, but that deserves another article - and it's not a great phenomenon, even though it produces more artifacts (a lot of them quite good).
I am not sure but the less power Google has, the better. I am getting tired of those Trump milking machinery leeching off of others - we already see how Trump treats Ukrainians. The ultimate agent Krasnov, just as Yuri predicted in the 1980s already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
> Let’s give it up for Google - the biggest ad company on Earth
I think Google needs to be forbidden from causing more damage to the
EU market. And there need to be replacements too, once we forbid this
Evil entity from sabotaging EU citizens any further.
We also need real open browsers not controlled by greedy Ad companies.
I am also aware of the irony of using thorium here right now (based on
the adChrome code base). If I use Firefox, I can not listen to audio
since mozilla claims only systemd-pulseaudio using people can listen to
audio. Well, chrome plays audio on youtube (which is also owned by
Google, do people begin to see how big of a problem Google has become)
just fine, so I have no idea what Mozilla devs are smoking. I could
recompile firefox, to just use ALSA, but who in his right mind wants
to compile a 1% usage base legacy browser that uses ancient technology
to compile its outdated code base please?
Mozilla gave up decades ago on fighting adGoogle. And it can be seen via
small things too.
Ladybird may be a competitor at one point in time but they ban people from
their github repository, which also sends the message "do not contribute
to us because we don't care about you if you have dissenting opinions". Well,
so much for real competition, when projects get all emo early on. You can't
beat the evil adGoogle empire with wishful projections about "conduct of
people". That's not going to work. I don't subscribe to any random ruleset
made by random people I don't know and don't want to know when they resort
to censorship. But hopefully more and more people realise that something has
to be done about Google one way or another.
It would have to be somewhat more global than only in China though. After all Google's spyphones also operates globally, more or less, even if Google is a ruthless US tool for abuse of other markets. IMO we need to get rid of all companies though. That's not realistic, but it really should happen. I just do not trust any of these private entities anymore; verifiable open source and open hardware at all times should become the new standard. Is anyone really using Win11? Ever since the recall-spy feature I knew I could not commit to it; whether I can disable it or not is not a useful distinction since there is no more trust in that private blob, now supported via AI slop.
Ruby replaced all my shell needs. Almost 25 years ago.
I even have a shell written in ruby (it handles both
bash-like behaviour as well as ruby code as-is); admittedly
it is not quite perfect for everything, but I improve on
it steadily. And it works on Windows too, which was one
reason I wrote it in the first place (need to have it work
via cmd.exe as-is).
Never looked back to shell. It is too awful to use.
I think if you really want to build something like that, you need real momentum. Perhaps the ladybird folks can succeed here, the future will tell. I don't think Mozilla has enough momentum left.
https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/browser-market-share-202...
Firefox is between 2% and 3% now.