asim

Embedded JS micro app platform.

I never heard the term mini framework before but I like it. Applied within that context it makes sense. I was at Google 2011-2013 through an acquisition and witnessed some of what the author is describing. Actually something very specific comes to mind. There was a SQL library built on top of BigTable, Google's internal columnar data store, I think it was called Megastore [1]. The team implementing a new product decided to use it over BigTable directly because what it would mean for ease of development but it turned out as soon as they needed to do any data migration it was locking the entire database (or I guess the table? Aka BigTable). Anyway at the time this was a major issue and they had to revert to BigTable best practices as opposed to what this library was doing. Because essentially it was a library layer, not some new data store. Eventually Google built a different SQL based data store to replace the whole thing which you can see the open source version known as CockroachDB, which some ex-googlers invented.

Moral of the story, abstractions always fail the edge cases, especially at scale. But when the entire eng org adopts something, it works much better. Everyone has to be bought in. Which at Google scale is hard.

https://research.google/pubs/megastore-providing-scalable-hi...

Totally agree! Can't tell if I'm the go-go-go person anymore. So much stress...

Teach me oh Obi Wan. lol. I never made my bootstrapped efforts work. Neither did my VC funded efforts. Now with the next attempt, I think there's a lot of clarity in what bootstrapping gets you versus VC funding. Also solo vs team. Timelines are so different, the approach is so different. I don't think there is the same urgency in bootstrapping. You can have longer time horizons. With funding its a go-go-go attitude, especially with that finite funding. But even when it goes right and you became public, you are at the mercy of a quarterly report where you have to show something to keep that stock price propped up. I'm sure people running the company will say it doesn't make them think differently but the long termism breaks down a little unless you are pumping cash from somewhere.

Anyway, if I had my shot again, I'm not saying I'd renounce funding. Bootstrapping for a short period to figure things out is great, but funding also creates opportunities where an immediate business model is not clear. Opportunities exist for different approaches. Again not an advocate for the VC funding, but I'd taken even $500k these days to get something up and running as the cost of capital is basically nothing aka YC.

It's quite interesting because it makes me wonder how we make it efficient and predictable. The human language is just too verbose. There must be some DSL, some more refined way to get to the output we need. I don't know whether it means you actually just need to provide examples or something else. But you know code is very binary, do this do that. LLMs are really just too verbose even in this format right now. That higher layer really needs a language. I mean I get it. It's understanding human language and converting it to code. Very clever. But I think we can do better.

I don't do any of that. I find with GitHub copilot and Claude sonnet 4.5 if I'm clear enough about the what and where it'll sort things out pretty well, and then there's only reiteration of code styling or reuse of functionality. At that point it has enough context to keep going. The only time I might clear that whole thing is if I'm working on an entirely new feature where the context is too large and it gets stuck in summarising the history. Otherwise it's good. But this in codespaces. I find the Tasks feature much harder. Almost a write-off when trying to do something big. Twice I've had it go off on some strange tangent and build the most absurd thing. You really need to keep your eyes on it.

Based on the responses it's a lot of people who manage their own email domain or servers. Not the norm. I think most people would not have aliases and things like this but would probably benefit from it.

Agree with Go being basically C with string support and garbage collection. Which makes it a good language. I think rust feels more like a c++ replacement. Especially syntactically. But each person will say something different. If people can create new languages and there's a need then they will. Not to say it's a good or bad thing but eventually it would be good to level up properly. Maybe AI does that.

Well I guess part of the problem is I feel like I'm looking at the website with a magnifying glass...

Well listen, we have two modes of operation. It's either html/js/css in the classic sense, or Go templating with some tailwind and JQuery (or whatever the kids are calling it these days). In the case of react, something totally different. But essentially when you try to go that middle path with something that defines its own syntax, it starts to bleed into everything. It's not self contained. I'd argue maybe tailwind is like that as well, so you want to put it in templates or something. But if your htmx code lives in your actual code the way it does with Go a lot of the times because they promote building these partial functions, it looks horrible, very hard to reason or manage. I'm not talking one or two snippets, I'm talking when you have a full blown web app.

The reality is it's going to suit some people and some languages really well and others not so well. I think I like html/css/js and using AI to generate that. But I also like Go templates and trying to isolate that in a programmatic way. I find htmx in principle, a good idea, but when I actually tried to use it, fundamentally the wrong tool for me.

Thanks I'll look into it, but on first glance I feel like I just got space blasted by the website! What happened to simple websites eh

Man I did try htmx, and I was hopeful, right until I saw how it polluted my codebase. I can't say I have the answers, but writing a pure Go app, I'm currently using one giant css file, custom styling and inline html.

And now I'm at the breaking point. So I'm planning to move to tailwind and Go templates, but honestly, i was hopeful for htmx, so I need to properly see the usecase. Which i don't know is this. It reminds me of Angular a lot...

Yea its a mixed bag. I think some people like https://lobste.rs and there's always https://dev.to. But if that doesn't work there's also infinite sub-reddits on Reddit or classically tailoring your own RSS feed using Feedly or similar. I got to that place where I've curated my source of news but it's by category; Crypto, Dev, Finance, Islam, Politics, Tech, UK, World. I've got a feed for each and it's all grouped in a single UI like this https://mu.xyz/home

To echo what dang said in the thread. It's a place to hang out and learn about new things. Or sometimes old things. It's news, it's history. All with a tech skew. I've had this account since 2008. In that time I've used it in many different ways, including getting stuff onto the front page. Honestly trying to game it doesn't work. Post something people genuinely find interesting and it will make it to the front page and in the case it doesn't sometimes the mod will see that and think it should get another shot.

Kept trying to build it in a variety of ways. Ultimately its a Dev niche thing which maybe in the hands of tailscale will gain adoption but really struggled otherwise. There's definitely room for private ephemeral conversations but I think that can also be a more public utility. Who knows, maybe it lays the foundation for that.

So difficult but look somebody has to try. For us to make any progress we need attempts at this. Package the hardware and software, find a target demographic and go after it. I don't know if there's a mistake in going too broad or not having a tailored OS with a smaller footprint or being the general utility but we only learn through these tests. Good luck Umbrel team!

Mu - a personal app platform that includes chat with AI, news, video, posts and now mail. Solving a personal problem with ads, algorithms, tracking.

Tech is too addictive now. We need to get back to utility value. I'm trying to build an alternative with myself as user 1.

https://mu.xyz https://github.com/asim/mu

Yes, personally I think this idea that our identities are defined by careers, job titles or being a founder is inherently very dangerous. So when it all falls apart, who are you? It is very dangerous. We need to stop evangelising this way of thinking and try to be more holistic about it. Life before startups, tech, etc was not defined like this. Yes people's last names were effectively the work they did, but the whole of your identity was not wrapped up in something that could disappear in an instant. Or something we have effectively infatuated as a real necessity. The reason so many of us fail is because we're building things nobody needs. Maybe that's harsh but I have to ask myself, if I didn't build go-micro.dev, would something else have existed to replace it, yes, wholeheartedly yes. My contribution to software is not that significant. If Google didn't exist, would something else exist, Yes, it would.

We have to look at the world differently. OK there's Elon with his effed up childhood and maniacal need to "save humanity" but when you really get down to it, he falters at the simplest questions about life. This man doesn't know what's real and what's not. Let's be clear, those we follow are just human and often what gets them to where they are, while its hard work, if it wasn't them, it would be someone else and those people would be just potentially in the right place, at the right time, and sacrificing things that maybe we shouldn't sacrifice. Life went on long before tech and it will continue long after tech.

Sometimes we need a reset. I think after some time away you start to gain clarity and then you understand what went wrong or what didn't work. And then if you want to decide to do it again, you can with a better perspective, but you can equally find more value, the same value elsewhere. Some people find contributing to a shared mission elsewhere also works. I hope you figure things out.

I never thought I would fail. For 7+ years I think that's what drove me. Then things changed. Life changed. They attribute it to burnout and often that is the case, but you have to also factor in life and motivation changes. If the success doesn't come soon enough, you start looking towards other things, other aspects of life, if I may even say, more rewarding and real parts of life. Startups are a microcosm of what life is about, but we get hung up on the outcomes, our identities become intertwined with the mythology of the founder. It's important to break free of some of these notions and this retelling of the narrative even for failed founders in the way of "it's burnout", "lack of product market fit". Life goes on. We should look at these more as experiences to learn from, phases of life and then many go towards the next thing, and that's OK. To any failed startup founder here, it's okay, move on with life, try again, just keep going.

A little while ago I posted Mu on here asking for feedback. It was really useful. I was hoping I could get a bit more feedback as I iterate on the product.

Mu is a personal app platform that provides services without ads, algorithms, or tracking.

Source: https://github.com/asim/mu

Originally I wrote it entirely for me. There are still aspects that need adapting to be more broadly adopted but I'm working on it e.g card customisation on home screen.

Two reasons. 1 - they print cash through Ads which means there's opportunity or desire to do more things, or even a feeling like you should or can. So new products emerge but also to try diversify the revenue stream. 2 - the continuous hiring and scale means churn, people get bored, they leave teams, they want to do something new, it all bifurcates. It keeps fragmenting and fragmenting until you have this multilayered fractal. It's how systems in nature operate so we shouldn't think corporation's will be any different. The only way to mitigate things like this is putting in places limits, rules and boundaries, but that also limits the upside and if you're a public company you can't do that. You have to grow grow grow and then cut cut cut and continue in that cycle forever or until you die.

Unfortunately Google's problem is the product is dictated by the architecture of the APIs and this is an issue for anything they do. At one point long ago every Google product was disjointed and Larry Page told everyone they needed to be unified under a single theme and login. Then over time with the scale of the company you become entirely dependent on the current workflows. To work around it, all of a sudden there's a new UI for a new product and it looks super clean right until you try do something with that login or roles or an API key that has to effectively jailbreak the flow you're in. Painful. It's why startups win. Small, nimble, none of that legacy cruft to deal with. Whoever is working hard to fix these problems at Google KUDOS TO YOU because it's not easy. It's not easy to wrangle these systems across hundreds of teams, products and infrastructure. The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve and the issue is entirely about operating within the limitations of the system but for good reason.

I hope they figure out a lot of the issues but at the same time, I hope Gemini just disappears back into products rather than being at the forefront, because I think that's when Google does it's best work.

As a sysadmin in the 2007-2011 timeframe I literally used openssl to generate csrs, went to godaddy to purchase SSL certificates and then manually deployed them to servers. Man what a world of change. Let's encrypt is one the best services we've had on the internet. I wish we had more things like this.

It was not always like this. Google was very secretive in the early days. We did not start to see things until the GFS, BigTable and Borg (or Chubby) papers in 2006 timeframe.

I'd like to start seeing the architecture and design of how cloudflare works. Not blog posts, like a whole write-up. If you're going to have this many outages and you're a public company which 2/3rd of US infrastructure probably depends on then it might need some external input. Obviously they know what they're doing. This is not a blame game but the tools are starting to creak.

I recently saw this https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11714 on conversational networks and it got me thinking that a lot of the problem with polarization and power struggle is the lack of dialog. We consume a lot, and while we have opinions too much of it shapes our thinking. There is no dialog. There is no questioning. There is no discussion. On networks like X it's posts and comments. Even here it's the same, it's comments with replies but it's not truly a discussion. It's rebuttals. A conversation is two ways and equal. It's a mutual dialog to understand differing positions. Yes elite can reshape what society thinks with AI, and it's already happening. But we also have the ability to redefine our networks and tools to be two way, not 1:N.

Kudos to Mitchell for doing it. Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status, but knowing Mitchell, he's not about the money, power, status, etc so the project is in good hands and you can expect this to stay free.

The article is very hard to read, with ads on one side, links in every other sentence. I could not even figure out where Zig has gone... TLDR anyone?

Edit: Scrolling comments I see something called Codeberg but why am I getting connection refused?

Another edit: Oh because Codeberg is down. I had to look at another thread on the frontpage to find that out...

It's more honest than the Replicate answer but I think inevitably if you can't raise the next round and you get distracted by the shiny AI that this is the path taken by many teams. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There was an exuberant time when all the OSS things were getting funded, and now all AI things get funded. For many engineer founders, it's a better fit to go build deep technical stuff inside a bigger company. If I had that chance I would probably have taken it too. Good luck to the Bun team!