mdhb

It’s actually 28% I just checked but it’s front and centre there if you scroll down.

I had some additional logic that gave me a really easy but unintuitive way to tell with an incredibly high degree of confidence the difference between a bot and a human on keyboard scenario and for what it’s worth I think that is the specific thing that makes it worth the effort.

If I have reasons to suspect it’s a bot I just drop the request and move on with my day. The signal to noise ratio isn’t worth it to me.

As a side note I just happen to be reading a book at the moment that contains a fairly detailed walkthrough of the procedure required to access the Russian SVRs headquarters in New York in 1995.

Think of this as an analogue version and in no way a perfect analogy but it does include a step that has more or less the same security properties as this… anyways here’s a relevant quote:

“After an SVR officer passed through various checkpoints in the mission’s lower floors, he would take an elevator or stairs to an eighth-floor lobby that had two steel doors. Neither had any identifying signs.

One was used by the SVR, the other by the GRU. The SVR’s door had a brass plate and knob, but there was no keyhole. To open the door, the head of the screw in the lower right corner of the brass plate had to be touched with a metal object, such as a wedding ring or a coin.

The metal would connect the screw to the brass plate, completing an electrical circuit that would snap open the door’s bolt lock and sometimes shock the person holding the coin.The door opened into a small cloakroom. No jackets or suit coats were allowed inside the rezidentura because they could be used to conceal documents and hide miniature cameras.

SVR officers left their coats, cell phones, portable computers, and all other electronic devices in lockers. A camera videotaped everyone who entered the cloakroom. It was added after several officers discovered someone had stolen money from wallets left in jackets. Another solid steel door with a numeric lock that required a four-digit code to open led from the cloakroom into the rezidentura.

A male secretary sat near the door and kept track of who entered, exited, and at what times. A hallway to the left led to the main corridor, which was ninety feet long and had offices along either side. ”

Excerpt from Comrade J by Pete Earley

As another funny side note… I once discovered years ago that the North Koreans had a facility like this that they used to run a bunch of financing intelligence operations using drugs in Singapore where I was at the time and thought it would be funny to go and visit. It was in a business complex rather than a dedicated diplomatic facility from memory. But as I recall it was a similar scenario of unmarked door with no keyhole.

My advice is to go and learn a proper architecture (MVVM is a great fit in my opinion for MOST things) and then figure out how to implement that with something you enjoy using. My only bit of advice here is that the closer you stick to the underlying web platform the better off you’re going to be so if you want a concrete recommendation something like Lit here gives you all the primitives you need along with great performance, documentation and developer experience.

That too requires a substantial investment of time and resources.

I think in a more pragmatic sense too that you can form a very good understanding on if you’re going to have weird special requirements just from looking at what others have done with the same tools in similar situations before you.

Beyond that, Dart / Futter are truly an absolute pleasure to use for that use case.

This is going to become a blackmail target 100%.

I think maybe you might be mixing up some things here which is that there was once many years ago a version of Angular which was written in Dart which exists internally and powers AdWords but no longer exists publicly. Perhaps that is why you’re thinking of?

The only exception is about job postings and react, I’m not making the argument in any way shape or form that that isn’t the overwhelming majority of jobs out there, but that wasn’t what I was talking about I was saying it’s an actively bad choice for a project in 2025.

And so in that sense, the answer is web components. I know everyone hates the API but it was intentionally designed to be a low level thing to build a developer experience on top of and the best implementation of that right now is Lit. It’s also a pleasure to use and incredibly lightweight and designed to become even more lightweight overtime as new capabilities come to the web like signals in JavaScript or talk of native templating etc.

There is another option that I really like for certain kinds of applications which is Flutter which might sound contradictory to my original point because it skips the idea of the DOM entirely and brings its own rendering engine to a canvas element.

But it’s set to be the first serious Wasm and WebGPU based UI library on the web and has no problems spitting out 120fps (this is before even they have actually added WebGPU support and their newest rendering engine to the mix by the way) while keeping its rendering engine to I think about 1.5-2mb in size. It also gets you a single codebase that will run literally anywhere as an AOT compiled app.

That’s to say nothing of Dart itself which I cannot even begin to describe what a huge improvement it is over JavaScript and Typescript. If you haven’t tried it yet, do yourself a favour.

I’m just making the point that JavaScript and the DOM are no longer the only players in town and when you’re not trying to mix abstractions of a document markup language and an application a whole lot of problems just disappear like does this look different in different browsers or can I use this new feature etc.. it just works… everywhere… on the web.. on a desktop.. on a phone or an IoT device.