I tend to agree with this. Why re-invent the wheel by spending engineering effort building a CRUD backend?

If you're trying to bring value to market, focus on your core differentiator and use existing tooling for your boilerplate stuff.

It’s the “chrome replacement we have been waiting for”, but (if I read this right), my data is still sent to Firebase? Also it’s a browser, not a “tinder but for cats” startup idea I’m writing for my cousin for a beer.

It’s not only not a smart engineering decision, it’s also a terrible product, reputation and marketing decision.

I'm not disagreeing about the severity of the security vulnerability that has been uncovered – to be clear, it's an absolute shocker of a bug. It's really disappointing to see.

But I still disagree that the use of Firebase, in and of itself, is a bad engineering decision. It's just a tool, and it's up to you how you use it.

Firebase gives you all features needed to secure your backend. But if you configure it incorrectly, then _that's_ where the poor engineering comes into play. It should have been tested more comprehensively.

Sure. You could build your own backend rather than using a Backend-as-a-Service platform. But for what gain? If you don't test it properly, you'll still be at risk of security holes.

> a “tinder but for cats” startup idea

Needs a name. Meowr? Hissr?

Yowlr. (Which is apparently a dubstep musician.)

(Dubstep isn't music.)

My cats would use Yowlr.

There's also the Centennial Light [1], a light bulb made in the late 1890s. It was first lit in 1901 and it's still alight today.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light

The centennial bulb is less a lightbulb than it is a toaster oven. Planned obsolescence is real, but the centennial bulb is not evidence of it.

i guess a lot of lights will work a lot longer if powered at such low voltage and not switched on/off like most ppl do, but this would reduce a lot nr of cases where such a light can be used

I love incandescent twinkly colored christmas mini-lights, so much that I use them for providing walkable light at night around the doors to the backyard for roommates. They have a warm glow that LED’s just don’t replicate yet, and the filament and glass make them more gem-like. And the twinkle bulbs are truly “random” and also create subtle and pleasing variations in brightness in the whole line, due to voltage fluctuations.

Not a single one has burned out in something like 4 years of runtime. Honestly the paint inside the bulbs is going to fade away completely before these things go out. The trick is 2 things:

1. Don’t move them

2. Use a dimmer and run them around 75% power

Which to be honest has the power efficiency of a dim campfire

It barely glows. The "lightbulb cartel" was basically a consumer protection because barring major inventions, any deviation from the thousand hour lightbulb would have severe drawbacks in terms of power efficiency or light output.

This, to me, is a red herring.

The free market is designed for this. If the bulb lasts 5000 hours, but burns 1/2 as bright, consumers can easily decide what they prefer.

And further, the cartel did not have exceptions for product enhancements, or improvements, which might have enabled > 1000 hrs without any drawbacks.

Why are people defending this cartel? Market collusion is generally frowned upon.

They absolutely sold long lasting lightbulbs. There were horrible and no one bought them except for specialty scenarios.

The standards were set around what could be sold as a standard lightbulb.

What did you do?

DuckDuckGo also allows you to switch off ads, for free, without any fuss or adblocker needed. Just go to the settings page.

Although if you aren't going to support DDG with ad revenue, I'd suggest supporting with a donation if you can afford it and value their service.

I really don't mind helping DDG take advertisers for all they are worth as long as it doesn't cost me my privacy or waste too much of my time.

And if they take something away from Google in the process --- that's just an extra bonus.

Turnabout is fair play don't you think? Google has worked very hard to take privacy away from users.

Back in the early days of Docker, I did a whole bunch of work to make WordPress behave as a Twelve-Factor App.

It traditionally hasn't behaved as one – which sort of makes sense, because WordPress grew-up in a world where long-lived servers with writable and persistent local disk storage was commonplace.

I'm sure things have moved on since those days. This was back in 2016. But it sure was a fun challenge!

I remember when I learned about making servers stateless by storing session information in a database and just not writing to disk and stuff. I was amazed at how much simpler it made things and added the capacity to load-balance multiple nodes without having to bother with session stickness.

Of course it made things harder in other ways like having a separate DB for sessions.

Do any of the 'live' camera feeds work? They're all static for me.

This is super cool, though.

They work for me too, despite my slightly hardened browser (firefox, private browsing, no third party cookies, resist finger printing, adblock plus, LibReditect replacing Youtube Embeds with Invidious ones).

I was unsure about the 3D aspect (especially since the map surface itself seems flat), but it was quite impressive clicking on live feeds and seeing them match the display (some trains seem to be missing from the live map, and some live cameras are delayed a bit compared to the activity shown on the map -- timestamps sometimes lag by 40s or so).

They all work for me, they're just youtube embeds.

> (I know about core)

What is core?

This isn't even a realistic use case of tracking. Nobody needs tracking cookies to get reminders about buying birthday cards.

Online stores can (and do) remind us about this stuff via email. No third-party tracking cookies needed – you're already a customer of theirs. If they want to get in touch, they already know your order history and contact details.

Or, you know, we can add our own reminders to a personal calendar.

Now you gave me an idea: We gonna launch a start-up working on an AI-based reminder calendar app. And in order to improve the invest... ahm, user experience we gonna track them across the web to enable our AI to propose futire reminders!

I don’t think the article makes the case that tracking cookies are required. It only claims that automated reminders can benefit people, which is far less controversial.

The article gives instructions on how to turn this off and concludes with the classic warning about being the product.

It's less controversial but also not really relevant. Those kinds of reminders shouldn't be using cookies, and don't need to.

The part about tracking being arguably good is a separate paragraph that is clearly written in contrast to Google’s tracking.

At no point does the article claim cookies are required for “good” automation.

Isn't that what Tesla tried to do? I've heard their software was good. Or maybe I'm imagining that.

It does the same sort of thing for the @ symbol. They, too, look a bit like a lowercase letter 't'.