Is Reddit fighting the bot problem? They introduced a feature to hide post history which makes it hard to know whether you’re interacting with a spammy bot account. If anything they’re embracing it.

Actions speak louder than words. They’ve added features that help spammers hide their behaviour, they are rejecting API keys when people apply for access to deal with the bot problem, they ignore subreddits with spam-friendly moderators, and they ignore reports on vote manipulation. There’s a tonne of low-hanging fruit for tackling the bot problem on Reddit that they aren’t doing anything about, and often it seems like people outside of Reddit do a better job without access to the raw data than people inside Reddit do with the raw data.

I know they claim to care about the bot problem, but they appear at absolute best incredibly complacent about it, if not complicit. All those OnlyFans spammers, AI spam bots, etc. are engagement. They are ruining the platform for people, but engagement figures don’t distinguish between fake engagement and real people. The outcome of their current behaviour is for engagement to steadily rise while the value to real people steadily falls. It’s like they want to be the poster child for Dead Internet Theory.

I wonder what they say if you apply for API access and say you want to run a spam bot.

I don't think this is helpful to bots tbh. For over a decade every time I come across a clear bot account their comment history seems very human. I assume they're either buying real accounts for one-off astroturfing hit and runs in combination with deleting older astroturfing comments after the submission stops getting traffic to hide their footprints. Or more likely there's a giant ring of bots that submit innocent things and then comment preplanned innocent things in a giant bot circle and then make pointed comments on r/politics or whatever after establishing an innocent baseline. This is the obvious approach I'd take if it were me.

I'd also be really surprised if there wasn't coordination with Reddit employees/execs themselves for big advertisers.

Reddit can't even manage to regularly identify and ban bots that copy previously popular posts/comments verbatim, and that's a much easier problem than modern LLM-based bots.

The used car salesman mentioned that the car was in perfect working condition.

Actions speak more than words, especially true for CEOs.

I’m also a “text myself” kind of person. I’m using my own chat-based notes app called tetrify, which is now adopting the Matrix protocol for sync.

ooh, that's cool - come tell us about it in matrix.to/#/#twim:matrix.org when it's ready :)

Flutter developer experience is top notch. The best place you can see this is by comparing the experience of upgrading React Native vs upgrading Flutter. Flutter Web with WASM is also very cool. If you’re using a bespoke design for your app and don’t care about looking native, it’s overall a more predictable way to manage cross platform development.

That said, React Native has many great third party libraries whereas Flutter is dominated by a lot of low quality solutions.

Expo and the library quality is day and night compared to flutter.

Flutter has potential but just like any other Google tech it’s just shitty over time due to lack of TLC.

“You may click to consent to our and our 824 partners’ processing as described above.”

it’s a quirky text transformation website, how did we reach this point?

Looks like it was built by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=adamvarga but his HN account doesn’t seem active, so he may never see this. Still: hats off to him — the utility-to-bloat ratio here is… mostly good, modulo the 824 “partners.”

Many European labor laws came to existence thanks to their workers movements, which were primarily driven by, ehm, unions.

Because it happend much longer ago. If the US wanted they could leapfrog that step and go straight to federal laws covering the same things. It's just that there is no majority that wants it.

This is impressive! After Realm depreciation I have been trying many different offline sync options, they are especially few on Dart… Dart-Rust binding generator is pretty great though so it’s nice this is in Rust. Will keep an eye on this.

Thanks! Yeah, Realm's shift in direction left a gap in the offline-first space.

I didn't build Dart bindings yet (Rust → WASM → TypeScript for v0.1.0), but since the core is in Rust, Dart bindings via dart_rust_bridge are definitely feasible. Would actually be a great addition.

Are you actively looking for a Realm replacement for a Dart project? Curious what your offline sync requirements are. It might help me prioritize Dart support

I use Loro CRDT, which is written in Rust as well, on my Dart apps with flutter_rust_bridge and it works pretty well. For syncing I'm using their Loro protocol product although I used iroh before. However, the annoying thing about how the CRDT libraries work is that they're essentially key value NoSQL type storage, not relational. I would love something like SQLite or Postgres on both the server and client that can sync, which companies like ElectricSQL have, but no Dart bindings and also I'd prefer to be in the all Rust ecosystem as well as self host.

You've hit on the core limitation because SyncKit has the same issue. Document/key-value like Loro and Yjs. The relational model problem is fundamental to CRDTs. They guarantee conflict-free convergence because documents are independent, but that breaks with foreign keys and joins. Can't have arbitrary SQL queries and guaranteed convergence without coordination.

ElectricSQL and PowerSync solve it differently (full SQL but weaker offline guarantees). For SyncKit, document-based state is an architectural choice, not something v0.2.0 will change.

I'm curious to know how you're working around this with Loro. Are you building your own query layer or are you keeping everything denormalized?

Yeah I'm essentially writing my own ORM with functions like getFoo which queries the exact substructure of the CRDT to find the info I need. Apparently Postgres is getting a CRDT extension though but we'll see how it goes, typically it's not that fast.

This is a write up that may be helpful for you: https://sqlsync.dev/posts/stop-syncing-everything/

Schengen thing should be working like this but more and more I have been asked for ID/passport, usually by the airline before boarding or local police acting as border guards after arrival.

The new built-in translation in Firefox works pretty well! I never need to fallback to others, although forcing it to translate has weird UX.

Yeah I have thought about more user friendly Violentmonkeh before. This sort of thing just needs to be open source and non-profit, there isn’t even much upkeep to it. At what point will the investors want some form of return?

This is built from the system that created enshittifcation in the first place; a cleaner web is definitely not going to come from a startup.

This could be exactly what I need, AES GCM field-level encryption support is a godsend. Unfortunately seems like it’s planned and not ready. If I hadn’t just finished rolling out a sync feature built around the Matrix protocol, I would have loved to properly try this out.

i've been vetting matrix. what sold you? what are you using it for? seems like it is resource intensive and still a bit rickety. you using yjs?

My app is for chat-based notes[1] and I have been wanting E2E local-first sync on it for a while. Switched from Realm to SQLite after it was deprecated but never found a good non-niche DB SDK for it on Flutter. Tried to handroll sync + AES-GCM encryption with Supabase Realtime and it kind of worked but I knew managing encryption was going to be hell and also wanted collaboration features. Matrix was built for chat, and at some point I read someone call it basically a graph sync engine & potentially supporting general texting with other clients also seemed like a cool bonus.

That said, adopting it (even partially) was/is a big mess, there's a thousand corner cases with key exchange, etc. so it's really a big commitment, especially if there's no existing user-friendly SDK for it.

I'm not using yjs (yet), just going to more basic event sourcing that is essentially last-write wins but that's a direction I want to explore in the future.

[1] https://tetrify.com/

neat congrats on shipping! yeah i was kind of in the same boat which is why instantdb seemed like a good fit but it's early days. matrix feels like a house of cards that is meandering a bit with a ton of msc's. you using synapse or?

Yep just Synapse with more liberal rate limits and no federation.

I'm very curious on the use case you need AES GCM field-level encryption.

Zero-trust syncing of notes data. Honestly an overkill for the purpose but more of an ideological and educational goal.