Sharing and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 01, 2026

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Tedium ☛ What The Big Tech Escape Hatch Should Look Like

    Today in Tedium: When I spent two hours of my time, working against a deadline, deciding that I needed to build a workaround hack for Google’s AI overviews, I had no expectation as to what that would end up being. Two years later, the site is still online, despite people constantly telling me Google would kill it any day now. But meanwhile, Google has gradually let its golden goose decline over a vague belief that chatbots are the new search. (That belief got more specific at Google I/O last week. More on that later.) Yet it’s clear there’s a demand for the old thing. &udm=14, the site I built on that fateful day in a Panera, goes viral frequently. Last week, it had another one of those moments, in the wake of Google screwing with the thing people rely on yet again. Morning Brew and TechCrunch recently shouted it out, and The Verge once linked it out one day, months after it went viral, just because. And all it does is forward you to the right place. In a world of unresponsive 911 calls, it is the 912 that actually works. For today’s Tedium, I wanted to share some thoughts on what search is becoming and why. — Ernie @ Tedium

  • Mozilla

    • Servo (Linux Foundation) ☛ The Servo Blog: April in Servo: new Android UI, focus, forms, security fixes, and more!

      Servo 0.2.0 contains all of the changes we landed in April, which came out to yet another record 534 commits (March: 530). For security fixes, see § Security.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Ömer Faruk B ☛ concurrent device registration without redis

    A user installs the desktop app on a new machine, signs in, and the backend has to decide: do they have a free seat, or have they hit their device limit? Issue a key or send them packing.

    The constraint sounds trivial when you say it out loud. For any user with a maximum device count L and an active count A, make sure A <= L holds. That’s it. That’s the whole feature.

    Then you ship it, two of the user’s machines hit “register” within the same millisecond, and your invariant goes out the window.

    This is the story of how I got it back, without bringing in any new infrastructure to do it.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Jeff Bridgforth ☛ WordPress 7.0 changed editor defaults | Jeff Bridgforth

    Last weekend, I logged into the WordPress to add some posts to my memory keeper personal project. When the editor came up, I noticed that the button and link colors were a much brighter blue color. At that point, I remembered an email I received earlier in the day notifying me that my WordPress install for had been updated to WordPress 7.0 by my hosting service.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Vadim DrobiniVadim Drobinin ☛ 1.2M Messages to Obsidian - Building a Relationship Map from 20 Years of Chat History

      Parsing a bunch of JSONs and HTMLs wasn't hard but wasn't fun either. Instagram double-encodes Cyrillic through latin-1. Telegram assigns different internal message IDs between exports taken at different dates. Facebook introduced E2E encryption at some point, so the same messages show up in three different folders. Telegram lets you export group chats or just your own messages. VK exports everything without asking. Instagram doesn't differentiate between broadcasts and personal chats at all.

      Once parsed into a uniform tab-separated format, the five exports produce different kinds of signal. Telegram and VK are mostly DMs. Instagram adds story interactions and a follower graph. Twitter is its own thing: standalone tweets are a publication corpus, DMs are half support requests and half conference coordination, so I needed the reply/mention graph to catch real signals.

      I wanted to capture a daily note per conversation-day, a profile per person, a stub per place, a life timeline, and whatever else surfaces - recipes, cocktails, meeting notes.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Frederik Braun ☛ The S in interoperability

    Perfect interoperability is not created through a specification, it needs constant maintenance. The ambiguity can only be removed through long-term commitment and regular feedback from implementations and users.

    The same is true for security: The SRI bug persisted for ten years and nobody noticed how implementations disagreed and corner cases were overlooked. They only aligned due to a real, user-facing issue.

    But these examples are not a warning sign, they are scar tissue that shows how the [Internet] is made. Standards can only mature through vigilant maintenance.