I am already doing my part, by serving AI agents an infinite maze of garbage wisdom.

The best part? It requires very little energy to do this. A potato can do it! Thus, AI will always have something to train on, long after we’re gone. Beautiful, isn’t it?

What is stopping someone; say the FSF or some other group championing libre software from coming up with their own web engine completely different from the incumbent engines?

Building a browser engine is hard, especially when the target is moving at a rapid pace, and that target is controlled by Google. Like it or not, the web as it is today, is pretty much driven by Google (and to a lesser extent by Apple and Microsoft) these days. They can throw infinite resources into developing the browser engine and the browser itself. The closest competitor we have today is likely Servo, and they scrape by on pennies.

Developing something from scratch, with even less funding and expertise than Servo is a non-starter. It’s not going to happen. Sure, sure, there’s LadyBird and some other independent efforts, but I very highly doubt they’ll ever catch up to the three major engines.

To develop and maintain a browser, you need people, and they need to be paid. Paying open source developers is… quite a big problem in and of itself, even for things considerably easier and smaller in scale than a web browser.

surely if Web Devs tell them to go pound sand, or intentionally break the site when using Google Chrome, and put a message saying, “Go to Firefox / Safari for a better experience”, that will make Google backtrack.

They would not, because for every developer who would do this, there’s 100 who would not, because their livelihood depends on people with Google browsers being able to use their stuff. Google is in a position of power here: they are the #1 search engine, they are the #1 browser, they’re pretty well positioned on the mobile phone market too. The vast majority of businesses (companies or individuals, doesn’t matter) simply can’t afford to go against Google.

If the vast majority would, then yeah, Google would backtrack. But that would require a coordinated effort, from the vast majority of the internet. Likely multiple months of protest. That’s not going to happen, people can’t afford it.

I use Rust mostly because I am comfortable working with it. It hits a sweet spot of often letting me write in a functional style, at often zero or very low cost. It has a lot of high quality libraries, for almost any purpose. And the language itself comes with great things too. Traits, Option, and Result are all things I miss when working in other languages like Go.

It’s also a memory safe language that is also fast, approachable, and has a ton of good documentation. What’s not to like?

Anything and everything, really.

I wrote an idle inhibitor in Rust, a GUI WiFi connection manager for my wife, an API client for WriteFreely, I contributed to a Wayland compositor (niri), wrote a library & CLI tools to talk to Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards. I wrote the frontend of my personal search engine in Rust too.

But I also built a Tauri application where the backend and the frontend were written in Rust too. No HTML or JavaScript in sight, not in the sources at least.

Professionally, the answer’s the same: if I am allowed to write it in Rust, I will write it in Rust, whether it is a low-level library that talks with hardware, a GUI application, or some web related thingy, or anything inbetween.

Yeah. But I’m also using a keyboard layout where frequently used keys aren’t on my pinky, and a keyboard where modifiers are on my thumb cluster, rather than on my pinky.

A lot of people do. Especially on GitHub, where you can just browse a random repository, find a file you want to change, hit the edit button, and edit it right there in the browser (it does the forking for you behind the scenes). For people unfamiliar with git, that’s huge.

It’s also a great boon when you don’t want to clone the repo locally! For example, when I’m on a slow, metered connection, I have no desire to spend 10+ minutes (and half of my data cap) for a repo to clone, just so I can fix a typo. With the web editor, I can accomplish the same thing with very little network traffic, in about 1 minute.

While normally I prefer the comfort of my Emacs, there are situations where a workflow that happens entirely in the browser is simply more practical.