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arantius commented on Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web   tweeks.io/onboarding... · Posted by u/jmadeano
glenstein · a month ago
It certainly may, I'm not sure. I think the ecosystem was at its apex when userscripts.org had a browseable library of scripts that even laypeople could install with a click. It was like a second ecosystem of browser extensions.

My understanding is that it's a bit more of a fragmented ecosystem now but I could be wrong.

arantius · a month ago
IME the modern web is not amenable to user scripting like it was ~10 years ago. Then, most things were a simple static HTML document, more templated then generated. Now virtually everything (whether it's useful or not) is a heavy complex "app" that pops in at various times, only has arbitrary/volatile identifiers, and is generally harder to interact with as a user script.
arantius commented on Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web   tweeks.io/onboarding... · Posted by u/jmadeano
jmadeano · a month ago
I've also noticed the fragmentation of the ecosystem. There is still some powerful stuff out there, but it is hard to find and UX has a lot of room for improvement (especially for laypeople).

Part of the fragmentation (on the extension side at least) came from Manifest V3 which required a massive re-write of logic and introduced a lot of friction for userscript managers. Many projects just died or stayed in maintenance mode since it was a big undertaking. MV3 certainly has been a pain to work with on our side.

arantius · a month ago
For Greasemonkey proper (which has always only been a Firefox extension) the big pain point was Mozilla's forced migration to new extension APIs (2015: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... ). This required a major rewrite, taking over a year, and not to add new features but rather just to not bit rot away. Then what felt like right after that, they completely deprecated classic extensions, forcing only web extensions (2017: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef... ). This required an even more thorough rewrite again, and made it not difficult but actually impossible to keep all functionality.

Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.

arantius commented on The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia   cnn.com/2025/11/12/busine... · Posted by u/andrewl
randomtoast · a month ago
You probably could have made $150 if you had melted the coins and sold the copper instead.
arantius · a month ago
A penny is less than 3% copper (since 1982).
arantius commented on Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail   the418.substack.com/p/a-b... · Posted by u/shayneo
nyarlathotep_ · 5 months ago
Across two apartments in the last 5 years, I've received mail for no less than 5 different previous residents. Every week I'd end up with someone else's medical bills, bank statements, debt collection, the list goes on. I've zero faith at this point.
arantius · 5 months ago
Receiving mail correctly at the address on the label isn't a problem with the post office.
arantius commented on A new, faster DeepSeek R1-0528 variant appears from German lab   venturebeat.com/ai/holy-s... · Posted by u/saubeidl
xracy · 5 months ago
Can I ask why this article is title like Deepseek is a virus? Feels like this could've been "new flu variant".

I don't know if this is intentional or not.

arantius · 5 months ago
This is an appropriate usage of the word "variant", and applies to anything that can have several varieties.
arantius commented on Iconography of the PuTTY tools   chiark.greenend.org.uk/~s... · Posted by u/Tomte
Lammy · 9 months ago
I wonder if the “Agent” hat iconography was inspired by Forté Agent, the most (IMHO) popular Usenet software for Windows, which used a very similar motif: https://archive.org/details/forte-agent-1.6

Love reading this kind of history straight from the creator :)

arantius · 9 months ago
Sibling already mentions this, but the wording of the article almost directly but not quite says it's "Spy vs. Spy" based. I'm not aware of an official link to document this but

https://www.google.com/search?q=spy+vs+spy&udm=2

An image search will show you plenty copies of the inspiration for this hat.

arantius commented on What happened to the n in restaurateur?   ciachef.edu/blog/what-hap... · Posted by u/turtlegrids
burkaman · 10 months ago
This is wild, I have read this word many times but never consciously noticed that there is no N there. I would have bet money that "restauranteur" is the more common spelling in practice, but I'm completely wrong: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=restaurateur%2....
arantius · 10 months ago

u/arantius

KarmaCake day1029March 23, 2008View Original