Andrew Kelley is one of my all-time favorite technical speakers, and zig is packed full of great ideas. He also seems to be a great model of an open source project leader.
Readit Newssanity commented on Zig's New Async I/O andrewkelley.me/post/zig-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
How do people feel about tmux vs zellij?
sanity commented on CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) behind.pretix.eu/2025/05/... · Posted by u/pabs3
In the event ticket situation, how does this change the economics compared to just adding $1 to the ticket price? (or whatever your minimum donation threshold is)
It would add $1 to the ticket price, the goal is more to replace CAPTCHAs (which cost essentially nothing to defeat these days), but you're right that it wouldn't be a silver bullet in the ticket scalping scenario.
sanity commented on CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) behind.pretix.eu/2025/05/... · Posted by u/pabs3
> The economic friction doesn't scale for bot operators
Does the number of keys need to scale? If $1 buys a key for life, and signing can be easily automated why would it stop bots?
Keys embed approximate timestamps, so services can set age limits. The system was designed for Freenet integration where reputation can be attached to keys - repeat abuse would degrade a key's public reputation over time.
sanity commented on CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing) behind.pretix.eu/2025/05/... · Posted by u/pabs3
A few months back I built a cryptographic alternative to CAPTCHAs called Ghost Keys[1] that uses a small donation as proof-of-humanity. For donating you get an anonymous keypair that works across services without repeated CAPTCHAs. The economic friction doesn't scale for bot operators, and donations fund our non-profit[2].
Why are they using AI to heal a psychotic break? AI’s great for getting through tough situations, if you use it right, and you’re self aware. But, they may benefit from an intervention. AI isn't nearly as UI-level addicting as say an IG feed. People can pull away pretty easily.
The psychotic person is talking to cchatgpt, it's a realistic scenario.
I've been working on a decentralized group chat called River[1], which will be the first truly decentralized group chat and the flagship application on Freenet[1], a general purpose platform for decentralized apps.
Just 2 or 3 bugs remaining before people can start playing with both River and Freenet which hopefully means we're days away (touch wood).
[1] https://github.com/freenet/river [2] https://freenet.org/
sanity commented on Distributed systems programming has stalled shadaj.me/writing/distrib... · Posted by u/shadaj
That's really cool, now I have to read this post. Thanks!
Thanks!
That article just scratches the surface, if you'd like a good overview of the entire system check out this talk: https://freenet.org/news/building-apps-video-talk/
sanity commented on Distributed systems programming has stalled shadaj.me/writing/distrib... · Posted by u/shadaj
Haven't read the post yet (I should, I have been vaguely following y'all along but obviously not close enough!) How is this different from delta-based CRDTs? I've built (admittedly toy) CRDTs as DAGs that ship deltas using lattice operations and it's really not that hard to have it work. There's already CRDT based distributed stores out there. How is this any different?
Good question! Freenet is a decentralized key-value store, but unlike traditional KV stores, the keys are WebAssembly (WASM) contracts. These contracts define not just what values (i.e., data or state) are valid for that key but also when and how the value can be mutated. They also specify how to efficiently synchronize the value across peers using summaries and deltas.
Each contract determines how state changes are validated, summarized, and merged, meaning you can efficiently implement almost any CRDT mechanism in WASM on top of Freenet. Another key difference is that Freenet is an observable KV store, allowing you to subscribe to values and receive immediate updates when they change.
sanity commented on Distributed systems programming has stalled shadaj.me/writing/distrib... · Posted by u/shadaj
The article makes great points about why distributed programming has stalled, but I think there's still room for innovation—especially in how we handle state consistency in decentralized systems.
In Freenet[1], we’ve been exploring a novel approach to consistency that avoids the usual trade-offs between strong consistency and availability. Instead of treating state as a single evolving object, we model updates as summarizable deltas—each a commutative monoid—allowing peers to merge state independently in any order while achieving eventual consistency.
This eliminates the need for heavyweight consensus protocols while still ensuring nodes converge on a consistent view of the data. More details here: https://freenet.org/news/summary-delta-sync/
Would love to hear thoughts from others working on similar problems!