Nice, you beat me to this concept. I finally planted a flag and decided to dev entirely on an M3 with 8Gb.

It is completely feasible, and the battery life - amazing. Even when running a whole pile of Kubernetes services.

As an engineer, I want to believe this, but really - does it?

Most folks use frameworks because it's easier than learning how to build it all yourself - things are done for you instead. This niche is now getting eroded by AI and low-code substantially.

Couple that with my experience maintaining frontends that are far too complex for their use cases - e.g. do we really need SPA's, state sync, and reusable components for our admin tool that doesn't reuse components?

This leads me to think there's been bloat here for at least a decade. So, while vibe coding will also lead to bloat, it's easier to work with, and arguably higher value than paying for a specific framework.

It's a tragedy in life that things that are useful don't always get valued, instead being used as a stepping stone for progress, but I'm not sure that has a solution.

I've been exploring decentralized trust algorithms lately, and so reading this was nice. I've a similar intuition - for every advance in scraping detection, scrapers will learn too, and so it's an ongoing war of mutations, but no real victor.

The internet has seen success with social media content moderation and so it seems natural enough that an application could exist for web traffic itself. Hosts being able to "downvote" malicious traffic, and some sort of decay mechanism given IP's recycling. This exists in a basic sense with known TOR exit nodes and known AWS, GCP IP's, etc.

That said, we probably don't have the right building blocks yet, IP's are too ephemeral, yet anything more identity-bound is a little too authoritarian IMO. Further, querying something for every request is probably too heavy.

Fun to think about, though.

> What made it worth it for you?

- Like you mentioned, it helps me learn more about a topic/explore it more deeply, I usually begin with an intuition and then explore outwards.

- Folks positively mention my articles - both current connections and new connections.

- They sometimes spark interesting discussion which helps refine my knowledge further.

> What kinds of posts actually worked (for learning, career, network, opportunities)?

- Hard to say, I don't have a high signal here. Usually just having some content for people to skim was enough, but folks would tend to mention nearly random articles depending on their interests.

> Any practical format that lowers the bar (length, cadence, themes)?

- I'm not a great blogger in that I have no established cadence. I didn't want pressure to deliver crap (biweekly), nor did I want necessarily to put posts on too high of a pedestal (monthly+).

> If you were starting today, what would you do differently?

- Highly recommend going with simple tech. A static site based on Markdown does wonders. Offload discussion threads to sites like HN or reddit - the comment section of your links.

Cooperatives do not get rid of the net negative cycle. Ultimately whatever the benevolent entity ends up being, it becomes a contest of who can bear to lose more money.

Cooperatives distribute the losses but it is still a money pit.