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Latest Dispatches
Manyana - a new VCS from the author of BitTorrent
Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, has released "Manyana," a version control system with a new way of tracking changes that reduces the impact of merges to something more manageable and coherent. It's only a proof-of-concept as a VCS, not a replacement of Git, but looks interesting.
sonar: a command line tool to inspect port usage
RasKrebs' sonar is a CLI tool for inspecting and managing everything listening on localhost ports. The name is overloaded, and badly, but the tool works well. So they built something more suitable for their purposes. sonar list gives you ports, process names, Docker container names, Compose projects, CPU/memory usage, and clickable URLs in one shot.
Tela: A userspace private cloud
Tela is a remote-access fabric built around encrypted WireGuard tunnels relayed over WebSocket, with no TUN device and no admin privileges required on either end. That implies that spinning up a Tela network has a relatively light administrative burden in terms of system permissions. The access levels required makes it interesting: Tela is not "just another tunnel,” but a userspace tunnel that would be appropriate for all kinds of constrained access deployments.
Comprehension Debt: the Cost of Relying on AI Code
Addy Osmani put out an essay called "Comprehension Debt - the hidden cost of AI generated code." The problem is that AI can indeed generate code incredibly quickly - but it's more quickly than humans can integrate or understand, or evaluate. The result is a codebase that "works" - code created with "just make the tests pass, please" - but that humans don't understand, and cannot or do not review.
Kotauth: a Self-hosted Authentication Platform
Anderson Fariña tagged a release candidate of Kotauth, a "docker-oriented full authentication service inspired by keycloak." It could fulfill a very real gap: authorization and authentication services tend to be very low-ceiling until they're not. If you've had to wrestle with Keycloak or are dreading the Auth0 renewal quote, this project might be very interesting.
Mojarra 5.0.0-M1 released - Jakarta Faces implementation
Eclipse has announced the release of Mojarra 5.0.0-M1, an implementation of the Jakarta Faces 5 specification still in draft. It's interesting to see how many JSF libraries are being released, while consumers of those libraries seem relatively quiet.
"XML is a cheap DSL" - from an IRS use case
An IRS engineering lead put out article saying "XML is a cheap DSL," defending XML's structure and verbosity as absolute gains: it's hard to misunderstand documents when their purpose is baked into their structure.
Project Falcon: Java implementation of the AT protocol
JohannaWeb's Project Falcon is a Discord-style desktop client built on top of the Bluesky AT Protocol. The concept is: what if Discord's UX wrapped a decentralized social graph instead of a proprietary one? Built by one person, it's an impressive piece of work.