Very excited about this. IP certs solve an annoying bootstrapping problem for selfhosted/indiehosted software, where the software provides a dashboard for you to configure your domain, but you can't securely access the dashboard until you have a cert.
As a concrete example, I'll probably be able to turn off bootstrap domains for TakingNames[0].
I got sniped away from Visible (Verizon MVNO) by US Mobile (multi-carrier MVNO) during a Black Friday sale. USM has an interesting thing where you can actually get a separate eSIM for each of the major carriers, and switch between them. I was curious so I signed up for all 3. It's been interesting to see how the signals vary from location to location, and at least a couple times I've been able to get significantly better signal by switching.
The main downside is that you have different numbers for each eSIM, but that doesn't really affect me because I use Google Voice for SMS.
Unfortunately GV has been having a ~week outage of outgoing MMS group messages. Well, let's say a brownout – many messages make it through to some recipients.
But yeah I probably should have clarified that Google Voice has been a pretty terrible UX and quality overall for years. I really need to just bite the bullet and port my number out.
I switched to US Mobile a long time ago just due to pricing. I was WFH most days of the week (before Covid) so I could do minimal data and pay around $100/yr for unlimited talk/text. Now, I do unlimited everything as I commute 5 days each week, but it's only $200/yr. Still significant savings.
I like US Mobile a lot. That they're able to get postpaid priority on Dark Star is amazing.
I use them for my work phone, but there are a few things keeping me from switching away from T-Mobile for my personal lines (and I'd VERY MUCH like to switch):
- I have a family plan wherein I pay something like $254/mo for seven voice/data lines, two smartwatch lines and two tablet data lines. The phone lines all have unlimited data at full speed.
- T-Satellite just launched (wherein your phone uses Starlink when terrestrial towers aren't available). I'm not in this situation often but it can be useful.
- My plan provides free Wi-Fi on United. I fly a lot and use this benefit all of the time. Losing it would negate the savings I'd rack up from switching to US Mobile.
I really love US Mobile. I was a flagship postpaid $90/mo VZW customer for a decade and was so hesitant to switch. It's been 4 years now, and all I can say is that I can't believe I waited so long.
The only time that's going to matter is during a high usage event, like sports or perhaps a mass casualty. At that point, the network is overloaded for the primary users anyway.
I switched over a year ago and all I can say is … it’s been excellent. $25/month per line is perfect and service is just as good as our Verizon postpaid.
Yup! Tip: lock em in and verify a regular cell phone number and then port it. They can probably make it work for you if it’s like a bank, otherwise yolo.
Love seeing this written in C with an organic, grass-fed Makefile. Any details on why you decided to go that route instead of using something with more hype?
* I can read and understand every line of code that is running
* I can understand all of the hardware it's running on
We've gotten so used to computers not working. Weird stuff breaks all the time and even experts can only guess why beyond turning it off and on again, which takes minutes for most devices.
I dream of a world where we trust computers to work and be fast. It's completely possible, but step one is reducing complexity by several orders of magnitude.
If websites removed all CSS and JS, they could still provide almost all the worthwhile content that's currently available, and browsers could become user agents again.
It's seems like the Tulip could definitely be used for something like that, though you might have to write quite a bit of your own framework code in python.
If you're staying in python or another dynamic language it could probably work. Unfortunately I don't think there are a lot of native compilers that run on esp32s, though there are some[0]
What I love about this is the reduction in complexity compared to how something like this would typically be built today.
If I were to build a synth a year ago I probably would have used Rust compiled to WASM and running in the browser. This thing has a lot of the same functionality, but you have about -30 million lines of code for the OS, -30MLOC for the browser, and another -30MLOC for Rust/LLVM.
And that doesn't even get in to the cost of materials or power savings.
Obviously it's not apples to apples but it really makes me wonder how much of that stack we need for most programs.
There’s a sort of graph isomorphism problem of mapping APIs onto each other that seems solvable since a lot of them do the same thing but in different ways. Though it’d take something more keen on the minutiae than the LLMs for this I think
I agree AI is interesting here. It raises the level of abstraction in a similar way to the OS/Browser/language, but it does so by depending on a lot of data, as opposed to depending on a lot of code.
As a concrete example, I'll probably be able to turn off bootstrap domains for TakingNames[0].
[0]: https://takingnames.io/blog/instant-subdomains
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