See also https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk

And

https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api

A few months ago I read an article that compared vibe coding to gambling[0] and I've found it a useful model.

[0]: maybe this one: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/

Totally helpful and I believe accurate. I find the times where I’m actually most productive with coding agents are not super fun, instead it’s iterative manual qa and code review hell. But while that actually results in good, usable code it’s not addictive, quite the opposite it feels like work. Whereas starting from scratch vibe coding a whatever-ma-jigger sure feels like a blast until I actually start pushing at edge cases.

The ESP32-P4 is a beast

Would a HDMI dummy plug work?

Then you can’t see what you’re doing. It’ll run with the HDMI unplugged but at that point you’re undoing a core reason for using it to begin with.

I think I misunderstood the original problem

There are a lot more devices being released built on esp32s lately. e-readers are another example. I suspect with current hardware prices we might see a significant rise in consumer compute being limited to these types of devices, and a corresponding push to make software efficient enough to run on them. Could be interesting.

Now that you mention it, it does make some sense that with the rising prices (especially for ram) (and maybe with LLMs?) it’s cheaper to use basic hardware and put “more effort” on efficient code (an LLM’s effort, of course).

I am fairly certain this is against Apple's policies. In principle you're not supposed to change the functionality of your app without review.

i don't see any difference between wasm and js? If react native apps can be updated with js, wasm should be allowed.

I think updating js without review is also against policy.

It's a grey area.

App Review Guidelines §2.5.2 says: "Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps"

Technically Apple can punish you for anything but so far it seems to be accepted for small fixes and tweaks.

Doesn't seem like a grey area at all, pretty clear it is against the policy. Just a ridiculous policy and hard to enforce.

It’s not a grey area for features.

It’s a grey area for other parts of the code that are not mentioned in the text.

It’s not a grey area for features.

It’s grey for other parts of the code that are not mentioned in the text.

I personally would love them

Makes me a little sad that it's been almost exactly 6 years since I made this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475946

In that time I started a domain registrar, a free OpenID Connect login service (https://lastlogin.net/), created the de facto list of tunneling tools (https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling), and built a couple of my own tunneling tools (SirTunnel and boringproxy), all to try and make self hosting easier.

I'm still trying to solve this problem. Some progress has been made (mostly by other projects), but we're still not there.

FWIW, I used to think everyone owning a domain was the way forward. I now suspect otherwise. Domains are too expensive (especially most TLDs outside .com/.net/.org) and the costs of accidentally forgetting to renew are catastrophic. Domains just aren't a consumer product.

I think you only need a domain if you want a permanent public web presence, and I don't think most people need that. Most people just need a better/faster/private google drive, google photos, google docs, etc, and for that it's ok if your domain changes once in a while.

So I think free subdomains set up without vendor lockin are probably the ticket.

If anyone is interested in collaborating in this space, definitely reach out.

I wholeheartedly agree with your comment and have thought a lot about how I would solve these problems. Considered founding a startup as well, but the market size is very unclear. I would say in theory, cloud-in-a-bottle already comes quite far. The only thing missing is another tier where imbue only provides you with a domain and a reverse-proxy so your home-server is reachable. Of course, their software would then also habe to manage the whole certificate lifecycle and DNS-challenge, but if it did, then you can have your server at home and not have to worry about how it manages to be reachable from the internet.

However, if I'm understanding you correctly, a solution like this would also be too much vendor lock-in for you, correct? If so, how independent do you wanna go? I think especially if you want people to be able to self-host from home, you will always need some proxy in the cloud. Or are you considering a DDNS setup?

Interested, I've lastlogin, working on simplifying this space too

> Self hosting implies having hardware and software knowledge to set it up

This is unfortunately true, which is why I think we need a different term for turn-key self hosting. I like indiehosting myself.

Indie hosting = owning a car so you can use it Self hosting = building a kit car