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TL;DR The "build vs. buy" equation has flipped. Businesses used to buy SaaS because it was cheaper than building their own. AI has changed that—building your own is now more affordable than ever. The discovery problem. AI recommendations default to well-established solutions. Think SEO is a long game? Try LLM SEO. Everyone worries about AI taking developer jobs, but what if AI wipes out the entire off-the-shelf software industry? The "Why Buy?" Problem Six months ago, we needed an AI-powered code review tool. We explored several options and ultimately "vibe-coded" our own GitHub Action—a simple Bash script that takes a git log, sends it to Claude via curl, and posts the results to Slack. Done. The best part? AI wrote the entire thing faster than it would take to sign up for a SaaS. How long until every company realizes they can do this? Need a simple "CRUD" CRM with JIRA-style tasks? Done. Need a mobile time-tracking app for remote employees? AI will spit out a React Native iOS build in minutes. Why pay for yet another SaaS when you can "vibe-code" something in a week? And mark my words, LLM providers are one step away from actually hosting the code they generate. Who needs to spawn an AWS server if you can just ask OpenAI to host the code it just wrote? - "Hey Siri! build me a Basecamp, but with green buttons, also register a domain, spawn a server and host it all there, charge this credit card when you're done" - "Absolutely, that'd be $1.17 per hour" The Discovery Problem AI doesn’t just make it easier to build software—it makes it harder for new SaaS products to get discovered. When you ask AI for recommendations, it defaults to the biggest names. And not just in SaaS, by the way, in open source too. Imagine launching a killer new JS framework today. AI coding assistants and tools like Cursor will just default to React anyway. And not even the latest version of it! In a recent tweet Adam Wathan, the creator of Tailwind, asked: "Has anyone migrated to Tailwind 4.0 yet?" The most popular response was "Nah! we're still waiting for LLMs to learn it." AI isn’t just "the next internet moment." It’s more like "the social network moment." Echo chambers get louder, big names get bigger, and smaller ones disappear into the noise. What Can SaaS Companies Do? 1. Become an Industry Standard Or at least a "go-to" product in a niche. If your app becomes something people mention on their CVs or job descriptions, you win. Examples: Slack. HubSpot. Salesforce etc. A salesperson moving to a new company simply expects Salesforce to be there. That kind of lock-in ensures survival. 2. Build Moats: Infrastructure & Vendor Lock-In SaaS products that are just CRUD apps will die. The ones that survive will own infrastructure or at least some part of it. Instead of building another AI voice assistant, create one with built-in VoIP and provide landline numbers to customers. Examples: Transistor.fm – Not just a SaaS, but also a podcast hosting and publishing pipeline. Postmark (or any transactional email service really) – yes, AI can code an email-sending app, but it can't get you a 10-year old high-reputation sender IP address trusted by Gmail and Outlook. SignWell, SavvyCal and similar "inter-business" file-sharing, communication & escrow apps that own the communication part (and frankly, are literally easier to use than vibe-code your own). But prepare for tthousands of clones. Which SaaS Will Die First? Side-project-scale, "one simple tool" SaaS products that used to be easy wins—form builders, schedulers, basic dashboards, simple workflow apps—those days are over. If AI can generate it in an afternoon, no one is paying a subscription for it. Oh, and "no code" is toasted too. The SaaS graveyard is about to get a lot more crowded. I give it 4 years. Software consulting is making a comeback though. Someone has to clean up the vibe-coded chaos.
TL;DR The "build vs. buy" equation has flipped. Businesses used to buy SaaS because it was cheaper than building their own. AI has changed that—building your own is now more affordable than ever. The discovery problem. AI recommendations default to well-established solutions. Think SEO is a long game? Try LLM SEO. Everyone worries about AI taking developer jobs, but what if AI wipes out the entire off-the-shelf software industry? The "Why Buy?" Problem Six months ago, we needed an AI-powered code review tool. We explored several options, tested them all, and ultimately "vibe-coded" our own GitHub Action—a simple Bash script that takes a git log, sends it to Claude via curl, and posts the results to Slack. Done. The best part? AI wrote the entire thing—faster than it took to sign up for another SaaS. How long until every company realizes they can do this? Need a simple CRM with JIRA-style tasks? Done. Need a mobile time-tracking app for remote employees? AI will spit out a React Native iOS build in minutes. Why pay for yet another SaaS when you can "vibe-code" something in a week? The Discovery Problem AI doesn’t just make it easier to build software—it makes it harder for new SaaS products to get discovered. When you ask AI for recommendations, it defaults to the biggest names. Here’s an open-source analogy: imagine launching a game-changing JS framework today. AI coding assistants and tools like Cursor will still default to React. And not even the latest version! Adam Wathan recently asked on Twitter, "Has anyone migrated to Tailwind 4.0 yet?" The most popular response was "Nah! we're still waiting for LLMs to learn it." AI isn’t just "the next internet moment." It’s more like "the social network moment." Echo chambers get louder, big names get bigger, and smaller ones disappear into the noise. What Can SaaS Companies Do? 1. Become an Industry Standard Or at least a "go-to" product in a niche. If your app becomes something people mention on their CVs or job descriptions, you win. Examples: Slack. HubSpot. Salesforce etc. A salesperson moving to a new company simply expects Salesforce to be there. That kind of lock-in ensures survival. 2. Build Moats: Infrastructure & Vendor Lock-In SaaS products that are just CRUD apps will die. The ones that survive will own infrastructure. Examples: Transistor.fm – Not just a SaaS, but also a podcast hosting and distribution pipeline. Postmark (or any transactional email service really) – AI can code an email-sending app, but it can't get you a 10-year old high-reputation sender IP address trusted by Gmail and Outlook. SignWell and similar B2B file-sharing apps (literally easier to use then code your own). Don't just build another CRUD sales CRM, build a CRM with an inbound VoIP number – because AI can’t replace telco infrastructure (yet). Which SaaS Will Die First? Side-project-scale, "one simple tool" SaaS products that used to be easy wins—Calendly replacements, form builders, schedulers, basic dashboards, simple workflow apps—those days are over. If AI can generate it in an afternoon, no one is paying a subscription for it. Oh, and "no code" is toasted too. The SaaS graveyard is about to get a lot more crowded. I give it 4 years. Software consulting is making a comeback though. Someone has to clean up the vibe-coded chaos.
I mean, it is! But the whole story about the stock market reacting to the news about DeepSeek V3 and R1 is a fine example of the knee-jerk nature of mass consciousness in the era of clickbait economics. Briefly, by points: No, DeepSeek isn’t “head and shoulders above” every other model. The results vary across benchmarks, but on average, GPT-4o and Gemini-2 are better. You can see this on ChatBot Arena, for example (Reddit thread). Even in the results published by DeepSeek’s authors themselves (benchmark graph), you can see that in several tests, the model lags behind GPT-4o from May 2024—which, mind you, is currently ranked 16th on ChatBot Arena. No, training DeepSeek didn’t cost $6 million, “100 times less than GPT-4.” The $6 million figure refers only to the final training run of the published model. It doesn’t include any prior experiments, earlier versions, or R&D costs. This is just the raw computational cost of that final training run. And guess what? That figure is pretty much in line with models of the same class. No, Nvidia did not deserve this hit Not that we’re shedding tears for them — they could use a push to lower hardware prices. And let's not forget that DeepSeek was still trained on Nvidia’s own hardware. And no, their GPUs aren’t suddenly obsolete. DeepSeek’s computational budget is fairly standard for training, and inference for such a massive model (reminder: it’s an MoE with 671 billion parameters, 37 billion of which are active per token generation) requires a ton of hardware. Inference costs are roughly on par with a 70B dense model. Naturally, they’ll scale this success by throwing even more hardware at it and making the model bigger. Not to mention that Deepseek makes LLMs more accessible for the on-prem customers. Which means smaller businesses will buy more GPU's, which is still good for NVDA, am I right? Does this mean the model is bad? No, the model is very, VERY good. It outperforms the vast majority of open-source models, which is fantastic. DeepSeek used 8-bit floating point numbers (FP8) throughout the entire training process. This sacrifices some of that precision to save memory and boost performance. Additionally, they employed a multi-token prediction system and innovative GPU clustering/connectivity techniques. These are clever and practical engineering choices that undoubtedly contributed to their success. In the end, though, stocks will recover, ideas will spread, models will get better, and progress will march on (hopefully).
After years of working with the "big" Visual Studio, I've had enough. It's buggy, slow, and frustrating, and I've decided to make the switch to Visual Studio Code. While as a C# developer I'm still unsure if I can replicate every aspect of my workflow in VS Code, I'm willing to give it a shot—and so far, I'm really impressed. 1. Performance Visual Studio 2022 performance has been a constant issue. It's sluggish and feels increasingly bloated with every new update. It's like watching paint dry every time I open a project. In contrast, Visual Studio Code feels lightweight and incredibly fast. The first time I opened my large project in VS Code, I was shocked — it loaded in lees than a second, literally, even with extensions like "C#" and "C# Dev Kit" installed. 2. Better Developer Experience Running dotnet watch run in VS Code's terminal has been a revelation. It's fast, responsive, and actually works consistently. Visual Studio's "hot reload" feature, on the other hand, has been a constant source of frustration for me. Half the time it doesn't work, and I'm left restarting debugging sessions over and over again. I can't tell you how many hours I've lost to that unreliable feature. 3. Fewer Bugs, Less Frustration The minor editor bugs in Visual Studio have been endless and exhausting. I remember one particularly infuriating bug where syntax highlighting would break in Razor and .cshtml files whenever I used certain HTML tags or even just adjusted the indentation. It drove me up the wall! Not to mention the bizarre issues with JavaScript formatting that never seemed to get fixed. Since switching to VS Code, I've encountered far fewer bugs. It just feels like an environment that respects my time and sanity. 4. A Thriving Ecosystem The VS Code extension ecosystem is alive and thriving. Need Tailwind CSS IntelliSense? There's an extension for that, and it works beautifully. Want to visualize your Git history for a particular line (better version of git-blame)? The Git History extension has got you covered. In "big" Visual Studio, I'd report issues through the "feedback hub" and wait months — or even years — for a response. With VS Code, the community is constantly contributing new tools and improvements. It's energizing (and sometimes exhausting) to be part of such an active ecosystem. 5. Cross-Platform Flexibility One of the biggest advantages I've found with Visual Studio Code is its true cross-platform support. Whether I'm on my Windows PC gaming rig at home or my MacBook while traveling, VS Code runs smoothly and keeps my workflow consistent. Visual Studio's limited macOS version just doesn't cut it for me. Being able to switch between machines without missing a beat has been a game-changer. I have to admit, I was skeptical at first. I've always had a bit of a grudge against Electron-based apps — they've often felt sluggish and bloated. But VS Code has completely changed my perspective. It's fast, responsive, and flexible enough to let me build the development environment that works best for me. Switching to VS Code has rekindled my passion for coding; it reminds me why I fell in love with development in the first place. While Visual Studio will always have its strengths, I need a tool that evolves with me—not one that holds me back.
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OH: It’s just JavaScript, right? I know JavaScript. My coworker who will inevitably spend the rest of the day debugging an electron issue — @jonkuperman.com on BlueSky “It’s Just JavaScript!” is probably a phrase you’ve heard before. I’ve used it myself a number of times. It gets thrown around a lot, often to imply that a particular project is approachable because it can be achieved writing the same, ubiquitous, standardized scripting language we all know and love: JavaScript. Take what you learned moving pixels around in a browser and apply that same language to running a server and querying a database. You can do both with the same language, It’s Just JavaScript! But wait, what is JavaScript? Is any code in a .js file “Just JavaScript”? Let’s play a little game I shall call: “Is It JavaScript?” Browser JavaScript let el = document.querySelector("#root"); window.location = "https://jim-nielsen.com"; That’s DOM stuff, i.e. browser APIs. Is it JavaScript? “If it runs in the browser, it’s JavaScript” seems like a pretty good rule of thumb. But can you say “It’s Just JavaScript” if it only runs in the browser? What about the inverse: code that won’t run in the browser but will run elsewhere? Server JavaScript const fs = require('fs'); const content = fs.readFileSync('./data.txt', 'utf8'); That will run in Node — or something with Node compatibility, like Deno — but not in the browser. Is it “Just JavaScript”? Environment Variables It’s very possible you’ve seen this in a .js file: const apiUrl = process.env.API_URL; But that’s following a Node convention which means that particular .js file probably won’t work as expected in a browser but will on a server. Is it “Just JavaScript” if executes but will only work as expected with special knowledge of runtime conventions? JSX What about this file MyComponent.js function MyComponent() { const handleClick = () => {/* do stuff */} return ( <Button onClick={handleClick}>Click me</Button> ) } That won’t run in a browser. It requires a compilation step to turn it into React.createElement(...) (or maybe even something else) which will run in a browser. Or wait, that can also run on the server. So it can run on a server or in the browser, but now requires a compilation step. Is it “Just JavaScript”? Pragmas What about this little nugget? /** @jsx h */ import { h } from "preact"; const HelloWorld = () => <div>Hello</div>; These are magic comments which affect the interpretation and compilation of JavaScript code (Tom MacWright has an excellent article on the subject). If code has magic comments that direct how it is compiled and subsequently executed, is it “Just JavaScript”? TypeScript What about: const name: string = "Hello world"; You see it everywhere and it seems almost synonymous with JavaScript, would you consider it “Just JavaScript”? Imports It’s very possible you’ve come across a .js file that looks like this at the top. import icon from './icon.svg'; import data from './data.json'; import styles from './styles.css'; import foo from '~/foo.js'; import foo from 'bar:foo'; But a lot of that syntax is non-standard (I’ve written about this topic previously in more detail) and requires some kind of compilation — is this “Just JavaScript”? Vanilla Here’s a .js file: var foo = 'bar'; I can run it here (in the browser). I can run it there (on the server). I can run it anywhere. It requires no compiler, no magic syntax, no bundler, no transpiler, no runtime-specific syntax. It’ll run the same everywhere. That seems like it is, in fact, Just JavaScript. As Always, Context Is Everything A lot of JavaScript you see every day is non-standard. Even though it might be rather ubiquitous — such as seeing processn.env.* — lots of JS code requires you to be “in the know” to understand how it’s actually working because it’s not following any part of the ECMAScript standard. There are a few vital pieces of context you need in order to understand a .js file, such as: Which runtime will this execute in? The browser? Something server-side like Node, Deno, or Bun? Or perhaps something else like Cloudflare Workers? What tools are required to compile this code before it can be executed in the runtime? (vite, esbuild, webpack, rollup typescript, etc.) What frameworks are implicit in the code? e.g. are there non-standard globals like Deno.* or special keyword exports like export function getServerSideProps(){...}? When somebody says, “It’s Just JavaScript” what would be more clear is to say “It’s Just JavaScript for…”, e.g. It’s just JavaScript for the browser It’s just JavaScript for Node It’s just JavaScript for Next.js So what would you call JavaScript that can run in any of the above contexts? Well, I suppose you would call that “Just JavaScript”. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
By the end of 1995, the web moved outward and into the hands of everyone. The post Exploring the web in 1995 appeared first on The History of the Web.
The recent disconnection of the ICC's chief prosecutor, at the behest of the American administration, could not have come at a worse time for Microsoft. Just a month prior, the folks from Redmond tried to assure Europe that all was well. That any speculation Europeans could get cut off from critical digital infrastructure was just fear, doubt, and uncertainty. Then everything Europeans worried could happen happened in Hague. Oops! Microsoft's assurances met reality and reality won. That reality is that all American administrations have the power to disconnect any individual, company, or foreign government from digital infrastructure provided by American Big Tech. So in that sense, it's pointless to blame Microsoft for the sanctioning power vested in the Oval Office. But we certainly can blame them for gaslighting Europe about the risk. What's more important than apportioning blame, though, is getting out of the bind that Europe is in. The continent is hopelessly dependent on American Big Tech for even the most basic of digital infrastructure. If this American administration, or the next, decides to use its sanctioning power again, Europe is in a real pickle. And with the actions taken against the ICC in Haag, Europe would be negligent to ignore the threat. Denmark even more so. It's no secret that tensions between Denmark and the US are at a historic high. Trump keeps repeating a desire to take over Greenland by fuzzy means possible. The American intelligence services have been directed to increase their spying on Denmark and Greenland. Naturally, the Danes are spooked. They should be! Regardless of what happens with Greenland, trade negotiations, or geopolitical disagreements, though, it would suit Europe well to become digitally sovereign. That doesn't mean cutting off all American tech, but it does mean rejecting any services that can be turned off from Washington. So in terms of Microsoft, it means no more Microsoft 365, no more Teams, no more Azure. And that's exactly what the two biggest counties in Denmark have announced plans to do. Copenhagen and Aarhus just declared that they're going to get rid of Microsoft products for all their workers. The Copenhagen county is the largest employer in Denmark with over 40,000 employees. So this is a big deal! The chairman of the Copenhagen committee who pushed this forward made this comment to Danish media: If, theoretically, the relationship to the US gets worse, we could fear that Microsoft would be forced to shut everything down. That possibility exists. And if we suddenly can't access our emails or communicate via our systems, we'll be challenged. That's an understatement. Denmark is one of the most highly digitalized countries in the world. It's also one of the most Microsoft dependent. In fact, Microsoft is by far and away the single biggest dependency, so it makes perfect sense to start the quest for digital sovereignty there. But Denmark is also full of unambitious, defeatist bureaucrats who can't imagine a world without Microsoft. Just today, the IT director for The Capital Region declared it to utopian to think Denmark could ever achieve digital sovereignty or meaningfully replace Microsoft. Not even a decade would make a dent, says the director, while recognizing that if we'd done something 15 years ago, we wouldn't be in this pickle. A remarkable illustration of cognitive dissonance! Sadly, this is not an uncommon conclusion from people who work inside the belly of bureaucracies for too long. Whatever has always done too often seems like the only thing that ever could be done. But, as Mandela said, it always seems impossible until it's done. So let's get it done. Digital sovereignty isn't easy, but neither was securing a sovereign energy supply. Nor will it be to rebuild a credible defensive military. Europe needs all of it, yesterday. The bureaucrats who aren't interested in making it happen should find employment elsewhere.
Three years ago, Kagi officially launched with a splash on popular technology forum Hacker News (to which we are eternally grateful for helping put Kagi on the map).
Questionable puns aside, it’s Pride Month and we’re excited to celebrate by bringing you these updates hand-made by real LGBTQIA+ community members from around the world!—and possibly some straight cis folks too. This rainbow of releases includes some important accessibility updates, tons of bug fixes, and of course a few new features. Window Manager & Dock Another absolutely massive release of our window manager is out that fixes about 20 reported issues and a brand new Gesture Controller thanks to Leonhard and Leo. You can now Swipe up in Multitasking View to close windows, app titles in Multitasking View are now always shown—making them accessible for touch screen setups—and screenshots taken with a keyboard shortcut will send a notification that you can use to view it in Files, just to name a few headlining features. If you want to read the full release notes, Good Luck Babe they’re quite long. A new release of our Dock is also out which brings back a couple of old Plank features: showing multiple dots for apps with multiple running windows and cycling through app windows when you hold a drag-n-drop over its icon. Plus you can now open context menus with a long-press. And there’s a number of bug fixes including things related to hide modes and memory usage. Thanks again to Leo and Leonhard for their hard work here. System Settings Leonhard fixed a crash when setting custom hotcorner commands and we now only show the Applications Menu hotcorner action in its corresponding panel corner—that’s top-left for folks reading left-to-right and top-right for folks reading right-to-left. Plus there’s a new option to enable hotcorners even while an app is fullscreened. As a follow up to last month’s fixes, choosing light or dark mode in System Settings will now properly snooze your schedule instead of disabling it all together—a great convenience for those of us who suffer from eye strain or headaches and need to occasionally reach for that dark mode during the day. Plus, the Reduce Motion setting now covers a whole new range of animations—perfect for folks who get motion sick or find animations distracting. Leonardo tackled a couple of crashes in Display settings including one when mirroring, and another when new displays are attached while System Settings is open. We fixed an issue that prevented CalDAV accounts from connecting in Online Accounts settings. And Alain snuck in a few design tweaks, fixing button alignments etc. And More Thanks to feedback from Aaron, Notifications and the Shortcut Overlay both got releases that add screen reader support. Corentin addressed some Flatpak sandbox issues with an updated Apparmor Profile—especially notable if you’d had trouble with Steam. We now use BeaconDB as our location services provider. And thanks to Ryo we’re now shipping the latest version of GNOME Web which brings improved performance and web compatibility as well as a redesigned bookmarks sidebar. Get These Updates As always, pop open System Settings → System on elementary OS 8 and hit “Update All” to get these updates plus your regular security, bug fix, and translation updates. Or set up automatic updates and get a notification when updates are ready to install! Community Pride I want to take a little space to say that our community is for everyone regardless of gender or sexual identity. We’ve long been made up of lots of different kinds of folks and I’m really proud of that. Open Source software should never be a space that is restricted to a narrow set of identities. In a time where many companies are withdrawing their support for the LGBTQIA+ community, I think it’s incredibly important that we make a strong statement against hate and don’t give in to the pressure to erase queer people in some sad attempt to be “apolitical”. Free Software has always been political, and its politics are freedom and inclusivity and so are ours. Sponsors At the moment we’re at 23% of our monthly funding goal and 336 Sponsors on GitHub! Shoutouts to everyone helping us reach our goals here. Your monthly sponsorship funds development and makes sure we have the resources we need to give you the best version of elementary OS we can! Monthly release candidate builds and daily Early Access builds are available to GitHub Sponsors from any tier! Beware that Early Access builds are not considered stable and you will encounter fresh issues when you run them. We’d really appreciate reporting any problems you encounter with the Feedback app or directly on GitHub.
