About vibe-coding, hyper-individualism and the attention economy
Este texto está en inglés.
A friend said it in a chat: every day there are thirty new browsers. He’s right, and I think most of them are abandonware waiting to happen.
Not only do we have to endure the doomsday content, the tech bros and the AI psychosis. Now we turn on the computer, go download a program, and face an incredible amount of slop.
Menu bar managers are rare. Thaw is the big open-source one, up against Bartender, and I can count the rest on my fingers. Browsers? In one Threads post about five were suggested, and not one had a team behind it like Helium or Zen. Every one of them copies Arc: the same idea, the same approach, even the same UI. What happens if you take AI out of the equation?
A browser is an enormous, security-sensitive piece of infrastructure. Most of the people building these lack the skills to handle one, myself included. Who’s going to work on security, compatibility, accessibility, performance, networking, privacy, updates, and platform integration five years after the launch post?
Everyone wants to make something, and no one thinks about what doing it requires later. Those efforts could go into one browser with a direction and contributions from many people. Different points of view on the same concepts could strengthen one project.
That’s how I try to run Thaw. I accept most pull requests, even typo fixes, and I’d rather fix forward than reject them, even when they’re made with AI. The point is to make everyone part of something. We credit translators, and the person who turned our logo into proper SVGs got credited too.
Thanks for attending my TED talk about hyper-individualism and the attention economy. I’ll see you next time.