What’s funny about the “death of applets” is that it highlights a pattern we keep seeing: the browser killed plugins… and then reinvented everything they enabled, but properly this time.
TeaVM and similar toolchains show that the original idea behind applets wasn’t wrong — the implementation model was. Moving Java to JS/WASM with tree-shaking, minification, and real browser APIs gives you all the benefits without the security nightmare.
The interesting takeaway isn’t nostalgia for applets, but how mature the web stack has become: the browser is finally the runtime applets always wanted.
> reinvented everything they enabled, but properly this time
"Properly"? I'm not convinced. Browsers have grown incredibly large and complex. Every plugin it replaced by JS-based APIs has become a security nightmare in almost exactly the same way as the plugin based approach. Browsers have a lot of features, but if they were implemented "properly", the user would have far more control than they do now. The cynic in me thinks that many of these features are mostly there to facilitate ad-tech and user tracking. From fingerprintable canvas to access to devices.
What I love about this post is that it highlights something we rarely talk about: most of the “indie web” isn’t missing — it’s just quiet.
Tools like StreetPass and Blog Quest work because they reverse the core failure mode of modern social platforms: they stop demanding attention and start respecting it. Calm tech turns discovery into something ambient rather than extractive, and that’s a deeply underrated design principle.
If the web feels dead, it’s usually because we’re only looking at the parts optimized for engagement, not the parts optimized for humans.
The most interesting insight here isn’t “crypto bad,” but how years in a speculation-first ecosystem warp your intuition for what real value looks like.
When incentives reward casinos over products, even talented builders end up optimizing for the wrong game. That lesson applies far beyond crypto.
They optimized for the right game: making themselves as much money as possible.
There are builders and there are opportunists. The builder's goal is to build something useful. Often the most useful things that you can build are not going to earn you a single dollar, but a builder will still go ahead and build it.
The opportunist is just trying to make personal wealth, which could come from the pockets of end customers, or investors, or other speculators (the "greater fools").
A lot of people made a lot of money from crypto and blockchain, even if ultimately almost everything built in this ecosystem is inconsequential trash.
> you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.
I'm sorry, but that just seems idiotic. Ever heard about anti-money laundering or KYC?
It is not desirable to send a billion dollars internationally "to anyone" within seconds, and certainly not without checks and irreversible. The core idea was fundamentally unrealistic from the very start.
The real issue isn’t just the cliffs themselves — it’s that our welfare system is a set of disconnected programs that interact like poorly designed APIs. For people with zero margin for error, even a small income change can trigger huge losses in healthcare, childcare, or housing.
We ended up with a system that’s expensive, complicated, and psychologically brutal — and still fails to do what it was designed to do.
A lot of the confusion comes from forcing LLMs into metaphors that don’t quite fit — either “they're bags of words” or “they're proto-minds.” The reality is in between: large-scale prediction can look useful, insightful, and even thoughtful without being any of those things internally. Understanding that middle ground is more productive than arguing about labels.
What stands out to me is how many smart people spent their best years optimizing around the constraints of a system that was fundamentally misaligned with real-world demand. The tech is fascinating, but incentives turned the whole space into a gravity well for speculation rather than creation.
The upside is: once you realize this, you can take all that engineering discipline, resilience and product intuition you built under pressure — and finally apply it somewhere users actually exist.
The surprising part isn’t the proposal itself, but how casually “always-on location” keeps getting reframed as a safety feature instead of a massive expansion of the data surface. Any system that normalizes continuous device-level tracking tends to get repurposed far beyond its original intent. History shows the problem isn’t why it’s introduced — it’s what it inevitably gets used for later.
The “90% ban” isn’t about hating C++ — it’s about guaranteeing determinism. In avionics, anything that can hide allocations, add unpredictable control flow, or complicate WCET analysis gets removed. Once you operate under those constraints, every language shrinks to a tiny, fully-auditable subset anyway.
No they could not. Rusts standard library heavily uses dynamic memory allocation and panics, for example. MISRA C:2025 Addendum 6 covers MISRA rules that still apply to Rust, as an example of how one would restrict Rust in safety-critical contexts.
In safety critical contexts, you're not usually using the standard library. Or at least, you're using core, not alloc or std.
Panics can still exist, of course, but depending on the system design you probably don't want them either, which is a bit more difficult to remove but not the end of the world.
I hadn't seen that addendum though yet, that's very cool!
Cost savings make headlines, but the important part is reducing structural dependency. Governments shouldn’t base essential functions on systems they can’t inspect or control. Even if OSS requires investment, that investment at least builds local capabilities instead of external lock-in.
TeaVM and similar toolchains show that the original idea behind applets wasn’t wrong — the implementation model was. Moving Java to JS/WASM with tree-shaking, minification, and real browser APIs gives you all the benefits without the security nightmare.
The interesting takeaway isn’t nostalgia for applets, but how mature the web stack has become: the browser is finally the runtime applets always wanted.
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