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The increased activity came from Igalia who started working on Servo in 2023 with support from the Linux Foundation. Prior to that the project was effectively dead in the water with no sponsored development.

And Igalia is notable for contributing to every major browser engine: https://www.igalia.com/2026/01/05/Doing-Our-Share-for-the-We...

But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

I doubt you'd invest that kind of money/time into a project without a good reason. I am not saying that ladybird or manifest v3 are the reason, I just notice a lot of new energy in the not-just-chrome category and wonder what the other reasons might be.

Andreas Kling is pretty open about his reasons to have started the ladybird project and I just know Servo from his monthly videos and a few other sidenotes, so I was surprised that it gained so much traction after being basically dead.


> But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

Igalia is generally pro open-source, and Servo certainly aligns with their ethos, but a lot of the money came from Futurewei / Huawei who are interested in Servo because it's not US based, and therefore they are actually able to contribute to it (they are effectively banned from contributing to Chrome/Firefox/Safari due to US sanctions). There is now also funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund who are also interested in a "European browser" (and NLnet, but they fund all sorts of things)


Thanks, that are the insights I was hoping to get.

As I understand it, funding was provided by NLnet[1], a longstanding Dutch non-profit that focuses on supporting open internet technologies. The funding was provided specifically for reviving Servo. By the looks of it, the money itself mostly comes from the EU, which has various grant programmes to fund open access technology, digital sovereignty, etc. Given several Servo contributors worked for Igalia, I expect they submitted a proposal to NLnet for them to fund Servo development, and it was successful.

[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/


> But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

> I doubt you'd invest that kind of money/time into a project without a good reason.

Igalia is a very peculiar company. I would not rule out "it's a good thing for the commons and we bet we'll get some upside eventually" as the reason.


Unless you're paying for a concierge doctor, MDs frequently will not spend the time to give you useful advice. Especially for relatively minor issues.

I've googled what a "concierge doctor" is, and it just sounds like a fancy term for a family doctor.

It’s a physician who gets paid a subscription by a small panel of patients.

Pros: more time spent with patients, access to a physician basically 24/7, sometimes included are other amenities (labs, imaging, sometimes access to rx at doctors office for simple generics, gym discounts, eye doctor discounts, etc)

Cons: it’s an extra cost to get access to that physician yearly ranging from a few hundred US dollars per year to sometimes thousands $1.5k-3k (or tens of thousands or more), those who aren’t financially lucky to be that well off don’t get such access.

—-

That said, some of us do this on the side to augment our salary a bit as medicine has become too much of a business based on quantity and not quality. Sad that I hear from patients that said a simple small town family doc like myself can spent 20-30mins with a patient when other providers barely spend 3 mins. My regular patients get usually 20-30mins with me on a visit unless it’s a quick one for refills and I don’t leave until they are done and have no questions. My concierge patients get 1 hour minimum and longer if they like. I offer free in-depth medical record review where I get sometimes boxes of old records to review someone’s med history if they are a new concierge patient. Had a lady recently deal with neuropathy and paresthesias for years. Normal blood counts. Long story short. She had moderate iron deficiency and vitamin b 6 deficiency from history of taking isoniazid in a different country for TB and biopsy proven celiac disease. Neuropathy basically gone with iron and b6 supplements and a celiac diet after I recommended a GI eval for endoscopy. It takes time to dig into charts like this and CMS doesn’t pay the bills to keep the clinic lights open to see patients like that all the time and this is why we are in such a bad place healthcare wise in the USA were we have chosen quality than quantity and the powers that be are number crunchers and not actual health care providers. It serves us right for let’s admins take over and we are all paying the price.

So much more I want to say but I don’t think many will read this. But if you read this and don’t like your doctor, please look around. There are still some of us out there that care about quality medicine and do try our best to spend time with the patient. If you got one of those “3 minute doctors” look for one or consider establishing care with a resident clinic at an academic center were you can be seen by resident doctors and their attending physicians. It’s not the most efficient but can almost guarantee those resident physicians will spend a good chunk of time with you to help you as much as they can.


> It’s a physician who gets paid a subscription by a small panel of patients

That's how it works here too, in PCP-Centric plans. The PCP gets paid, regardless if the patient shows up or not. But is also responsible to be the primary contact point for the patient with the health system, and referrals to specialists.


"Public good" is a term of art in economics which means a good is both non-excludable (it is impractical to control who benefits from it) and non-rivalrous (one person benefiting does not prevent others from also benefiting).

Roads are clearly rivalrous and while it's often impractical to prevent non-payers from entering a toll road, one can certainly record them and met penalties after the fact to discourage it.

So no, roads are not a public good.


> roads are not a public good

You’re both right. Roads can be an impure public good.

At low traffic loading, they are not rivalrous and can be modelled as a public good. At high traffic loading they become rivalrous and thus closer to a common-pool resource.

If roads are made excludable, they resemble a club or even private group.


If roads are "rivalrous" then so is literally everything else.


Roads are rivalrous because too many people using them causes a traffic jam. Seriously go read the Wikipedia article on the subject.


Parks, stadiums, etc famously have infinite capacity.


Cryptographic software is probably close to a best case scenario since there is very little memory management involved and runtime is dominated by computation in tight loops. As long as Fil-C is able to avoid doing anything expensive in the inner loops you get good performance.


  > best case scenario since there is very little memory management involved and runtime is dominated by computation in tight loops.
This describes most C programs and many, if not most, C++ programs. Basically, this is how C/C++ code is being written, by avoiding memory management, especially in tight loops.


This depends heavily on what problem domain you're talking about. For example, a DBMS is necessarily going to shuffle a lot of data into and out of memory.


It depends. Consider DuckDB or another heavily vectorized columnar DB: there's a big part of the system (SQL parser, storage chunk manager, etc.) that's not especially performance-sensitive and a set of tiny, fast kernels that do things like predicate-push-down-based full table scans, ART lookups, and hash table creation for merge joins. DuckDB is a huge pile of C++. I don't see a RIIR taking off before AGI.

But you know what might work?

Take current DuckDB, compile it with Fil-C, and use a new escape hatch to call out to the tiny unsafe kernels that do vectorized high-speed columnar data operations on fixed memory areas that the buffers safe code set up on behalf of the unsafe kernels. That's how it'd probably work if DuckDB were implemented in Rust today, and it's how it could be made to work with Fil-C without a major rewrite.

Granted, this model would require Fil-C's author to become somewhat less dogmatic about having no escape hatches at all whatsoever, but I suspect he'll un-harden his heart as his work gains adoption and legitimate use-cases for an FFI/escape hatch appear.


> DuckDB is a huge pile of C++. I don't see a RIIR taking off before AGI.

While I'm not a big fan of rewriting things, all of DuckDB has been written in the last 10 years. Surely a rewrite with the benefit of hindsight could reach equivalent functionality in less than 10 years?


the sqlite RIIR is going quite well: https://turso.tech/blog/beyond-the-single-writer-limitation-...

(sqlite is quite a bit smaller than DuckDB tho)


I'm trying to make Turso load some data, but it is so slow that even several months are not enough to load the dataset: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/issues/336


Is it? It's much less new.


for one, duckdb includes all of sqlite (and many other dependencies). it knows how to do things like efficiently query over parquet files in s3. it's expansive - a swiss army knife for working with data wherever it's at.

sqlite is a "self contained system" depending on no external software except c standard library for target os:

> A minimal build of SQLite requires just these routines from the standard C library:

> memcmp(), memcpy(), memmove(), memset(), strcmp(), strlen(), strncmp()

> Most builds also use the system memory allocation routines:

> malloc(), realloc(), free()

> Default builds of SQLite contain appropriate VFS objects for talking to the underlying operating system, and those VFS objects will contain operating system calls such as open(), read(), write(), fsync(), and so forth

Quoting from the appropriately named https://sqlite.org/selfcontained.html

as a very rough and unfair estimate between the two project's source, sqlite is about 8% the size of duckdb:

    $ pwd
    /Users/jitl/src/duckdb/src
    $ sloc .
    
    ---------- Result ------------
    
                Physical :  418092
                  Source :  317274
                 Comment :  50113
     Single-line comment :  46187
           Block comment :  3926
                   Mixed :  4415
     Empty block comment :  588
                   Empty :  55708
                   To Do :  136
    
    Number of files read :  2611
    
    ----------------------------
    $ cd ~/Downloads/sqlite-amalgamation-3500400/
    $ sloc .
    
    ---------- Result ------------
    
                Physical :  34742
                  Source :  25801
                 Comment :  8110
     Single-line comment :  1
           Block comment :  8109
                   Mixed :  1257
     Empty block comment :  1
                   Empty :  2089
                   To Do :  5
    
    Number of files read :  2
    
    ----------------------------


Oh, wow! I really had no idea!


I am professional database developer. We do not do what you are thinking we are doing. ;)


I was thinking less about the DB data itself and more about temporary allocations that have to be made per-request. The same is true for most server software. Even if arenas are used to reduce the number of allocations you're still doing a lot more memory management than a typical cryptographic benchmark.


Most databases do almost no memory management at runtime, at least not in any conventional sense. They mostly just DMA disk into and out of a fixed set of buffers. Objects don't have a conventional lifetime.


That's less a matter of price sensitively and more that other countries usually have price controls on healthcare. That's why doctors make so much less and drugs are so much cheaper outside the US: it's literally illegal to charge more.


The problem is for many years now the smallest phone available has been getting larger and larger. This has lead small phone enthusiasts to cling to their old phones as long as they can stand it until they are forced to step to a larger model.


If your ISP issues you a routable IPv4 address then not much. Otherwise IPv6 lets you avoid CGNAT and all of the issues that come with that.


These days ACH settlement runs multiple times a day. The biggest source of delay for ACH transfers is your bank delaying release of the funds for risk management. ACH transfers can be reversed even after they have "settled" and if the receiving bank has already disbursed the funds then they have to eat the cost of reimbursing the sender. Reversals are more likely to happen soon after the transfer completes, so delaying release of the funds makes it less likely the bank will be left holding the bag.


> Medical insurance companies often already go out of their way to pay early to save in the long run

Literally LOLed when I read this. Health insurance companies might pay lip service to this and make some token gestures like free preventative care, but in my experience health insurance companies frequently shoot themselves in the foot by denying care that later ends up costing them even more when the patient's untreated condition worsens.


Maybe true in US, but here in Europe ie my health insurance gives me rebate on my gym membership (any gym). With some more automated low cost gyms I can get back up to 50% back. This seems like a similar case.


The important part is the short term gains, and the people making them jumping away on a golden parachute before the long term consequences kick in.


> Because at the time those vulnerabilities could be exploited by executing malicious javascript in a browser to steal passwords

"could be" is doing a lot of work here. AFAIK there has never been a PoC or active exploit which actually exfiltrates sensitive data from a browser using these vulnerabilities. Anyways, browsers have long since implemented software mitigations.

IIRC the real criteria for W11 support has to do with TPMs. Microsoft really wants to have secure boot on all Windows systems.


Spook.js was demonstrated to steal passwords from another tab by running innocent-looking JS via the Spectre vulnerability.

https://www.spookjs.com/


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