Froggie 🐸

Language isn’t everything. While Rust provides some features and safety that C doesn’t while being roughly equivalent in performance, the algorithms that developers choose will dominate the performance impact on the program.

GNU core utils has decades of accumulated knowledge and optimisation that results in the speed it has. The Rust core utils should in theory be able to achieve equivalent performance, but differences in the implementation choices between one and another, or even something as simple as the developers not having prioritised speed yet and still focusing on correctness could explain the differences that are being reported.

If they really didn’t provide you any more information than what you mentioned in the post and comments and you won’t even be permitted access to maintain the server, I wouldn’t complicate too much. Even if you could do more, you’d be guessing, and probably make life harder for the researchers who might not have the expertise having to actually maintain something too complex.

Do the bare minimum to make it functional and overall secure, make sure the operating system works, get SSH access configured for as few people as you can get away with, and make sure updates are installed automatically. They should be responsible for everything else and you should make that clear to them (backups, software, etc)

Provide notes on what you did to the future owners of the server and maintenance instructions as well.

If you are part of an IT team in the university, and if you have some leverage on it, make sure you have the authority to handle things on an emergency (like having the right to pull the plug if the server becomes rogue or misbehaves somehow). Also look to see if you can push them to a more standardized alternative, if your IT team provides standard services look to see if their use case can be fulfilled somehow by them, even partially. I know a lot of universities provide code forges and job submission clusters students and teachers can use, maybe their use case fits these.

As the TechCrunch article I shared says, that warning was added only after the multiple vulnerabilities listed were found and publicised, and the original article in this post didn’t mention the vulnerabilities or it being experimental either.

Reminder that this is the same app that a few weeks ago was found to be advertised as secure when it was still experimental and without being audited, and for which multiple serious vulnerabilities were found before they added the disclaimer saying it was experimental:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/09/jack-dorsey-says-his-secure-new-bitchat-app-has-not-been-tested-for-security/

I am not sure if it is possible, to be honest. I decided to move as I saw a lot of the YouTubers I follow do sponsored segments on nebula, so I knew I was going to find at least them in there. If I do find any kind of page or tool to find out I’ll share it here

Yes, I forgot to clarify that. I decided to pay for a nebula subscription, which is creator owned, and to try and stop using YouTube as much as I can.

I even got a nice discount on it from the sponsor segment of one of the creators I follow

I know this isn’t an option everyone can take, but for the ones who can, I think it sends a clearer message to YouTube and Google than any ad blocker, if you don’t respect me as a viewer I’ll stop using your service altogether. The ad blocker is still a great option though!

Finally subscribed to Nebula a few days ago. Between a third and half the creators I follow are there. I’m planning to move away from YouTube entirely, even if I can pay for premium or block ads I want to make the statement I don’t support their service anymore.

Your blog post reminds me of my adventures working as a sysadmin at my university from quite awhile ago 😄 especially having to rush to fix the broken computers before the next class started 😂

About the website itself, I find it really cool that you made it yourself, and the vibe really reminds me of old geocities blogs 😄

Given the strong feedback given so far, I will provide a few ideas of the tiniest changes I think you can do that will make it a better website:

Currently your blog post is separated into a day per page. It gives it a sort of diary or star trek’s “captain’s log” feel, but for fast readers it isn’t that practical, and the next button is often assumed to be for the next article, not the next section of the current article.

I would switch that pagination for a single page, with nice big titles splitting it. Don’t be afraid of putting a lot of text on the same page, that’s what blogs are for and your readers will thank you! 😄

And second (on Firefox for Android at least), is that the font size for the blog post only is a bit too big. About 3 to 4 words at most fit into each line, which makes it disruptive to read. The font size on the rest of the website is fine though! Double check if other mobile browsers have the same quirk, maybe this is something specific, but if it is universal, I would shrink it a bit and target about 7 to 8 words per line, that allows the flow of reading to be much easier. Make sure you don’t shrink the font size too much though, otherwise people will have to squint their eyes to read 😛

With these two changes, I think your blog will have a nice balance of retro style with usability 😄

Some people mention static website generators and other things, I think you don’t need those for the start of your adventure in making your website, but in the long run it might be a fun idea to adapt your theme into a static site generator like hugo, which uses go, which you already know, or jekyll or one of the others. They give you additional cool features like RSS feeds so people can subscribe and be notified when you publish a new post, and make it easier to change the same thing across all pages, all while keeping everything super simple and generating static html and css that you upload to your server. But for now, your website is really cool and you should be happy for it!

Adding the Portuguese experience, I’ve seen the more inclusive communities within Portugal replaces the “o” and “a” vowels in gendered words with “e”, i.e. todos/todas becomes todes, amigos/amigas becomes amigues, etc.

For pronouns, there’s currently 3 sets of different gender-neutral pronouns I’ve seen used or in circulation. One is to drop the gendered vowel that terminates the pronoun, i.e. ele/ela becomes el, dele/dela becomes del. This still does have some ambiguity, so I’ve seen a greater adoption of pronouns that I’ve heard come from Latin roots. The two variants I’ve seen more often adopted are ele/ela → elu and ele/ela → ilu.

These gender-neutral pronouns are still not widely used outside inclusive communities, but I’ve heard of individual cases of wider adoption. I think I’ve heard of a book that was printed by a major publisher that for the first time used gender-neutral pronouns in its translation, and you start seeing some places use these pronouns in place of gendered pronouns in signs.

In more traditional media it’s still not common, but if they need to, what they tend to use is gender avoidant language, that explicitly avoids using pronouns or gendered names, for example, to replace ele/ela with “esta pessoa”, as “pessoa” is one of a few nouns that can be used that does not imply gender. But it isn’t easy to avoid gendered words and pronouns for a long period of time, and what I’ve heard from a few translator friends is that this is a complex and tiresome process as each sentence needs to be very carefully constructed, instead of the much easier process of the newer but still not widely adopted gender-neutral pronouns.