Hey everyone,

We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!

First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.

This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.

Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.

Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.

Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).

Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.

Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).

Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)

Dear Australian Government and National Authorities, you can go fuck the right away with this shit!

It’s bad enough we are a country of national data collection with flimsy laws of obtaining access to said data, but to then go that one step further and shove back doors into everything is going too far.

https://news.com.au/technology/...

Under the proposed new laws, Australian government agencies could compel companies to provide technical information such as design specifications to help in an investigation, remove electronic protections, assist in accessing material on a device subject to a warrant and even build or install software or equipment that could help authorities gather information.

What could possibly go wrong 🤷‍♂️

I've compiled enough recent news to point out some notable articles in a list:

- Windows 10 20H2 can corrupt the main filesystem on SSDs when ChkDisk is run under yet-unknown circumstances (https://borncity.com/win/2020/...)

- Nintendo updated SwapNote for 3DS well after killing it off (https://nintendolife.com/news/2020/...)

- Google has finally fully open-sourced Fuschia, its attempt to replace Android, you can now make PRs and such (https://computerweekly.com/blog/...)

- a recent Win10 update for normal users is causing massive speed issues (https://pcgamer.com/microsofts-dece...)

- Amazon's trying to compete with StarLink and it's going pretty okay (https://arstechnica.com/information...)

- Cyberpunk 2077 has a fuckton of fixes in a new update, for those who care (https://theverge.com/2020/12/...)

- Xbox 360-based Halo games are going to have their online component killed in December 2021, for those who care (https://halowaypoint.com/en-us/...)

i forget who said they liked these last time i did them but to that one person, here you are.

http://bit.ly/2zD8t2z

The above link is an article about a new Amazon service allowing for purchased products to be placed inside your home. How does this work? With a "smart" lock.

When will people learn that the more technology they have, the more hackable they are? It'll only be a matter of time before people learn how to break these locks, leaving your house left unprotected.

"I have learned 679 ways to render HTML. At least once or twice a year, I learn a new way to render HTML and at least 2.3 frameworks to help me on this journey."

This is from an article that popped up in my news feed yesterday. It's quite cynical and shouldn't be taken too seriously, but this HTML-part struck in an odd way.

All this fucking technology BS just to spew out some good old HTML.

I am sad now.

(href: https://blog.logrocket.com/develope...)

https://youtu.be/2VkNWLYD5c4
What this? Kids who use tablets and technology have IMPROVED fine motor skills over those who do not.

How can this be? Everything the new generation has that older generations did not is always the worst thing ever.

So... our software is... really old. Part of it was built 20 years ago in Delphi 6 and is still used to this day. It's an automation tool, which supports some scripting... In WSH. Meaning, it only supports JScript (that's right, not javascript, just JScript, the 1998 version), VBScript, and through the use of activex, Python or Perl.

And even our *newer* software, built a couple years ago, just released an update where the HTML rendering engine was updated... to Gecko 38, the version from 3 years ago. And the JavaScript engine is Rhino, the "old" one now replaced by Nashorn a few years back, and barely updated since.

But... there is *some* light on the horizon. The very newest automation tool now has a new plugin, which is based in NodeJS. Having just installed this newer version, I looked in the files to find the nodejs.exe executable... to find that it's on version 8.9.4. Ok it's not precisely the "latest" version, but knowing the history of development for these things I almost expected node 0.10.

It's great news in all this ancient technology I have to deal with. When's the *last* time you made an HTTP request using this code?

var http = new ActiveXObject("WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1");
http.open('GET', 'http://example.com/', false);