You can always give a shot at using a third party client (possibly acting as bridge for other/better protocols, like e.g. slidge.im>xmpp or the buggy matrix equivalent), but you need to keep in mind that they will all require you to authenticate (and remain authenticated) using a smartphone, and that usage of 3rd party clients is forbidden from WA's terms and conditions (which may lead to your account being blocked/deleted).
How about nextcloud with only the bare minimum amount of plugins? Filles alone is pretty snappy.
Pydio used to be called ajaxplorer and was a pretty solid and lightweight (although featureful) solution, but then they rewrote the UI with lots of misguided choices (touch controls and android inspired interactions on desktop devices) and it became so horrendous, heavy and clunky that I almost forgot about it. I wonder if they reversed the trend (but from the screenshots it doesn't look so).
Aren't they not the same thing at all?
Russia supplied 77 per cent of China’s purchases
Not exactly a surprise, then. And good luck for the Russian's arm industry bouncing back, considering its performance on the battlefield and its interleaving with western tech that it hasn't managed to decouple itself from since 2014. China's only taking a reasonable stance there.
and how much of this troubled history is linked to Java Applets/native browsers extensions, and how much of it is relevant today?
Yep but:
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it's one runtime, so patching a CVE patches it for all programs (vs patching each and every program individually)
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graalvm is taking care of enabling java to run on java
Or rather a Dunning Kruger issue: seniors having spent a significant time architecturing and debugging complex applications tend to be big proponents for things like rust.
Why? What's wrong with safe, managed and fast languages?
I agree with the sentiment and everything, but the whole gaming console industry has gone to crap after they started putting hard drives/storage in them with the goal of needing you to be online and not owning anything anymore. They are all equally despicable for that. Which makes emulation even more essential, just for preserving those games into the future when the online front will inexorably shut down.
I'm with you. Hg-git still is to this day the best git UI I know...
I'd like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to "deal with" isn't "AI" (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniques...) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for "sounding convincing", without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humans' time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.
I also haven't seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of "babysitting" the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).
Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).