Sadly, everybody using a browser from a massive ad company and an idp (not to mention a company with an interest in crawling the entire web for AI at the same time site owners are dealing with better scrapers) means the entire web will be login-only over time.
We're quite a few years into this period of technology. At a certain point, these "AI is going to kill the web!" predictions either need to come true or just be dismissed as false.
I don't see how those points bolster your conclusion. These pressures predate AI by over a decade and haven't forced a significant tidal change in the way the internet is used.
Europe is like the US, money is owned by private but they are old money, not new tech billionaires, and does not take the risks as the US. In China, money is owned by the state, and they are willing to take the risks as the US. In this way, I think China is more similar to US than Europe.
Next is an ok choice (IMO), but there are definitely some things Next does that you want to be aware of up front.
* It wants to be your back-end. If you have a separate back-end, get ready to write back-end auth code twice, and probably in 2 different languages, and some brittle proxy code that will break the next time the Next guys decide they want to change how middleware works (again).
* The maintainers aren't particularly helpful. Having built a couple sites using Next, many of our questions ended up being answered with some variation of, "You're holding it wrong," but it was clear they just didn't want to support our (and other users' submitting issues) scenarios.
* Whether you are on Vercel or not, the team behind Next is very motivated to get you onto Vercel. You can expect their technical choices to go more towards that path. This is at odds with the goals of this project. Coupled with the above, expect to have little to no agency to raise issues and have them solved beyond simple/obvious bug fixes, even after you've invested your project into their platform.
* Next really struggles in situations where your users are your customers' customers, and your customers want something more white-labeled. As soon as this bleeds into the arena of using custom domains per customer and such, some of the advantages of Next start to become disadvantages.
Many of the pieces Next offers are sort of optional, but if you don't fit their idea of how a piece (such as auth via next-auth or their take on server-side components) should work, you're left to solve on your own. It's not the end of the world to have to implement your own auth flow with oidc-client, but it can be a little risky and my brain doesn't hold onto OIDC or OAuth2 so every time I implement an auth flow from scratch I end up having to look up how it should work.
That said, if you end up having to deal with more than a couple of the above things, Next moves from an ok choice for the project to a poor choice.
This is really helpful context, thanks for writing it out.
You’re right that Next wants to be your backend and thats exactly why I kept the real backend separate in Go.
The Go backend handles all auth, billing, database, everything.
Next is just a frontend that calls the API. So if Next keeps changing things or pushes too hard toward Vercel, you swap it out. The backend doesnt care.
The white-label / custom domain point is interesting, hadnt thought about that edge case. Good to keep in mind.
Honestly the backend is the important part here. The frontend is just one way to consume it
Taxes, too. At the end of 2024 I had ~€200k or so saved up and was renting, so I got hit with box 3 tax. Now in 2025 that money is in my house which I just bought, and taxes are close to nothing. So my incentive is for house prices to go up.
The Netherlands has lots of land dedicated to meat production that could be repurposed for housing. It’s also surprisingly low-rise, with rowhouses the norm.
Aside from the fact that drivers have been known to mount sidewalks (especially while sending a text), the real problem is intersections, and crossing said stroads. When there's 8 lanes of Dodge Rams, Chevy Silverados, and F-250's with hoods that are taller than your head you're putting a great deal of trust in the red lamp overhead to actually stop them from killing you.
For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently, sometimes with a football (soccerball) or fishing rod in tow. And this is a pretty wealthy area by most standards.
We literally covered the world in asphalt ribbons of death and then we wonder why kids don't play outside.
What's crazy is how many kids are killed by drivers even _after_ kids stopped playing outside. It's like if the number of swimmers fell by 90% and drownings went _up_.
> For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently
Or come to where I live in the midwestern united states and you see the same thing. I see kids as young as 7 years old riding bikes together on a bike path that has a very generous distance to the nearby road, and parents let them roam free.
Always remember: If you see a statistic about the US and think "wow, that sucks, the US must suck", remember, it's a very, very, very big country. The corollary to this is that if you see some small country with a really nice looking statistic, remember that the US probably has many, many, many places within it that also just as nice and share a similar statistic. If we were to lump the NL with all of Europe, I'm sure we could find some ugly looking statistics, and you would probably resent the idea of NL being lumped in with it.
Regression to the mean is a real phenomenon and I wish more people would understand it.
If you live anywhere like Houten[1] anywhere in the US, please tell me ASAP because I'll move there tomorrow.
From my area of the Midwest around Iowa City, there are decent paths that connect the local towns, but intra-town cycling is far less supported. We have bike lanes (good), on some streets (bad), they're unprotected (bad) and they close on Sunday (bad, also what?). The car-free bike path along the river is shared with pedestrians, and some spandex-festooned idiots don't understand that it's not the place to go fast.
I didn't say I live in a place just like Houten, I said I live in a place where you regularly see kids under 10 years old riding bikes together without adults (and like GP said, often with a fishing pole or soccer ball in tow.)
You don't need a place that's the literal "best place for cycling in the world" for this, you just need to (1) build a bike path that's not adjacent to the road (ours is typically 10-20ft away from the road) and (2) have it be along a main thoroughfare where everyone lives a short distance from it.
I see that in poor areas of the midwest. You need enough single working moms with no time to supervise their kids that it saturates the area with enough independent kids that a Karen can't damn all of them no matter how fast they call CPS. The other kids get jealous too so the whole dynamic changes.
If it's a rich area with stay at home moms (#1 Karens) or enough retired boomers sitting around with nothing to do but enjoy the power of calling modern CPS, forget it.
I lived in the US for thirty years. I’m American. I would be ECSTATIC if the US had one place like this. Best I can think of are maybe accidentally low car areas like Catalina island.
Hah, was it Dirk by any chance? (Give your username)
There's a lot of kids stocking shelves in the stores here. It's a great way for them to be responsible and earn a few extra euro. I think it's great that the Dutch don't treat their 15 and 16 year olds like babies, like American parents do.
It's common in the UK to work from the age of 13 or 14, depending where you live. I worked in the Post Office across my road at 13, every Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon, in 2009. Most of my friends had part time jobs working in retail while at school. I was behind the pub bar at 16 slinging pints.
The (possibly completely incorrect) impression I get from speaking with Americans I know who have moved here, or I work with, is that nobody really works until they get to college unless it's a paper round or it's at your parents business. It almost goes without saying then that most people would be pretty infantile if they don't start work until they're almost mid-20s.
I think part of that in Britain is because we live in towns. In a small town there's always a shop or pub or restaurant to work in and kids can walk or cycle to work. Same in NL. Because so much of America lives in pure residential suburbs, the opportunities aren't there.
It was a nice surprise to see teenagers working in my local brewery this past weekend, collecting glasses, clearing and cleaning tables, etc. They were probably between 13 and 16. Not allowed to serve alcohol until they are 18, and can take on the personal legal responsibilities for Responsible Service of Alcohol.
Most jobs for teenagers here are in fast food service - two of my friends have mid/late teenagers working these jobs. Most jobs in retail, at least near me, seem to be taken by adults.
Yeah, I think I started working in Restaurants aged 14 and really didn't stop. I still get a slight burst of nostalgia whenever I go to the countryside and see the pubs etc staffed by young'uns(it doesn't seem to happen much in London, don't know about other cities).
In your analogy, swimmers may have gone down 90% but kids are still being submerged in water as much as ever if not more. The vast majority of traffic deaths are people INSIDE cars.
The increase is mostly attributable to 30-39 year olds on arterial highways at night.
Kids playing on neighborhood streets show continued improvement... In fact IIHS pedestrian fatality data says that 1-13 year olds are the group with the HIGHEST reduction
This exchange shows why I don’t trust most people who initially through statistics out on the internet. It takes a real autist to come in with the correct reading of it.
That data shows a local minimum in 2009 and suggests that pedestrian deaths were higher during the "golden age" the commenter is referring to than today, and that is in spite of many more cars on the road today
There was an awesome c64 music radio show on KDVS (the UC Davis radio station) back in the nineties, but I can find zero record of it existing. Does anyone on this thread know anything about it, or even perhaps have recordings?
Yes. I remember listening to it on the radio. The DJ used the handle Hard Hat Mack. It was pretty awesome to hear SID music over the radio.
I found this archive that has some of the shows recorded, and set playlists (I'm giving two links as the site is using frames so the top level page requires you navigate the menus to get to these):
The set playlists (using HVSC) works. For actual recordings they're 404 from this site -- arnold.c64.org is gone. But there are a few archives of the arnold.c64.org site! This should help re-construct the original links from the above page:
- https://www.mmnt.net/db/0/0/arnold.c64.org/pub/sidmusic/lala/ra
- https://archive.org/download/arnold.c64.org (download the whole thing and dig into pub/sidmusic/lala/ra)
Due to the era, most of the files are in RealAudio format; with a few MP3s as well. Wonder if this could all be re-posted somewhere in modern formats to make it more accessible.
Its possible the authors are still around and have more copies; doubtful KDVS has archives, maybe tapes buried in the library.
Anyway, hope this helps! Its a cool piece of history and brings back a few memories.
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