--- title: 200 Milliseconds, Correct Merges, and Franken-Domains date: 2026-08-04T18:00:00.000+02:00 week_number: 32 notes: "**TL;DR:** An HTTP request becomes a 200-millisecond interactive journey, while Ink & Switch shows why CRDT convergence does not guarantee valid data and Playwright turns long-lived SPA memory leaks into nightly tests. The tooling side spans proof-oriented F*, OCaml UIs, React over X11, compile-time CSS, progressive Web Components, a no-VDOM React successor, and a visualization language designed for agents. MobX and TanStack both get major cleanups, privacy law gets a practical home at noyb, and the strange-web section brings stitched-together domains, stolen buttons, collectible real cats, and local image dithering." links: - title: TanStack Has a New Look url: https://tanstack.com/blog/tanstack-has-a-new-look comment: "TanStack introduces a new logo system, global typography, semantic design tokens, component kit, Phosphor icons, and a public `/ds` design-system area. Tanner Linsley frames the redesign as more than polish: now that AI can cheaply generate a conventionally clean developer site, deliberate restraint and visible human care have become stronger signals than another gradient-heavy landing page." tag: news - title: MobX 7.0 url: https://github.com/mobxjs/mobx/releases/tag/mobx%407.0.0 comment: A cleanup-focused major release that drops the ES5 fallback and now always uses Proxy-backed observables, removes legacy decorators and several deprecated APIs, and replaces namespaced annotations with tree-shakeable named exports. The production ESM bundle falls from 17.02 to 13.96 KiB gzipped. The companion mobx-react-lite 5 and mobx-react 10 releases require React 18 or newer and leave batching to React's renderers. tag: news - title: 200 Milliseconds — The Complete Life of One HTTP Request url: https://200ms.thenodebook.com/#act-0-prologue comment: An interactive, scroll-driven trace of the roughly 200 milliseconds between a click and the resulting pixel. One request travels through DNS, TCP, TLS, the Linux kernel, Node's event loop, and Postgres before returning to the browser; scroll distance represents elapsed time, while every stage explains the otherwise invisible work in approachable language. tag: article - title: Convergence Is Not Enough url: https://www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/notebook/lm-02/ comment: "Ink & Switch demonstrates the limit behind an important CRDT promise: Automerge can guarantee that every replica reaches the same state without guaranteeing that the state still satisfies the program's invariants. Concurrent edits to a pointer-based linked list converge deterministically to either a truncated list or a cycle. The proposed direction is merge-aware datatypes that record higher-level operations and validate invariants, preserving intent rather than blindly replaying writes." tag: article - title: Your SPA Is Leaking Memory. Soak Test It url: https://denodell.com/blog/your-spa-is-leaking-memory-soak-test-it comment: A practical Playwright recipe for finding the slow leaks that short, isolated E2E tests miss. Repeat a round-trip user flow hundreds of times in one browser context, force garbage collection through CDP, and compare DOM-node and event-listener counts after a warmup; Playwright's fake clock can also compress an hour of timer activity into minutes. The author recommends this as a nightly test because browser-memory readings naturally vary. tag: article - title: The State of Zero-Runtime CSS-in-JS, Mid-2026 url: https://dx-styles.dev/blog/state-of-zero-runtime-css-in-js/ comment: "A useful field map of compile-time styling after runtime CSS-in-JS became awkward around concurrent rendering and Server Components. It compares vanilla-extract, Panda CSS, StyleX, next-yak, Linaria, and dx-styles by authoring model, output, tokens, recipes, RTL, and migration path. The shared bargain is clear: retain typed, colocated styles while compiling them to CSS and class-name strings, in exchange for a build step and statically analyzable code." tag: article - title: "F*: A Proof-Oriented Programming Language" url: https://fstar-lang.org/ comment: General-purpose language combining dependent types with SMT-backed proof automation and interactive tactics, for both functional and effectful programs. F* normally compiles to OCaml, while verified subsets can be extracted to F#, C, WebAssembly, or assembly; its high-assurance cryptography and parsers already feed production systems including Firefox, the Linux kernel, Python, and Windows Hyper-V. Particularly interesting for critical code in an era when generating code is easier than establishing that it is correct. tag: library&tools - title: Bonsai url: https://github.com/janestreet/bonsai comment: Jane Street's OCaml library for incremental, composable state machines, with Bonsai_web providing a reactive UI framework through Js_of_ocaml. Components are purely functional, and incrementality applies to business computations as well as rendering, so values are recomputed only when their dependencies change. It powers most of Jane Street's internal web apps and includes typed HTML/CSS tooling plus unusually expressive expect-test support. tag: library&tools - title: react-x11 url: https://github.com/sidorares/react-x11 comment: "A React renderer whose host is an X11 server: reconciliation becomes X11 drawing requests sent over a socket, with no DOM, HTML, or browser engine underneath. Yoga handles layout and pure-JavaScript libraries provide the protocol and text shaping; the X server owns the pixels, which keeps remote displays efficient. A fascinating fit for headless servers, low-memory appliances, and displayless CI—provided X11-only and no-web-component constraints are acceptable." tag: library&tools - title: Elena url: https://elenajs.com/ comment: "A 2.9 kB, dependency-free library for progressive Web Components: deliver semantic HTML and CSS first, then hydrate with JavaScript for reactive behavior. It uses native custom elements, avoids Shadow DOM barriers by default, supports SSR and scoped styles, and targets design systems that must work across React, Next.js, Vue, Angular, or no framework at all." tag: library&tools - title: Octane url: https://octanejs.dev/ comment: Compiler-first successor to Inferno that keeps React's component model, hooks, Suspense, context, actions, and one-way data flow while removing the virtual DOM. Its TSRX compiler tracks dependencies automatically, allowing conditional hooks without dependency arrays and updating cloned DOM nodes directly. Existing TSX can stay in place, and React 19 apps can adopt compiled Octane islands incrementally through OctaneCompat. tag: library&tools - title: Inferno url: https://www.infernojs.org/ comment: Mature, performance-focused React-like UI library for client-side and server-side rendering. Inferno offers familiar components and lifecycle APIs, an `inferno-compat` bridge for React-oriented code, functional-component lifecycle events, and native animation support while deliberately targeting the browser DOM rather than React Native. Octane may be its compiler-first successor, but Inferno remains the established virtual-DOM option. tag: library&tools - title: Dither it! url: https://ditherit.com/ comment: Free browser-based image dithering tool with Floyd–Steinberg, Atkinson, and Bayer ordered-dithering algorithms, plus animated GIF and multi-image support. Processing stays local in the browser, making it a quick way to experiment with limited palettes and retro texture without uploading source images to a service. tag: library&tools - title: "Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era" url: https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/gallery/plotly comment: Microsoft's compact visualization intermediate language lets an agent describe data semantics, chart type, and encodings while the compiler derives axes, labels, spacing, legends, and layout. The same human-editable input can produce native Vega-Lite, ECharts, Chart.js, Plotly, or Excel output, and an accompanying MCP server lets agents validate and render charts directly. The linked gallery shows the Plotly backend's 38 chart types. tag: ai - title: Comp AI CRM url: https://github.com/trycompai/crm comment: Open-source, single-tenant CRM designed around an autonomous agent rather than a chat box bolted onto a database. The agent leases work from a durable queue, schedules its own follow-ups, researches within a budget, and records observed evidence instead of guessing facts about people; weak evidence becomes a human-reviewed suggestion. Its shell sandbox has neither network nor database access, a thoughtful boundary for customer data. tag: ai - title: Free AI Prompt Generator url: https://freeaipromptgen.com/ comment: Open-source, client-side wizard that assembles prompts using visible frameworks such as RTF, CO-STAR, TAG, and APE for writing, coding, image, video, data, and research tasks. It explains why each field matters, formats output for different model families, and stores templates locally. AI-based refinement is optional and uses a provider or local-model endpoint configured with your own key. tag: ai - title: noyb — European Center for Digital Rights url: https://noyb.eu/en comment: Vienna-based nonprofit that turns GDPR and other European privacy rights into strategic complaints, litigation, collective redress, and public enforcement work. Its site tracks cases by authority and company, publishes reports and legal resources, and offers guides for exercising data-protection rights—a useful place to follow how privacy law is applied beyond policy summaries. tag: other - title: franken.domains url: https://franken.domains/ comment: A delightfully theatrical domain-hack laboratory that cuts real English, German, Spanish, and French words at the dot, then grafts the ending onto one of 150 country-code or 58 generic top-level domains. Availability is checked against the registry, the feed surfaces still-unregistered specimens, and an "operating table" dissects words you bring yourself. It is half naming tool, half internet cabinet of curiosities. tag: other - title: Stolen Buttons url: https://anatolyzenkov.com/stolen-buttons comment: Anatoly Zenkov's ever-growing cabinet of buttons collected from websites around the internet. The companion Button Stealer browser extension automatically adds one from every site you visit; it runs locally and sends no data anywhere. Useless in exactly the right way, and unexpectedly revealing about how many visual dialects the humble button has accumulated. tag: other - title: CatchCat url: https://www.catchcat.lol/ comment: "Pokémon Go-style cat spotting for iOS and Android: point the live camera at a real cat, pass on-device checks, and turn the encounter into a collectible card with a generated name, traits, rarity, and the original photo. Community sightings populate a map, while the Android Alley Clash mode turns collected cats into battle pieces. The album-as-field-journal framing is considerably more charming than another generic creature collection." tag: other --- My two favorites this week are franken.domains and 200 Milliseconds. Franken Domains wins on pure strangeness: it takes the exhausted domain-name problem and turns it into a mad-scientist cabinet full of stitched-together words. The HTTP-request visualization is the substantial pick—scrolling through all the invisible systems between one click and one painted pixel makes familiar browser behavior feel surprising again.