Zen Browser review and benchmark vs Chrome, Brave, Firefox and Safari

I'm looking for a new daily driver browser on my Mac. Chrome is a non-starter for me due to privacy concerns (Google's tracking empire is alive and well), and Edge is just... too much. Every update shoves another set of “features” down my throat — Copilot, discount coupons, Bing nonsense — things I have to disable again and again. No thanks.

No, Wall Street, DeepSeek is not "far superior"

I mean, it is!

But the whole story about the stock market reacting to the news about DeepSeek V3 and R1 is a fine example of the knee-jerk nature of mass consciousness in the era of clickbait economics.

I'm finally dumping Visual Studio

I've been a C# developer for 20 years and I've had enough. After two decades of working with the "big" Visual Studio, I'm effing fed up. It's buggy, slow, and frustrating, and I've decided to make the switch to Visual Studio Code which I only used occasionally until now. While I'm still unsure if I can replicate every aspect of my workflow in VS Code, I'm willing to give it a shot — and so far, I'm really impressed.

Please stop using Any() for C# Lists and Arrays

I'm here to talk about C# performance optimization (again). And about why you should stop using the .Any() LINQ method with Lists and Arrays and embrace the old-school .Count and .Length instead. Don't want to point any fingers, but I see people do it all the time, even in (cough) Microsoft's own .NET source codes.

Clearing Nginx Proxy Cache for Wildcard URLs: A DIY Guide

Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you need to clear the Nginx proxy cache for a specific set of URLs, particularly those following a wildcard pattern like www.website.com/folder/*. Surprisingly, Nginx, in its standard offering, doesn't provide a straightforward way to do this. They probably want you to upgrade to Nginx Plus for such "advanced" features. But fear not! There's a DIY workaround that's both effective and satisfyingly rebellious.

The state of modern Front End

Let's talk about front-end. There'll be a lot of swearing, I'm sorry.

About once every six months another blogger bursts into HackerNews/Twitter trends, saying - hey, enough of that JavaScript bloat, let's all use modern HTML controls!

ChatGPT won't "kill Google" because Google is already dead

I have just conducted an experiment where I forced myself to use Bing's new chat-based search for almost a week, and spoiler alert: I loved it. But I'll get into that later.

I really wanted to like Tailwind CSS

Nobody:

Absolutely no one:

Me: Here's what I think about Tailwind CSS!

How I learned to stop worrying and wrote my own memory-cache

How to Hide Tethering from Your Mobile Operator

TLDR:

1. Use a secure VPN to prevent DPI
2. On your laptop, change packet TTL to 65 (iOS default 64 plus one).