Ironically, PFAS levels have been found to be higher in wealthy people. People with money own more furniture and clothing with stain resistant treatments, for example.
I think the interesting interplay with this is in "need" vs. "want".
I share the conventional wisdom that nothing, or very nearly nothing, needs these properties. But I don't think it's unreasonable that people have been looking around for things that want them.
I don't know, but I also think it's reasonable for people (who aren't me) to see if they can figure out use cases where they do want that, and actually make them work. I'm not particularly bullish on any of these projects, I just also think that thinking outside the box in this way is one of the ways that interesting things come about.
I'm personally pretty happy to be conventional and milquetoast, but I think it's fairly self defeating to be stuck in the box of "only projects that work on traditional database architecture could ever make sense", so I'm glad people are out there trying different things, even when I think they're pretty likely to fail.
PURL is in the same space as w3id.org, not perma.cc. Purl and w3id work by creating stable URLs thar can redirect to a (potentially changing) origin, perma.cc/archive.org/archivebox create WARC archives or the content at a given instant.
HN discussion of above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44107655
How Well Do New Python Type Checkers Conform? A Deep Dive into Ty, Pyrefly, and Zuban (2025-08-29) https://sinon.github.io/future-python-type-checkers/