andyjohnson0

Seconded.

Someone once described Systemantics as the book that systwm designers read under the covers at night with a torch.

I've never been very clear what a "homelab" actually is. Anyone care to offer a definitin or description?

This is wonderful.

The gravitational constant is maybe a little low for my taste, but I like that I can fling a block vertically up off the top of the frame and it reappears even 5+ seconds later. Things don't get ignored out of existence. Neat.

I'm thirty+ years in too, and it happens all the time - particularly in smaller operations. Resourcing constraints, disinclination to provide training, tight deadlines, etc.

This is indeed what I meant. Thanks for stating it with more clarity than I was able to.

I felt that this article didn't provide strong justifications for some of its assertions.

> Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform.

Disagree. I'm most familiar with Windows and Android - but native apps on those platforms, snd also on Mac, look pretty good when using the default tools and libraries. Yes, its possible to use (say) material design and other ux-overkill approaches on native, but thats a choice just like it us for web apps.

And OS vendors are very much incentivised to make natuve development as easy and painless as possible - because lock-in.

> That explains the rise of Electron before LLM times,

Disagree. The "rise of Electron" is due to the economics of skill-set convergence on JS, the ubiquity of the JS/HTML/CSS/Node stack platform, and many junior developers knowing little or nothing else.

As for the rest: minor variations in traffic light positioning and corner radii are topical but hardly indicators of decaying platorms.

> Jevons' paradox tells us that AI will create more demand for software than ever. I see no threat to my career here.

AI will also create essentially infinite supply with, if you believe the predictions, little if any need for human contributions.

Linux Mint. My main machine is Win 11 and I'm happy with that, but I recently put Mint on a laptop and honestly it's great.

    Don’t just stand there with your hair turning gray,
    soon enough the seas will sink your little island.
    So while there is still the illusion of time,
    set out for another shore.
    No sense packing a bag.
    You won’t be able to lift it into your boat.
    Give away all your collections.
    Take only new seeds and an old stick.
    Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail.
    Don’t be afraid.
    Someone knows you’re coming.
    An extra fish has been salted.

by Mona (Sono) Santacroce (1928–1995)

from The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski

Wear OS watches commonly have wifi, and can be programmed with the standard Android API and toolchain/IDEs. I doubt that Google will discontinue Wear OS - although your evaluation of risk will undoubtedly depend on whether you're looking at developing personal or commercial apps.

I'm currently wearing a TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra, which has wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS. I've written personal tools for it, and its fairly painless (and free). As a developer with some background in Android, I enjoyed the experience. Getting apps approved for the app store is a pita though, as Google sets quite high bars for the review process.

I also have a Samsung Galaxy Watch4, which also has wifi. People here speak well of Pebble, which might be an option, but I have no real knowledge of it.

Finally, though, wifi is power-hungry and watches have limited batteries and endurance. Both Wear OS and WatchOS will limit wifi use by apps to conserve power, and you ultimately can't do much about that. Using Bluetooth to a phone, and its much greater wifi capacity, is a common approach.

To explain:

I posted that comment because your post was not actually asking (or telling) hn anything substantive. You encountered an entirely mundane piece of technology - an ineffective chatbot, which is hardly either new or novel - and basically used Ask to publish a low-effort blog post recounting the encounter. I dont see any attempt to draw anything deeper from what happened.

If this had been posted on a blog, or on x/mastodon/whatever, and submitted to hn in the normal way, then I'm sceptical that it would have been noticed.

But yeah, it got up-votes and my comment was down-voted. I just don't think that's what matters here.

Please don't do this. Ask HN isn't your blogging platform. Per the guidelines its for asking questions of the community.

From the hn guidelines:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "

Please don't do this. Ask HN isn't your blogging platform. Per the guidelines its for asking questions of the community.

I wonder how many similar agents are hanging out on HN.

Meanwhile the US government is abandoning the regulation of emissions that cause climate change.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/climate/trump-epa-greenho...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/trump-epa-ro...

> Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.

And during those periods there were no human beings. And no agriculture, or unstable globalised economiies, or dense urban societies vulnerable to disruption.

It is, of course, interesting that our planet has this long, varied existence that pre-dates us. But it is of little use in understanding how to get us out of the hole we're in. And it is arguably dangerous, because it misleads people into thinking that we have the capacity to adapt to such conditions, when we manifestly don't.

I'm a developer, mid/late fifties. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20, so I guess I started writing code at about the same time as the OP even if I'm a few years older.

Yes, I mourn the end of my craft and all that that. But also:

This isn't the end of hand-written code. A few will still get paid to do it in niche domains. Some will do it as a hobby or craft activity - like oil painting or furniture making. The tooling will move on and become more specialised and expensive. Like owning Japanese woodworking tools.

But software construction as a human-based economic activity is clearly about to slam hard into a singularity, and many of us who rely on our hard-won skills to pay the bills and survive are going to find ourselves unemployed and unemployable. A few early adopters will get to stay on and sip their artesanal coffee and "build beautiful things" while their agent herds toil. But most of us won't. Software has always mostly been just CRUD apps, and that is going to need a whole lot less people going forward. People like me, perhaps, or you.

Some, who have sufficient financial and chronological runway, will go off and do other things. Many won't have that opportunity. I have personal experience of late-career unemployment - although I'm currently working - and its not pretty. A lot of lives are going to to be irreparably disrupted by this. Personally, I'd hoped that I could make it through to some stable kind of retirement, but I just don't see it anymore.

I recall a few posts when he moved out there. Based on a quick look at my archived IP emails:

https://seclists.org/interesting-people/2018/Jun/35

https://seclists.org/interesting-people/2018/Jul/2

https://seclists.org/interesting-people/2018/Jul/84

I enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea, but my favourite of her works is Always Coming Home [1]. Such a rich and varied and humane book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home

Some kind of stop symbol used in training, perhaps?

Not sure where you are located, but here in the UK supermarkets (eg Tesco) sell vegan omega 3/6/9 capsules.

Coincidentally there is an interview with Roger Deakins, who did the cinematography on Shawshank, as well as many other excellent films, in The Guardian today.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/08/roger-deakins-c...

Please don't do this. Ask HN isn't your blogging platform. Per the guidelines its for asking questions of the community.

Another legend of our field has left the stage. RIP.

I never knew him, but I've been lurking on his IP list since the nineties. It was always informative, even as the web made tech news pervasive. Black bar, I reckon.

Please don't do this. Ask HN isn't your blogging platform. Per the guidelines its for asking questions of the community.

> Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.

For how long do you think this is sustainable? In the sense of you, or me, or all these other people here being able to earn a living. Six months? A couple of years? The time until the next-but-one Claude release drops?

Does everyone have to just keep re-making themselves for whatever the next new paradigm turns out to be? How many times can a person do that? How many times can you do that?

From memory, and from the one time I did it about three years ago: they get a letter saying that the DVLA has reason to believe that they are unfit to drive and that they must pass a medical examination in order to keep their licence. I don't believe the letter says that they've been reported.

And to be clear: when I said "anonymously" I meant from the pov of the person being reported. The DVLA requires some basic details of the person making the report, but they're definitely not disclosed to the subject.

You can anonymously report your concerns to the DVLA at [1]. Select "driver's medical". I had to do this with an elderly family member who refused to stop driving despite being manifestly physically and cognitively incapable. Its a difficult call but you may be saving someone's life.

[1] https://contact.dvla.gov.uk/driver/capture-transaction-type