RebeccaTheDev

Triumph of the Nerds and Pirates of Silicon Valley is what convinced me to actually pursue software as a career. It was so hugely influential.

For what I am using it for, I recently wrote a little web app called Afterfeed [0] that lets you view backups from social media websites as a single unified timeline.

To put this into perspective, I was a voracious social media user for decades. For me, this is 25 years of data, close to 100,000 posts, spanning everything from LiveJournal in 2001 to Mastodon in 2026. But when put together, it is a timeline of my life.

As kind of a last minute idea, I added an MCP server because why not? Once I wired an LLM up to it, I could ask introspective questions and find new ways of looking at myself and my own history. Simple things like "what was I doing 10 years ago around this time?" to more complex things like researching past thought patterns.

[0] https://github.com/rebeccathedev/afterfeed/

> The current climate around seems very sudden.

Is it?

Grievances against big tech - over issues like the stupendous amount of money being created for very few, and the damage being inflicted among many other things - have been building for years. Whether you view those complaints as legitimate or not very much depends on your point of view, but the anger is there, it is real, and it is palpable.

AI was the tipping point for a lot people, especially younger people. My teenager refuses to use it. Then, Elon Musk went to Memphis and threw gas on the fire, providing a perfect illustration of why people are so upset.

Data centers are an avatar right now of all of that because they are a physical manifestation of what people can't otherwise fight.

Conversely, I once had a very large yard for a suburban home, about a third of an acre. I sectioned my yard into about 5 sections, but I mowed pretty much the same way: whatever lines are longest without stopping.

The less time I spent in Alabama heat, the better.

> Also: subscription fatigue is real.

This. I just went and cancelled a bunch of vampire subscriptions that had accrued in my life (both in and out of the Apple ecosystem) and ended up saving somewhere in the range of $60 a month.

I get that people have bills to pay and building and maintaining software costs money, but when everyone wants money from me for every little thing, eventually I have to decide who gets what cut from an increasingly limited sized pie.

Apps like this that, while beautiful, replicate functionality that is "good enough" that I can get for free are the first thing to be cut.

To add on to this: if you're a "guy" still trying to feel out some really confusing feelings, playing a vixen online allows you to explore those feelings without it impacting your real life. It's the same reason it's pretty common for trans people to report preferring to play characters of their true gender in video games. It gives you a safe, low-stakes way to explore gender.

With furry especially, that particular fandom has for decades been openly and loudly supportive of LGBTQ+ people and a very very significant percentage are queer. It's a very, very safe place for exploration.

Nest thermostats. They were an endless source of frustration for me.

> I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path.

Just so you know, you're not alone here. Mine was a bit different (gender related) but the causes are essentially the same: I just kept choosing whatever path was easiest instead of facing what I was actually feeling. It made me fabulously "successful" at life and I had everything that you would expect to come along: wife, kid, big house, fancy job. It's a hard feeling to reconcile - being so successful in what most of society would say you should be ... and yet still so miserable.

So, I see you. <3

I mean, it's a hobby? It doesn't necessarily have to have a point other than to enrich your existence.

My Mastodon feed has a very "early to mid 2000s LiveJournal friends page" feel to it, and I honestly adore this.

I'll add my voice to others here that this is a huge problem especially for small hobbyist websites.

I help administer a somewhat popular railroading forum. We've had some of these AI crawlers hammering the site to the point that it became unusable to actual human beings. You design your architecture around certain assumptions, and one of those was definitely not "traffic quintuples."

We've ended up blocking lots of them, but it's a neverending game of whack-a-mole.

Three jobs ago I worked for a company that did e-learning systems for industrial clients. This was roughly 2004. One of the company owner's many ideas was a technical documentation system based on XML and XSLT. The "idea" being that technical writers or SMEs would rather write XML than, you know, use a word processor.

Unsurprisingly the idea did not take off, but I did find the XML/XSLT combination to be very interesting.

My day-to-day work now is mostly Python and Vue, but PHP was my bread and butter for almost 20 years and to this day probably still probably one of my favorite languages just because I am still so familiar with it. There's something to be said for knowing all the traps and rough spots, and knowing how to avoid them.

The things that held PHP up in the early days, especially it being just dead simple to deploy, are not as big a deal in 2025 as they were in 2005. Shared hosting, while it still definitely exists, is kind of a dying model. Most modern dev I see these days even in PHP is nginx/PHP-FPM and containers, which is really not that terribly different from any other web framework. Even Wordpress, these days I recommend anyone who truly wants to go down that path to find a hosted Wordpress provider rather than trying to do it themselves.

Personally? I would never start a greenfield project now using just PHP. I don't know many people who would.

But PHP + Composer + Laravel? Laravel did for PHP what Rails did for Ruby, and what React/Vue/etc did for JS. Composer gave PHP real package management. It cannot be understated how important it was to have a framework and package manager to take care of all of the thoroughly unpleasant parts. That way you can focus on building the app, not reimplementing things you've done so many time before.

Just wanted to say thank you for this service. I have a little homebrew clock I build from a Raspberry Pi and a small display in my bathroom. Below the time, it displays the weather forecast for the day so I know how to dress. That little clock has become an essential piece of my morning routine.

I switched to Open Meteo a few months ago when the previous API I was using quit working. It's been rock solid and such a nice user experience compared to everything else I tried.

Exactly what I'm doing. I even set it up as a separate binary sensor using a template.

At my last job, when I first started there (this was circa around 2006), we actually used a Firefox browser plugin with a custom XUL interface to enable our writers to write content faster. It has a very complex UI, as complex as anything that could be found in the browser itself. Thousands of lines of XML and JS.

XUL was deeply unpleasant to use and maintain, and I do not miss it at all. We eventually ended up rewriting it as a standard webapp. It made the writers a bit slower, but they adapted eventually.

> Another problem is that programmers specialize at being good at programming, but things like documentation and UI testing are their own disciplines that are separate and distinct in a lot of meaningful ways.

Even having decent UIs is a problem for many Linux apps and many are often deeply unpleasant to use day-to-day. This is one thing that has started to slowly get better in the last decade or so, but I can always tell what applications were designed by programmers and which ones have had at least some UI work done on them.

Also, accepting feedback from users on UI improvements often gets either ignored or de-prioritized in favor of adding new features. It's very frustrating to see an otherwise really fantastic application with a lot of neat functionality hamstrung by a bad UI.

This is what I did to control an DeLonghi electric oil radiator in my home office. And since it takes a couple hours to warm up, I have it connected to Home Assistant to turn on a couple hours before my workday starts - and also sync'd to my work calendar so it doesn't do it on days I'm not working. And then turn off again at the end of the day.

Ended up setting it up as a virtual thermostat along with a Zigbee temperature sensor and letting HA manage the the whole thing. After a few months of hacking and tweaking, it works pretty well!

But, there were a few problems with this approach:

* The IR code to turn on and turn off were the same code (which makes sense if you look at the unit, there's just an on-off toggle button)

* No temperature control. On the heater itself, you can adjust the temperature as well as a high/medium/low setting. The remote didn't have these settings, so I couldn't capture them using an IR receiver sensor. Thankfully, these settings persist when the unit is off so I just set them once and called it good enough. And I eventually got around the need for this by setting up the virtual thermostat with a Zigbee temperature sensor in the room.

But the biggest problem is that I had no way to know if the unit was actually ON.

The codes sometimes wouldn't work unless the IR blaster was pointed directly at the unit, and even then they will sometimes randomly fail. I ended up plugging it into a Zigbee plug with power monitoring, so I could tell from the power draw if it was on, and try to re-send the commands a few times if it failed to turn on.

Overall, it was kind of a fun way to make a dumb device smart, but what OOP is doing is way cooler.

I was not prepared for my food tastes to change! I used to love candy. But now I’m rarely drawn to it, but I will absolutely INHALE fruit. It has so much incredible depth of flavor now!

You can do whatever you like. Many do, and are totally happy about that.

Note, again, I am talking about one specific "type" of gender dysphoria, social dysphoria. There are usually far more facets that come into play as well.

And that's also a way you know you're trans, and not just a man that loves spending time with women. Because the relationships dynamics and social expectations are totally different regardless, we feel out of place. And not being seen in the correct way causes ... pretty deep negative feelings.

I can't speak for other trans women, but is kind of how I describe my experience with this. And this is from someone who is a later-transitioner, talking about this specific type of social dysphoria [0].

It took me enormous effort to relate to other men, and I was never sure if I was doing it correctly. I would go out of my way to try to learn "how to man," including having typically male-coded interests (like sports, or home repair) that I really didn't actually care about but knew I had to because it was socially expected of me. I knew I had to, because I had to operate in that world, but I was never comfortable, none of it ever came naturally and all of it just felt wrong.

I was desperate to relate to women. It would hurt that I wouldn't be able to participate in that world even though I longed to be a part of it. Often my wife and I would have grill out parties, and I would be at my expected place outside with the guys, talking stuff I hated, but I longed to be chatting with the other women inside. I feel comfortable as a woman, and much more comfortable relating to other women in my life.

Do I still have male friends? Of course. I have men I worked with for decades and that I'm still friends with. Our relationships definitely changed a bit, but we still have shared experiences that bind us together. At the same time, with my female friends, our relationships definitely changed as well. Things felt different. Our conversations got deeper and more meaningful, and I feel like I "know" some of them better than I ever knew any of my male friends.

I also kept some of my male interests because I'm interested in them.. I still love aviation and trains. Definitely male-coded interests (though there are quite a few more women than one might expect.) I also picked up, or in some cases learned to stop repressing, typically feminine-coded interests. I have far more fun with dress than I ever cared about doing as a guy. Or, now I proudly own that I read romance novels instead of sheepishly hiding my kindle.

[0] https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en/social-dysphoria

I miss VB6 so much.

For rapidly prototyping an idea, I have yet to find anything that was as good as VB6. Drag a button, write code. Want to change things about the button? Use properties, that live update the GUI without recompiling. It was so simple that a reasonably intelligent person could grasp it in an afternoon, but in the hands of a capable developer could do some very impressive things.

It was also a fun game to hunt for VBX/OCX controls that you could use in things that were downloaded or came on random disks or CDs.

I really feel like VB6 was the peak of that development model and we've been moving away from it since. And I get some of the reasons why (just look at the mess that comes from trying to do anything with Xcode storyboards and version control.) But for just rapidly trying out an idea, I have yet to find anything anywhere that was as good as VB6 was.

WDE!

Ugh, yeah, some of those hallways especially in 1st and 4th quadrants where there aren't very many classrooms and not many people can have a very, very liminal space feel to them. I can totally understand how he got lost in there.

Literally nothing about that building makes any sense unless you stand on your head until you almost pass out. :D

What a fun surprise to see this on HN!

I had the opportunity to work the Foy Desk a few times during my undergrad at Auburn in the early 2000s - mostly as a volunteer while the regular workers would be in meetings. At the time we had a multi-page list of common questions and answers, the Internet (as it was then), as well as access to university computer systems for things like class schedule lookups.

The most common questions I got then were from other students, most around when a certain class started or where it was located. This is was the early 2000s and, while a lot of this was available via OASIS (the Auburn student system) for any student, many either didn't have the computer savvy to use it or ... didn't have a computer at home at all!

The most unusual call I took was from a student who was lost in Haley Center (the largest building on Auburn's campus - at the time, not sure about now as I haven't been back in decades - and somewhat difficult to navigate if you aren't familiar with its layout). The poor kid sounded absolutely panicked. I actually had to pull up a map and walk the him turn-by-turn until he found the main hallway again.

As an aside, it's neat to see a few other Auburn alums on here. WDE!

I blocked a lot of social media sites on my home network to help ease my addiction some. Especially Reddit. I found the mornings I was on Reddit before getting out of bed my mood suffered. I still need to have them available to communicate with some people and for research. But now, in order to use those sites, I either need to leave the house or disconnect from the wifi.

Functionally, this seems to have helped a lot and usually the only time I end up on social media is when I am killing time waiting while out or when I really really want to look at something specific, and only on my mobile device. It seems that making it slightly more inconvenient worked on me without me having to give them up entirely.

My utility also installed smart meters a few years ago - the Focus AXRe with Gridstream RF. It theoretically has Zigbee in it. It even has the Zigbee logo on it. It also uses some frequency hopping radio thing for reporting that I was never able to quite figure out.

But I DID discover that my utility, buried down in like 5 menus on some random screen of the account portal, offers a usage graph at 15 minute intervals. It's not real time - it seems to be delayed by 1-3 hours - but it is far better than getting a surprise bill. And while it used some weird SAP JSON interface, I could deduce what was what and could get the data out of it.

So I whipped up a script to basically scrape this "API" and shove the data into InfluxDB. I also added daily scrapes for the billing page and the rate page so I know when I was billed and how much the current rate is. This is because my utility bills at a lower rate for the first 1,400 kwh, and a higher rate for everything over that. I was not able to discern any pattern to when the bills were issued and the utility company was very unhelpful in this regard, just "sometime ever 27 to 35 days depending on holidays and weekends."

While I would really like realtime data directly off the meter, even being delayed a few hours is better than a random surprise $370 bill. I've written enough scrapers in my life to know it will probably break at some point, but it's been humming along nicely for the last few years.

I used to get my laptop out and try to do things. But ever since the seat pitch started shrinking, I find it really hard to get anything larger than a tablet out without it needing to rest on me or risk having the screen broken if the person in front of me leans back. The last one happened to a coworker a few years ago.

So these days I usually just pull out my iPad and noise cancelling headphones and catch up on my movies or TV shows.

I give her my old iPhone that's already paid off when I upgrade (and that I can put parental controls on.)