This is an awesome idea and really resonates with me.

I did something similar for my site:

https://stratts.au/_editor/?preview=%2F&file=_site%2Fcontent...

You can edit and rebuild the site from within the browser, then download a .zip that contains everything. The editor can even edit itself.

Beyond self-modifying sites being just plain cool, there's a longevity aspect to it that I find very important as well.

There's also https://www.sparktype.org/ (a browser based CMS) which is also along similar lines.

Daily isn't the only option - you can still get monthly lenses.

Like I said, with proper care and disinfection, permanent lenses could last for years, not days or months!

Weren’t those the hard plastic ones with low oxygen permeability? They’re not as good for your eyes.

No, they were soft, “hydrophilic” or for astigmatism, toric. The hard ones were old, old technology, and largely superseded.

The idea of writing a draft on paper, or cutting out squares to prototype layouts on a table, sounds like a nightmare to me. But I never did like pen and paper much and have lived and breathed computers since I was young. My ideal method of writing is a full screen monospaced terminal

That said, I do much prefer reading on paper, or at least on e-ink, for many of the same reasons outlined in the post. Computers and phones are just too distracting, and too dynamic.

And I'd love some way to write down shopping lists or appointments, and have them available wherever, without having to pull out the phone. Our current method is a whiteboard + a photo whenever we need it, which doesn't quite cut it.

How does a 30” e-ink screen sound?

Throw in touch for using a stylus and I’d buy it

I think this is a risk with anything that promotes itself as "unlimited", or otherwise doesn't specify concrete limits. I'm always sceptical of services like this as it feels like the terms could arbitrarily change at any point, as we've found out here.

(as a side note, it's funny to see see them promoting their native C app instead of using Java as a "shortcut". What I wouldn't give for more Java apps nowadays)

It was always possible to write large amounts of crappy code if you were motivated or clueless enough (see https://github.com/radian-software/TerrariaClone). It's now just easier, and the consequences less severe, as the agent has code comprehension superpowers and will happily extend your mud ball of a codebase.

There are still consequences, however. Even with an agent, development slows, cost increases, bugs emerge at a higher rate, etc. It's still beneficial to focus on code quality instead of raw output. I don't think this is limited writing it yourself, mind - but you need to actually have an understanding of what's being generated so you can critique and improve it.

Personally, I've found the accessibility aspect to be the most beneficial. I'm not always writing more code, but I can do much more of it on my phone, just prompting the agent, which has been so freeing. I don't feel this is talked about enough!

Not only that, but so many people are reluctant to pay for anything so your average installation is chock full of freemium plugins. I've worked on plenty of sites whose admin page looked a bit like the IE6 toolbar meme.

Hmmm... I'm reluctant to pay for WordPress plugins because a bunch of them are also single purpose plugins from random developers, and of questionable quality.

And they also make your WP admin page look like an IE6 toolbar.

The premium plugins are arguably even worse.

Unlike the free plugins, they're not reviewed by the WordPress.org team, and if you stop paying for them then you'll lose access to their future plugin updates, including critical security fixes.

I wouldn't say that their code quality is noticably higher, either; there have been countless CVEs for premium WordPress plugins over the years, and no shortage of discontinued/abandoned premium plugins that are no longer being maintained but are still installed on thousands of sites.

It makes sense that you wouldn’t receive updates if you stopped paying. You’re paying for the labour up until that point. It’s like paying to have your grass mowed and then complaining because it wasn’t mowed again in the future without you paying.

Both my wife and I are reluctant to upload our entire photo collection spanning 20+ years to the cloud. Immich has been working really well for us, the experience for her is just as seamless as it would be for Google Photos, I think.

And at $180/yr for the 2TB of storage we'd need to pay for, vs. maybe $200 in hardware, it pays itself off pretty quickly... if you exclude the time spent setting it up and administering it. But I don't mind, it's a bit like digital gardening for me.

$200 hardware only? my main concern with storing photos locally is the need for a NAS. Even at 2-3TB you still need: a NAS device, 2-3 hard drives and the mini pc to run immich + power bill to run them. it will cost more than $180/yr. cost should not be the main factor people store photos locally.

You don't need a NAS, really. My setup is a second-hand i5-7300U fanless mini-PC I got for $90, 2 x second-hand 4TB HDDs, and 2 x USB 3.5" enclosures. It's messy but it works... I haven't measured power in a bit but I reckon it pulls around 20-30W, which is around $15-20 a year at my current prices.

We back it up daily using restic to an old 2TB NAS that's at my parents place + the occasional manual backup

How is that by itself not a NAS?

It is, but OP said you need both a NAS and a mini PC

180/year? That's ~150watt server. That's a very powerful NAS. You'll be paying $200 per month form a cloud provider for such performance. A performant home low power NAS can be build that will consume easily, 30-40W. It won't need to be upgraded for over a decade. Ideally, 5x HDDs with 5 year warranty. The only expense is rolling upgrades of HDDs as storage fills up.

Backup to cloud glacier storage is ~$1.20 per TiB-month

Cost is absolutely a factor. self-hosting can't even be touched. And, the that's just the start of the value proposition.

My local backups certainly cost more than $180/year just in hard-drives alone.

It's what I paid for my system without the drives. And I don't remember how much I'm paying for the power bill but it was like 15 or 20€/ year more.

If it was just for backuping my photos I would just buy an external hard drive or 2 tough

It's a spectrum, isn't it? From targeted edits that you approve manually - which I think you can reasonably take credit for - all the way to full blown vibe-coded apps where you're hardly involved in the design process at all.

And then there's this awkward bit in the middle where you're not necessarily reviewing all the code the AI generates, but you're the one driving the architecture, coming up with feature ideas, pushing for refactors from reading the code, etc. This is where I'm at currently and it's tricky, because while I'd never say that I "wrote" the code, I feel I can claim credit for the app as a whole because I was so heavily involved in the process. The end result I feel is similar to what I would've produced by hand, it just happened a lot faster.

(granted, the end result is only 2000 LoC after a few weeks working on and off)

I think LOC and "writing code" are largely irrelevant as metrics of productivity in a world with LLMs that love to churn out overly loquacious code.

I think the right way to explain the work done sounds something like, "I worked with Claude to create an app that does ______. I know it works because ______."

> Ubuntu in 2026 is pretty much the same as Ubuntu from 2006.

Well, Ubuntu MATE perhaps :)

Windows LTSC I find comes pretty close to the less intrusive Windows I remember from the XP/7 era.

Beyond the pricing part of it, just having media that isn't dependent on an external device is so nice.

But for TV series in particular, watching on disc is quite clunky after a decade+ of streaming services, and DVR boxes prior to that. I'll buy them in principle, but ultimately they end up ripped and viewed via Jellyfin.

We did this with Jeremy Brett Sherlock. Boxed set is of some sentimental value, but we tired of loading the disc, finding the episode etc. Even worse if you have to stop half way.

They ended up ripped and played on kodi