Hello, world!

Lawnchair is now officially on Mastodon! We'll be posting release announcements, blog posts, while bringing the same casual vibe (and occasional shitposts) over from our X account.

Speaking of which, we just dropped our end-of-year Lawnstate post with a look at Lawnchair 15 Beta 2 and the road to Lawnchair 16. Check it out!

https://lawnchair.app/blog/lawnstate-2025-reflection/

Give us a follow and a boost to help spread the word!

#Android #Launcher #OpenSource #FOSS #Lawnchair

Reminder to watch “common side effects”.

https://youtu.be/twChhekETjQ

The Charter Oak at Hartford (c. 1846), by Frederic Edwin Church

#Art #Painting

Show HN: I built 48 lightweight SVG backgrounds you can copy/paste

Link: https://www.svgbackgrounds.com/set/free-svg-backgrounds-and-patterns/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427299

Farm animal welfare USA vs UK

FYI Ractopamine is a muscle growth drug banned in 160 countries

We fact-checked. All accurate, bar:
• hot branding is legal in the UK
• max livestock journey times in USA (without break) is 28hours, not 36
• farrowing crates, sow stalls, barren battery cages now banned in 10 US states

By @RSPCA_official

I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.

About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.

In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.

There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.

Now it's LLMs.

Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.

#rant

EDIT: This blew up. Muting the thread for some peace and quiet.

Apparently I missed that Tony Hoare died last week. (EDIT: Apparently two weeks ago, the obituary I saw didn’t have the date of death and was from last week).

I think the first time I met Tony was when we were both on the same panel. The Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG) conference arranged a panel with some people from their community and two relative outsiders. They didn’t tell me until I turned up that there were only two and I was the one without a Turing Award or a knighthood. I was, as you might imagine, somewhat intimidated by this. Tony was amazing. He made me feel like we were just two peers in the subject, each with valid opinions to contribute.

I spent a few years with my office a couple of doors down from his. He was always happy for people to drop in and chat. I went to him with questions periodically and always learned something. Rarely an answer to my question, but always something interesting.

A huge loss to the field.

Kind and cherished FOSS and computing freedom advocate @sleepyowl (Joyce Ng) has gone missing and there is reason to fear she may have been apprehended by authorities, possibly likely even for being framed. Nobody has been able to reach her and many of us are worried for her safety.

Joyce does work on verifiable open source hardware. She also has been an activist pushing against the rise of far-right Christian nationalism globally but especially in Singapore. Because of this and her identity, she has people who would like to see bad things happen to her.

Probably for this reason, she may have been misidentified by Five Eyes as being a threat actor. Joyce wrote about this concern in November, posting a threatening screenshot where she was tipped off. https://bitowl.online/about

Please spread this wide. Hopefully this is a false alarm but Joyce is a kind-hearted person who fights for human rights and computing freedom; many of us are worried for her safety.