Hacker News: bergie

New comment by bergie in "Chuwi Minibook X"

bergie — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:01:17 +0000

Absolutely. The 11" MacBook Air was the best laptop Apple ever made.

New comment by bergie in "Ask HN: What Is the State of App Development in 2026?"

bergie — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:26:41 +0000

I think the reasonable way to look at LLMs is similar to how you'd work with junior developers. They can churn out code, but do need constant guidance. Of course, (some of the) real juniors will eventually become seniors. It remains to be seen if LLMs will.

New comment by bergie in "I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)"

bergie — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:51:50 +0000

The traditional longer-range P2P is HF radio and maybe Winlink email on that. APRS over HF is also possible, and Reticulum would be too if hams were allowed to use encryption.

On the passage from Panama to Polynesia we had daily HF radio contact with Hawaii and California. Sometimes radio weather was pretty bad, but generally it worked out.

In practice nowadays passage communications for 99% of boats is WhatsApp over Starlink, with maybe Garmin InReach as backup.

New comment by bergie in "I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)"

bergie — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:36:21 +0000

I'm right now anchored at an atoll in the Tuamotus, French Polynesia. 3/10 boats anchored here have Meshtastic.

New comment by bergie in "I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)"

bergie — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:34:01 +0000

Isn't that exactly the idea of Reticulum?

http://reticulum.network/manual/whatis.html

New comment by bergie in "I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)"

bergie — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:56:39 +0000

I think there are people playing with Halow with Reticulum. That's one advantage of having a multi-transport system. There is also a Bluetooth transport now: https://salemdata.net/johnpress/?p=720

New comment by bergie in "I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)"

bergie — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:53:06 +0000

A lot of the "early internet" protocols would likely pair quite well, especially ones based on UDP.

However, Reticulum has its own active "small web" implementation with NomadNet and the Micron markup.

New comment by bergie in "Incident with Actions and Pages"

bergie — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:09:49 +0000

I'm looking at setting up rngit mirrors of all my repos on our boat NAS. Conceivably it also allows issue tracking and collaboration without centralized infra

https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html#mirroring-reposito...

Distributed Development

bergie — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:25:56 +0000

Article URL: http://reticulum.network/manual/distributed.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48261635

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bergie in "An Introduction to Meshtastic"

bergie — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:40:04 +0000

We started this trip with a summer cruise in Scotland, so who knows where we'll end up

New comment by bergie in "An Introduction to Meshtastic"

bergie — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:52:08 +0000

A few boats, yes. But it is still a "new thing". Before leaving Panama I ordered a stack of cheap Heltec V3 Meshtastic boards so we can give some to our buddy boats

New comment by bergie in "An Introduction to Meshtastic"

bergie — Sat, 09 May 2026 01:36:13 +0000

We are in the South Pacific with our sailboat, and are using Meshtastic every day to talk between ourselves and with various buddy boats. The boat has a solar-powered repeater (CLIENT_BASE) on the mast that increases communications range significantly.

This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed.

We plan to run experiments with Reticulum when we stop for the cyclone season. Reticulum would open a lot more possibilities with both LoRa and internet-based comms. The Columba app seems to do a lot to bridge the usability gap, but work will need to be done to integrate Reticulum with our boat systems the way we have with Meshtastic (alerting, telemetry, digital switching control).

New comment by bergie in "For the first time in history, more Americans are moving to EU than vice versa"

bergie — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:02:55 +0000

The salaries are indeed lower, but you get so much more for the money. Better healthcare, better food, livable cities. Lots of major cost items like a car (or three!) are things you can simply skip.

New comment by bergie in ""People who don't use AI will be left behind""

bergie — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 22:37:16 +0000

> a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person

[citation needed]

I try LLMs for something every couple of months, and I have yet to see them produce anything actually correct. Calling non-existing library methods, confabulations, etc.

But sure, they produce a lot of stuff in a short while. The utility of any of that another question.

New comment by bergie in "Using the internet like it's 1999"

bergie — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 04:54:20 +0000

Now, I think the author would consider it "solutionism", but the other day I spent a bunch of time browsing Reticulum's NomadNet sites (using the Columba mobile app).

And while aesthetically it was more early 90s than 1999, it filled me not only with nostalgia, but also with some optimism for the future of the Internet. Something I haven't felt in a while...

Rediscovering the Handcart

bergie — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:44:24 +0000

Article URL: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2026/04/rediscovering-the-handcart/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47870694

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by bergie in "Not buying another Kindle"

bergie — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:49:02 +0000

At least some of the Boox devices support Play Store, meaning that you can install termux.

https://lockywolf.net/2024-08-07_Using-an-ebook-instead-of-a...

New comment by bergie in "I think WebRTC is better than SSH-ing for connecting to Mac terminal from iPhone"

bergie — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:17:51 +0000

Reticulum shell is also an option, and would also work over LoRa

https://pypi.org/project/rnsh/

New comment by bergie in "Elon Musk Wants to Build an A.I. Satellite Factory on the Moon"

bergie — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:13:26 +0000

Somebody gave him a synopsis of Moon is a Hard Mistress that went something like "AI organises a libertarian polygamous utopia on moon after seceding from earth using mass driver as the threat"

New comment by bergie in "Android’s desktop interface leaks"

bergie — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:43:47 +0000

They rebuilt DeX on Google's desktop codebase. So obviously a lot of features were lost. Hopefully what we'll gain is wider app support.