Technology
At the PKM Summit 2026, Mark Meinema showed us how we can easily create some extra features for Raycast using Claude Code.Some interesting questions came up during that session: What makes you decide to build something? Mark said he only builds something when he notices some annoyance about repeating tasks. As soon as he feel enough friction he’ll take action.
But if you build all these pieces of small custom software yourself, don’t you also need to maintain it? Then came the remark that stuck: it’s not a question of if software will break, but when.
That remark kept resonating with me over the following days, because three things broke in quick succession.
On Sunday, the Quantis QE317 DVB-C digital receiver just stopped working. It was bricked, with no clear fix. After a lot of hassle, I was able to revive it.
On Monday, the Onedrive app on my Mac decided not to connect to the cloud anymore. The Signing In spinner kept turning till eternity.
And today, mid-flow during a work session, all my Safari browsers went completely blank. I had been running macOS Sequoia 15.7.3, and I generally follow the rule: if it works, don’t touch it, don’t upgrade. But now I had to bite the bullet. Systems get clogged over time, and right when you least need it, they’ll give up.
The 21st century did not free us from manual labor. It just handed us a different kind of wrench. We are all unpaid systems administrators now, keeping our digital lives running between the cracks of whatever else we were supposed to be doing.
“Mechanical Man” by Devo, a raw 1974 demo written before the band had a label or any public profile. One of Devo’s earliest statements of their core idea: de-evolution, the human reduced to a machine operator, running on routine rather than will.
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Filed from a Macbook that had other plans today