i personally have pushed back on every “infinite scrolling” feature request from product designers. first, you think you need it; you don’t. second, you think it’s just so nifty! it isn’t. oh is your content is dynamically generated? what was wrong with Reddit’s pager that launched that site into popularity?

it’s unnecessary complexity that hides information from the user, makes API calls (which are, spoilers, paginated) more complicated, can cause the obvious memory/resource consumption issues, and just generally disempowers the user. which i guess on a social media app is the point. but totally counter to the goals of a fleet management system lol

yeah i get that.

generally most modern UIs are moving away from those reactive patterns (React, Svelte, etc) just cuz the composition can be optimized (Kotlin compiler plugin, shadow-DOM, etc), and a lot of people—myself included—find that declarative design easier to reason about. and yeah i guess i outed myself as an Android dev, but i can’t in good conscience recommend the node based Android XML UI lol (although that’s a different SDK).

anyway, not to yuck your yum. i played around with JavaFX back in the day but never made anything to speak of. i’ll have to check out more of your blog!

JavaFX with Kotlin

mad lad.

what makes you snub Compose UI?

honestly, i 100% do not miss GUIs that hopefully do what you want them to do or have options grayed out or don’t include all the available options etc etc

i do get burnout, and i suffer many of the same symptoms. but i have a solution that works for me: NixOS

ok it does sound like i gave you more homework, but hear me out:

• with NixOS and flakes you have a commit history for your lab services, all centralized in one place.
• this can include as much documentation as you want: inline comments, commit messages, living documents in your repository, whatever
• even services that only provide a Docker based solution can be encapsulated and run by Nix, including using an alternate runtime like podman or containerd
• (this one will hammer me with downvotes but i genuinely do think that:) you can use an LLM agent like GitHub Copilot to get you started, learn the Nix language and ecosystem, and create Nix modules for things that need to be wrapped. i’ve been a software engineer for 15 years; i’ve got nothing to prove when it comes to making a working system. what i want is a working system.

someone was asking for a GUI, so not going to be an ffmpeg expert. likely the LLM would recommend ffmpeg anyway. plus you would run YOLO (or maybe CLIP) locally; it has been running on Android phones since 2020 at least. a Jupyter notebook would also give a quick and dirty GUI to visualize and document the solution. plus “motion detection” is probably not the full story, and any video will probably have artifacting that means you’d have to tune the motion detection algorithm or end up with a bunch of garbage artifacts/false positives in the end. also, sounds like the user isn’t looking for something long-running like Frigate. if the user isn’t familiar with Python and wants to do something downstream like sort the outputs or whatever, an LLM would help with that.

sure, programmatically, it’s not a difficult problem, but like it or not it can be solved by someone without an advanced CS degree with an LLM precisely because the problem is easy. no easily ready solution exists, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. “just use ffmpeg” to someone like my dad who might have the know how to install Linux but isn’t a programmer isn’t exactly the simple advice it sounds like.

i’d vibe code something in Python for this tbh, but i have some expertise in this area already. you could even get some classification going with a YOLO model to help you narrow down the search. it won’t have a GUI unless you count Jupyter notebooks.

normally it’s for syncing across machines, but it is convenient for setting up new machines. i use chezmoi and Nix and some other tools to keep things in sync

i host my dotfiles on GitHub, but any cloud provider or self-hosted git instance will do. otherwise, rsync, scp, or a good old fashioned thumb drive