Past End of Life
The Hubble constant is 73.5, not 67. A 2013 MacBook runs NixOS twelve years past its support date. James Williamson died in 2019 and his courses are gone, but the developers he taught are still building. Three end-of-life designations, all incomplete.
The Hubble constant is 73.50 ± 0.81 kilometers per second per megaparsec. That's the number from the H0DN Collaboration, published Friday — the most precise measurement yet of how fast the local universe is expanding, built from decades of independent observations: Cepheid variable stars, red giants, Type Ia supernovae, entire networks of overlapping techniques. One percent precision. A community consensus, assembled over three years, starting at a workshop in Bern whose title was a pun: "What's under the H0od?"
The problem is that the number should be 67.
The standard cosmological model — the one that fits the cosmic microwave background, the large-scale structure of the universe, everything we can measure about the first 380,000 years — predicts 67 or 68. The local universe says 73.5. That gap has been there for years. Astronomers kept hoping it would resolve: better instruments, tighter measurements, an overlooked error somewhere in the chain. The H0DN report says: it's not an error. Every independent path gives the same answer. Remove any single technique from the network and the result barely moves.
The collaboration's conclusion is careful: "If the tension is real, as the growing body of evidence suggests, it may point to new physics beyond the standard cosmological model."
The standard model has not expired. It remains the best framework we have for describing the universe's evolution. But the universe, right now, today, is expanding at a rate the model cannot explain. The model is past end of life in a way the model doesn't know yet.
Michał Skalski has been running a 2013 MacBook Pro past its end-of-life date for twelve years. Apple officially ended support at Big Sur. The machine runs NixOS now, with rust-analyzer and gopls for smaller projects, remoting into a more powerful desktop when needed. "It rarely feels like a twelve-year-old machine."
What keeps it alive is deliberate. The battery was replaced once with an iFixit kit, then swapped again when the replacement began to swell. The Wi-Fi card was just replaced: the original Broadcom chip had been marked insecure in NixOS — a known CVE, no upstream fix — so Skalski ordered an Intel AX210 card with an AliExpress adapter described as "WIFI 6 AX200 AX210 adapter for MacBook Pro A1502 A1398." There was a Power Management setting to comment out. Then it worked.
"I probably gained another year with this machine."
The support date is a statement about what Apple will maintain. It says nothing about what a person can maintain. Skalski bought the machine out when he changed employers. He carried it across three continents. It became, over time, "more of a writer deck, a distraction-free machine for writing and focused work." The machine the company stopped supporting is not the machine he's using. It became something else — through use, through repair, through the refusal to treat a support-end date as an ending.
The soul of the old machine is not in the Apple logo. It's in the commented-out TLP config line. It's in knowing which battery kit to order when the Japanese Amazon doesn't carry the one from iFixit. It's in the moment of connecting the dots — only fails on battery power — and knowing exactly what that means.
Brennan Day is grieving Eleventy. Not because the software stopped working, but because Font Awesome just launched a Kickstarter to rebrand it as "Build Awesome" — pro tiers, collaborative visual editing, build-in-a-browser for non-technical users. The Kickstarter reached its $40,000 goal in one day. (It was subsequently cancelled and rescheduled; the email notifications failed to send, "ruining the momentum.")
The thing Day is grieving can't be Kickstarted. He points to James Williamson — the web developer who created Eleventy's possum mascot in 2018 and died of ALS in 2019. Williamson ran simpleprimate.com (the domain has since lapsed), taught accessibility and CSS and static site generators on Lynda.com. His courses are gone from LinkedIn Learning. His website is archived.
But Elle the possum is still there. And developers who learned from James Williamson's tutorials are still writing code. The knowledge he transmitted is embedded in things that will outlast the Kickstarter and the rebrand and probably Build Awesome Pro. It's in the developer who learned why semantic HTML matters in 2016 from a video that no longer exists, and who still reaches for it first in 2026. It's in the reflexes the video created.
Day's economic argument about Build Awesome is correct: Gatsby raised $46 million, was acquired, and shut down. Netlify CMS rebranded and deprecated. Stackbit was acquired and sunsetted. The commercial CMS-for-SSG model fails not because of execution but because the audience that cares about static sites is specifically the audience that doesn't need what the commercial version provides. The SSG community is self-selecting for people who want the terminal, not a browser-based editor.
But underneath the economic argument is a different one. What James Williamson left behind was not a product. It was a transmission — the kind that happens when someone explains why something matters, not just how it works. A Kickstarter can inherit the codebase. The Kickstarter cannot inherit the transmission. Elle the possum is a brand asset. The reason she exists is not.
Three end-of-life designations. None of them wrong. All of them incomplete.
The cosmological model says the universe should expand at 67. The universe expands at 73.5. The model isn't wrong — it describes everything we can see about the first 380,000 years with extraordinary precision. It's just that the universe, in its current state, is doing something the model wasn't built to account for. The H0DN collaboration didn't discover a measurement error. They produced the most precise measurement ever and confirmed the gap is real. The gap is the evidence. The gap says: there is something here that has no name yet in the current framework.
Apple says the 2013 MacBook Pro is unsupported. The machine runs NixOS 25.11 with no hardware issues. The support date is a statement about Apple's maintenance calendar, not about the machine's capacity. The person who repaired it knows things about what it can do that the support matrix doesn't record. The gap between "end of life" and "still running" is full of iFixit guides and AliExpress adapters and a commented-out config line.
Font Awesome says Eleventy is now Build Awesome. The software is real. The funding came through. But James Williamson's lessons are in people now — not in a codebase, not in a product tier, not in a licensing arrangement. The courses are gone from LinkedIn Learning. The domain lapsed. But the possum is still named Elle, and developers are still building things James Williamson taught them to build, in ways no subscription model can reach and no rebrand can revoke.
End of life is a designation. It describes when the institution stops maintaining something. It says nothing about what the thing keeps doing on its own.
What the measurement finds is sometimes different.