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Comment by rohansingh | Hacker News Reader

Just tried it on our site (https://tidbyt.com). The text it produced was accurate and even flattering [1], but it kinda seems to just be a paraphrase of our home page, with some phrases just straight-up lifted.

Would be curious to understand more about what's actually happening behind the scenes?

[1]: "Tidbyt is a company that sells a product called the Tidbyt. It is a retro-style display that has hundreds of apps and can be used to keep up with the things you care about. With Tidbyt, you can stay up to date on what's playing right now on Spotify and Sonos, follow sports scores in real time, and get real time transit information for subways, buses, and ferries. Tidbyt is easy to set up and is highly rated by customers; it's a great way to stay in the know."

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The AI output was much easier to understand than your homepage.

I read your homepage for 10 seconds - I thought it was just a low resolution display.

I read the AI output - I realised there were apps and also what kind of apps were available. A completely different product.

Thanks, that's good feedback. I appreciate it.

Any update on a local-first SDK for Tidbyt? Looked recently but it didn't look like there was any news on that front. I want to build an integration with a game running on a PC and communicate locally with my Tidbyt to send updated images as things happen.

We don't have anything yet on the local-only front, but that's an interesting use case. Most of the requests I've heard about local communication so far are about having the Tidbyt reach out to local smart home devices, sensors, etc.

With the PC use case, have you considered having the game integration push images to the Tidbyt via our REST API? Or is that something you're ruling out due to connectivity, privacy, or other reasons?

Not sure about him, my use case is the piece of hardware I can buy without being afraid of your company dying and shutting down servers or my internet not working.

That's fair and we've put some work into mitigating that risk. Our core runtime is open source, as are most of the apps for the Tidbyt.

We've also released hardware spec that folks have used to start writing their own open firmwares, which don't need to reach out to our servers or the Internet at all. That's something I'd like to contribute to and support more of (though with a tiny company, our resources are limited).

That's actually sounds way better than I expected. I went from "I want it" to "that's a potentially very expensive brick" very fast. Although it's weird that pushing image to a device on the same network has to go through your servers.

What's up, Rohan! Nice to see you here.

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