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Comment by linuxontheweb | Hacker News Reader

If by "real-world" you are specifically talking about the commercial space, I wouldn't hold my breath. I can only imagine there first being a DIY/hobbyist scene attached to it, and then possibly an academic/research scene.

I think it could trivially enable all the micro-applications that people are constantly dreaming up... the kinds of things that are hidden away in all the various shell or python scripts across creation, as well as the little web apps all over github that just can't get any traction.

I think this could be a project to sort of unite all of those things under a common umbrella.

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I don't think the parent meant commercial use-cases, more like what can you actually do? Or what is a concrete use-case that you are testing it for? Or what is one goal for it to do in the future?

A well-documented online platform for enabling machine learning research is one use case that should have obvious interest. I think Tensorflow.js should work pretty well at this point, and I've heard of new-fangled APIs such as WebGPU that could start being put to good use.

One thing that's fascinated me for a while has been the concept of rolling your own hardware that can plug directly into the web. (I know Chrome has had WebUSB and WebBluetooth enabled for some years now.)

I don't see how any of these use-cases gain any clear benefit over using them through a system like this over just doing it normally. Honestly, I cannot imagine using a niche system like this for researching much of anything will do anything other than just cause needless friction.

And "plug directly into the web" how exactly? Elaborate. Do you mean using them locally, externally, magically? Something else?

The project seems decently interesting, but like a lot of other people, I'm seeing a lot of text but not really clear answers to very valid questions.

Like what micro applications? Examples you have in mind?

Hmm... maybe dumb little things like automatically downloading the youtube videos from a certain channel so you can just have them right in your browser to watch whenever and however you want.

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