The pictures are very detailed and done with taste, there is no ads to be seen, the website is well organized.
This rivals any high end coloring book I've seen, you are very talented! My kid will be thrilled, thank you so much for creating this!
Later: The prompt worked with Imagen 3 on Gemini Advanced, too:
All my attempts with GPT-4o have failed. Always ends up with areas where the black lines become fuzzy.
Can you add dinosaurs?
p.s. - my son is an expert at dinos, not sure why I haven’t added them
Is it possible to get all PDFs at once? Hopefully per section? That will really help to print all at once and get her a single book to go on for couple of weeks.
I thought I could do `curl | grep | xargs curl`, but the site returns 520.
But I've noticed that if I print out some coloring books for my son, they stay on his desk for a long time and he rarely colors them.
But if I print him one coloring page, he almost always finishes it.
My niece tends to finish a book start to end within a week or so, hence why I thought of asking. Another reason is I don't get to see her too often, and it is easier to hand over a book a visit, color a page together to get her started, and then she does the rest.
One evening, when her mother called down that it was her bedtime, she replied:
— Can't mom, busy working! click click click
— What are you working on?
— click I have to turn it all orange! click
Upon hearing that, we knew she was one of us.
How about a digital-coloring version too, that kids and adults can use on say a tablet, or even a phone?
I think that's easy to implement, if you care.
I love this project.
Now I release my knowledge in bite-sized chunks on my new YouTube channel to help others:
What's a battery management system? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QsMoCrSTYc
What is the C-Rate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDu1fRtKfsA
What is battery balancing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGYLPOlT45A
etc. etc. I focus really hard on answering exactly one question in a concise and engaging way and trying to keep every video under 5 minutes. Oh, and to make the videos solution independent, so not specific to a product, but convey the underlying knowledge so it has a longer shelf-life.
Full list is here: https://foxev.io/batteries/ I am planning to turn this into a knowledge base with playlists for "learning paths" like "everything to watch about batteries" or "here is what you need to watch to make a motor spin on a bench". I will add interactive functionality like quizzes and widgets to make the knowledge even more sticky.
Check this forum section here: https://openinverter.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=11
Do you know of any communities with self-built airplanes? (especially novel-esque designs for propulsion or wings?) I realise these have far more regulations, but experimental GA is something that really excites me.
Just yesterday I stumbled upon https://vesc-project.com/forum where they are doing something similar with a focus on ebikes and drones.
You are talking full-sized aeroplanes right? I think some of the sail-gliders can be homebuilt, there must be communities for those guys.
They have had a handful of articles of people working on electric propulsion in their magazine. I would imagine you could reach out to some of those featured. I once contacted a person who was building a DIY HUD and he was very friendly and eager to talk about the project. Overall a very good community!
He's actually building out an aviation park to promote the community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IenxeMl2nkw
Those guys channel is worth checking out by itself, they are making Ferrari Testarossa's electric and reviewed our taxi on the side.
Here is a review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2xWbfSz8Ug
Here is all the media: https://openinverter.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=49051
My video tutorials are linked above.
https://robbreport.com/motors/cars/first-drive-gto-engineeri...
Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41690087 - Sept 2024 (1041 comments)
Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342017 - Aug 2024 (1424 comments)
One thing I'd like to hone in on is that these threads aren't intended for promotion, but rather for the just-because sort of project, driven by idle interest or weird obsession—the sort of thing people might spend their free time on.
I'm not sure yet what the official "rule" should be (if any), but if you're working on a startup or have had attention via Show HN, maybe abstain from these discussions? It wouldn't be good for the thread to get taken over by things HN already has a place for.
We know our history and the role collaboration has played in it. Whether at Xerox PARC or Bell Labs, bouncing ideas off of other colleagues has spurred incredible innovation.
I submit that HN is a giant Xerox PARC. We have all of the ingredients for this recipe here on HN. We have the brilliant minds; we have the joy of creation. I submit that what we lack is mixing those ingredients. We lack dialogue and collaboration, and it's all completely unnecessary. It's here. Please use it.
> Ask HN: What are you exploring?
I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.
Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.
I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.
Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.
Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.
I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).
Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.
Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.
Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's too few opportunties for small players to promote, which makes the discussion here less egalitarian, more corporate, and less interesting. You'd be better served encouraging more self-promotion in threads like these.
More genuine conversations are intensely welcome, so if that takes overt guard rails, so be it. If the only enthusiasm someone really wants to share is about their capitalist endeavors, count me out.
> Grindset self-promo tactics being pervasively, overly represented in the content submissions and discussions here are the number one reason I take very long breaks from the site.
"Grindset": I never saw that before. I guess it is a combination of grind plus mindset? Very cool. It rolls off the tongue nicely.As for YC companies getting Launch placements, well too bad, it’s their site, you’re free to leave and start your competing one. I assume most users aren’t bothered — I seldom notice them and hardly ever click on them. I notice job ads more.
Another option would be to go the whole hog and explicitly reference side projects in the title, or at least in whatever will become the instructions at the top of the regular thread.
Whatever the line is, it's still gelatinous. We want to figure it out in a way that optimizes the thread for interestingness, which means avoiding repetition and prioritizing the long tail of projects that probably wouldn't get discussed in other contexts on HN.
Video on what I'm doing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCiuS1oHnKw
Picture of my home lab - https://x.com/koeng101/status/1844150979484319842
I'm trying to build a DNA assembly company right now (been lots of ups and downs lately...), and one thing I need to do is validate the specs of my oligo pool synthesis provider, Agilent, before I release to customers / raise a seed round. So as a stress-test run of my system, I'm synthesizing a genome, and am thinking about trying to livestream it. The unique technology is variety of ways to assemble and validate DNA from oligo pools for a lot cheaper, pretty much enabling a 10x reduction in DNA synthesis cost vs commercial suppliers. I've worked my ass off for nearly 2 years to get to this moment and am so excited!
I'm pretty sure I saw this movie... and it didn't end well for existing life on Earth, as I recall. :p
Tampering with existing viruses and symbionts so they can escape their current minima in the fitness landscape is the more dangerous thing.
I think if you have the right structure, it is easier to train developers to be bioengineers than bioengineers to be developers! Bioengineering tends to be a more wicked discipline, which seriously affects how one writes their code. Makes it kinda crap. Software devs on the other hand typically aren't as experienced in the other field, and so are coming in blind.
Also, I second what Dig1t said. I would gladly get involved and volunteer my time and skills, just to get my foot in the door. Would contributing to dnadesign be a good place to start?
some sets of problems I have right now (on the hardware / software side):
Hardware: It'd be great to have an open source plate gripper. I wrote a little bit about the general problem of transferring here - https://keonigandall.com/posts/transfer_problem.html . I have a uarm lite6, but wanted to investigate building an arctos robotic arm to move plates between machines. Just need the gripper! This is something I cannot do myself - I have software skills, and can build things with my hands, but have zero skills on designing new hardware.
Software: A lot more here, but depends on interests. I have some general life-improvements I'm looking at doing, but also some wild ideas that need prototyping
[1] https://www.sideman.com/ronald-fisher-and-ellen-leonida-achi...
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The language is called Funciton (pronounced: /ˈfʌŋkɪtɒn/) and the above example demonstrates the factorial function.I made this language over 10 years ago, but earlier this year I've been making YouTube videos in which I describe it in excruciating detail: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkG32PHxWoJaetjKUMVRONWLg...
For my next video, I want to show in detail how the interpreter works. For this purpose I'm creating an elaborate animation. You'll notice that the latest video is already several months old; this is because this animation is more work than I bargained for, and I got a little burned out by it. Nevertheless, I persevere and the video will come out whenever I may finish it.
Language specification: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Funciton
Interpreter: https://codeberg.org/Timwi/Funciton
I've long wanted to look for a sort of "ascii drawing program" where one can just draw on a grid with monospace ascii characters and have tools for boxes, circles, etc. Maybe it already exists!
I'm building Pastmaps - striving to eventually be the world's largest online collection of old maps, aerials, and photos all packaged into a public historical research platform that's as easy to use as Google Maps. This has been a labor of love now for about a year, but I still have a huge mountain to climb to realize the full vision. Give it a try and give me your harsh criticisms - that's the greatest gift you could give me!
Even in it's current state, it's being used by geneologists, urban explorers, search & rescue teams, real estate developers, government agencies, etc. The number of exploding use-cases continues to astound me and keeps me motivated to continue.
For context I'm working on an app called 3DStreet[1]. It's mostly used by planners for future projects, but I've been excited about the possibility of helping to visualize the past too.
It allows us to control the algorithm. It’s all LLM translating to YouTube search queries under the hood.
Visually it looks the same.
The suggested videos come from predefined buckets on topics they love.
E.g. 33% fun math, 33% DIY engineering, 33% creative activities.
Video recommendations that have a banned word in the title/desc don't get displayed e.g. MrBeast, anything with Minecraft in it, never gets surfaced.
For anyone interested in using it, send me an email.
jim.jones1@gmail.com
If my kid watches an hour of unboxing toy videos, I shouldn't have to try and disable 3,000 channels of toy unboxings in an effort for that topic to never surface again.
The thumbs down button essentially has zero effect.
https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-dislike-button-mozilla-r...
Diversity of thought and topic is much more critical when they are kids.
But from my kids' viewing habits, I don't see it. The algorithm is seems super narrowly focused.
https://x.com/hitsman/status/1845168160691061121
Andrej Karpathy commented on the narrowness of the algorithm just the other day.
Anyone who works on this stuff should be ashamed of yourselves. You’re modern day cigarette companies.
How would you go about writing the recommendation algorithm?
De-jargoned, that means clicking the like button means I want to see more things like that, and the dislike button means I don't want to see things like that. If I watched something all the way through, but clicked the dislike button, that means I don't want to see things that produced a similar response from people who tend to react the way I do.
This kind of algorithm is not going to increase watch time over the short term, and might not over the long term either, which makes it unlikely to be adopted by any for-profit service.
"The algorithm" was different in the early 2000's and all of our lives were richer for it. Before Facebook publicly embedded psychologists into the development teams and before the goal was more and more attention. The internet used to be great.
I probably wouldn’t. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook were all invented before recommendation algorithms existed, and they worked great. Reddit still doesn’t use a recommendation algorithm.
Would they make less money without this stuff? Yeah, probably. But I think that’s a good deal for humanity.
I was really struck in The Social Dilemma how at the end they asked devs if they’d let their children use the platforms they’ve made. People interviewed overwhelmingly said no. If that’s the case, you know it’s bad. Just stop.
Would love your input.
jim.jones1@gmail.com
iOS and Android.
On the other hand, it's so soul-crushingly depressing to contemplate how most youtube content targeted at kids is such brain-addling garbage fucking up their psyche in all sorts of ways, all for the sake of ad impressions... If there's a place for the expression "late capitalism" this has to be it
Fortunately this is one of the killer apps of LLMs IMO - I have built multiple small tools to help educate our daughter, like this guy: https://x.com/random_walker/status/1848388462782673340
I also never subscribe to any channels, watching a few videos pretty much guarantees they will pop up on the homepage every once in a while.
I drive a 21 year old Saab, and in my 2 years of owning it, I have replaced every single bulb in the exterior of the vehicle except a turn signal or two.
I decided to create a mobile service for vehicle lights. It's a simple website that even technologically-disadvantaged people can use. The website is nearly finished and I will likely come back here to write a post on it for how the website works.
Oh the best part, I get texted and emailed for each service order that comes in, and using my service is only $10 more than what it would cost you to go buy a bulb yourself at OReillys, AutoZone, etc.
I programmed everything myself and developed the idea as well. This is my first real-world project/solution I am bringing into this world that has been verified by others, to be a needed service. Pretty excited about it and I love changing bulbs or replacing light housings, it's fun and simple.
**Update: I perform the install.
I figured, hey I could do this; and now I am in the process of doing it.
I think you want to keep this as simple as possible, but I see headlight restoration (which can be done in 30min) and wiper blade replacement complementing this nicely.
Hey thank you for that idea! I am going to be adding in headlight/taillight housing replacements as well, but I do like the idea of wiper blade replacement, I may keep that on the back-burner for some time until demand approaches.
However, the headlight restoration idea is a fantastic one. Definitely will add this to my list of primary services after launch.
Not sure if it was mine or my friends car, replacing one of the lights was neither fun or simple :). Some manufacturers really seem to prioritize style over repairability!
Unless you are doing this purely as a public service, $10 seems VERY low. Many independent mechanics in my area charge a minimum of 1 hour of work for anything they do, and bill at $90/hr and up. And they won't come to you for that price. (Nor are mechanics a highly paid profession in general.)
I really do wish you all the best, maybe I'm just not seeing the whole picture.
Edit: Something else to think about: when I replace bulbs in my cars, I always do it in pairs. Reason being that if one side burned out, the other is likely not far behind, especially headlight bulbs. The headlights also have another quirk: if you replace one and not the other, you usually end up with the new one being much brighter than the old one.
For my Saab's headlight bulb replacements, I have to remove my front bumper and then the headlight housing unit itself, just to replace turn signal and headlight bulb. I am fairly mechanically advanced.
It's not quite just $10, it's $10 more than a single bulb would cost you at your local parts store. If you lookup how much a headlight bulb is these days, it's about $20. My service will be $30 flat for bulb replacements in my area with a small mileage fee for out-of-towners.
The great part about Minnesota, is most of us hate the cold. I however do not. Many people get lazy and will Doordash or find other convenient ways to have things delivered. Not many people want to change bulbs in the cold or bring to a mechanic to be over-charged. What my population is looking for is a service exactly like I am providing.
Again, the pricing of $30 per service is perfectly sustainable for me and I have no issues replacing most parts in vehicles, lights are a walk in the park for me.
*Will correct typos later, at work ATM.
What I really care about, is moving the world forward. This is a service that the area I am in, is lacking. I don't need to make excessive profit, I just need sustainable profit and I am happy to provide this service as it's well within my skills.
This weekend I did this with my 18 year old Mitsubishi. It seems you need child sized hands to be able to change them. In the end I had to take off the bumper and remove the whole light housing to get access.
As blinding as they are, if that's what the vehicle has I gotta put them back in.
AutoZone, O'Reilly, Advance advertise that they do things like replace batteries, change light bulbs, add washer fluid, wiper blades.
It's arguably imperative for their brand that they offer (and advertise) these store services when compared to Amazon or Walmart (without a car center). It's even clearer when they offer 20% off codes for online ordering 12 months a year. (Also interesting because basic bulbs for tail lights and turn signals are often also sold at gas stations and grocery stores)
They're not ASE certified techs, but I'm under the impression that staff receive some training related to it.
For an individual, it can be easier to focus on one model. You get to use parts and knowledge from past cars.
There's many people doing this with certain models, like hardbody trucks, Jeep XJs, Honda civics
- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...
- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat
- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2
The key idea is that you can only add 'friends' if you've actually met them once in real life. So it wouldn't be overrun by celebrities and pseudo-social relationships, influencers, etc. I'm hoping it would foster more local connections - e.g. if someone often runs into a certain person at the same places and has similar interests, maybe they'll add each other as 'friends'.
One question; how would you implement identity? I can imagine spam and unwanted content becoming a problem, so maybe a reputation system or network of trust mechanism would be needed?
Hah, that is a fun idea! But it could be a challenge to implement, unless you have a trusted person in that location selecting an image or some other local funfact – and at that point you might as well implement a graph of trust, spreading out from the first user in that area. Kind of like an invite system, where everyone vouches for the next one they invite in.
Come to think of it, having a limiting factor that an invite system imposes, might make the whole concept more attractive and a bit mystical, as it takes some effort to access the network.
I can see a lot of challenges implementing this though, but it is fun to explore different new directions this could take!
I am a fullstack developer living in Norway. Last year I registered the Norwegian branch of the Architectural Uproar as a not for profit organization. With the support from paying members, I have been able to go on tour to most of the major cities in Norway. We organize large meetings were we discuss architecture and city planning with politicians, architects and property developers on stage.
I am strongly inspired by Create Streets in UK and Strong Towns in the US. I want to improve people’s quality of life, help saving the planet and make Norway beautiful again while doing it.
https://arkitekturopproret.no edit: typos
As a fullstack developer, how did you even landed on such projects? Are you even using your SW Engineering skills in this? I really want to know more how are you able to lead an urbanism and architecture project with, supposedly, no formal backgrounds. Are you partnered with other people in this endeavour?
Most of the social media activities is done by a couple of fellows who is really into digital marketing. We are a team of 5 people working mostly for free now.
I have no formal training in architecture or urban design. I am just a nerd who used to love playing SimCity and read Astérix comic books. Paul Graham have always focused on finding real problems and making people happy. Car dependent housing projects and bad architecture is making peoples lives miserable. It needs to be fixed.
Same, but I do get caught thinking about how inefficient our roads are in the US and what might be done about that. I've worked in the auto industry a lot and when calculating fuel efficiency (MPG) there is a "urban drive cycle" and a highway one that are used. The average speed on the urban cycle is a hair under 20 mph, which seems absurd because our typical speed limit outside of neighborhoods is 45mph or even 50. So I started timing my drives around town and measuring on a map... Turns out 3 minutes per mile is about right for expected drive times. The main culprit is intersections, stop lights, and left turns. You seem interested in eliminating cars, which I can appreciate but I spend my time trying to figure out how to make traffic flow more efficiently and how those layouts might be retrofitted onto the grid of roads we have. There are not easy problems.
No. I mean yeah, but no. Rural areas are the only place where traffic is low enough to meaningfully improve flow. We should be able to improve traffic flow and MPG without eliminating vehicles. IMHO bike lanes are kind of stupid because putting bikes right next to car traffic is stupid. Same for sidewalks. Separating pedestrian traffic from car and truck traffic would obviously be safer.
I think the idea of optimising vehicle flow in urban areas is folly. It comes at the cost of too many other things.
Here's an example of what I mean. https://maps.app.goo.gl/pati5dBBTnSgxZ1m9 . It shows a road in a built up area that has been optimised to increase vehicle flow to the airport (using a roundabout instead of lights) and the effect that has on someone trying to travel by foot - turning what would be a <1min walk into 30min.
You're right that they're not easy problems, and it's because it encompasses more than just road layouts, but city design, land use and culture. North American cities, for example, tend to put a bunch of their amenities like supermarkets in a few places, with homogeneous swaths of housing-only suburbs so people have to drive, and those drivers have to use all the same roads to get where they're going.
One thing you've noticed is the so-called "stroad", a highway that's attempting to be both a road (an efficient, high speed connection) and a street (a destination, where people live, work and shop). These two objectives get in the way of each other, so you end up with a road that can't carry traffic well because it has too many entrances and intersections, and a street that is hostile to anybody not in a car. Generally, efficient road design separates these two, so the higher speed connections don't serve any destinations directly.
What is it about suburbs in particular that causes social isolation?
I can think of 10s, maybe even hundreds, of third paces I could theoretically go to within a short distance. None of them particularly appealing, though, because they don't have enough people to create an engaging environment.
If these third places consolidated their efforts, seeing most of them disappear to focus on one third place, there is a much greater chance that the single community would thrive. Combined, it could be huge, but so long as they each try to go at it alone...
The reader may point out that many people are isolated in big cities too. This is true – if an adult has decided to be alone, they can be. But in the city, one's lack of social connection is more often felt whereas a suburban home can diminish the effect, like ibuprofen taken for a headache.
But what about the suburbs destroys that? Or, would it be more accurate to say that those who already don't have connections have a preference towards living in suburbs? Perhaps that is where they feel most at home?
People who live in cities and in suburbs on the other hand seem to be far more transient. They move around for school or careers and aren't tied down to one place. I grew up in suburbs in three different cities. New neighbors frequently moved in and out of all three places, and the street where I lived from aged 5-10 has only two "original" families left.
For those people, the built environment in suburbs being conducive to social isolation (in American suburbs anyways) becomes a problem. The nearest grocery store, restaurant, or interesting venue of any kind is likely 30+ minutes away if you try to walk, and the walk is likely to be dangerous due to poor pedestrian infrastructure and poor public transit. There are few accessible third places in which to meet people, it takes a lot more intentional effort. This is even more of a problem if you're a kid, as you're now entirely dependent on your parents and their car to meet friends or go to places where you can meet friends.
I moved from upper-middle class suburbs to Washington D.C. The difference in how many people you meet who you might want to be friends with, and in how easy it is to get places where you want to go (especially without a car) is night and day. Will suburbs ever be as good as cities in this regard? Probably not. But mixed-use zoning and returning to "streetcar suburbs" would probably go a long way (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/27/in-praise-of-s...).
There's also other reasons to oppose current suburb development patterns. Suburban sprawl is highly inefficient in many ways. It takes dramatically more infrastructure to serve the same number of people that you could in a denser area. Roads, power lines, pipes for drinking water and sewage, etc. The taxes that many suburbs pay don't cover these expenses and suburbs end up being subsidized by people living in denser areas. Rural areas also suffer from this to some extent, but rural areas are a necessity for society to run, hosting farms and other resource extraction activities, so subsidizing some costs is fair. People in rural areas are also more likely to be self-sufficient, having their own septic tank, private well, etc., and aren't offloading their costs to society.
This does seem to be the repeated consensus – that suburbanites choose to live in suburban areas because they want the isolation. Which, I suppose, makes sense as it is not like you have to live there. People by and large live where they want to above all else. Obviously there can be exceptions (e.g. children needing to live where their parents do), but as far as what prevails goes.
> There's also other reasons to oppose current suburb development patterns. Suburban sprawl is highly inefficient in many ways. It takes dramatically more infrastructure to serve the same number of people that you could in a denser area.
Is denser the actual alternative, though? It seems that if you took suburbs away from these people, they'd most likely try to move into more rural areas, so then you just end up with the same there (without the practical reasons traditionally associated with subsidizing rural areas).
In fact, I'm seeing more and more spreading of the so-called "15-minute city" conspiracy, which has people believing that there is some kind of organized plot out there working towards forcing people into living in dense cities. While the conspiracy itself is not particularly important here, the sentiment of people fearing that they might be forced into the city conveyed alongside it seems quite real and indicative that denser is not the direction they are willing to head.
I don't think most of them want isolation, I strongly suspect that most people moving to suburbs are doing so for their career, as most well-paid jobs are in metropolitan areas. In a metropolitan area your options are mostly: 1) city 2) suburb w/ very little mixed-use zoning
Cities tend to be more expensive for less space. There are going to be many people who would want to live in a city with their family but simply can't afford the rent, so they live on the outskirts of the city (suburbs). Alternatively they may want the space, yard, etc. that a house provides, but this doesn't mean they want isolation. They may very well prefer suburbs with good mixed-use zoning and public transit, those are just very rare in the US.
> It seems that if you took suburbs away from these people
I'm not proposing taking suburbs away from people, nor are the vast majority of urbanists. We're proposing more ability to build denser suburbs (i.e. some multifamily housing in suburban areas), mixed-use zoning (so you can walk to stores), and better public transit in suburbs. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing. Suburbs that have these features tend to be in high-demand, they're just rare today because they're illegal to build in many places (I think there's some commentary on that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0).
> they'd most likely try to move into more rural areas
Unlikely IMO because again I suspect that many/most have moved to suburbs for their careers. There aren't nearly as many jobs in rural areas.
> 15-minute city
Anyone claiming this is bad is just being disingenuous IMO. ~Nobody promoting 15 minute cities wants to force people to live in cities, they want cities where you can meet most of your needs by walking or cycling or taking public transit. If you don't want to live in a city or want to live in a city and spend 10s of thousands of dollars on a car you still can. I don't think we can extrapolate much about what the average American wants based on those who believe that conspiracy theory, because the people who believe it are either woefully uninformed about what it actually is or are just being malicious reactionaries.
Doubtful. Moving somewhere for a career is fairly abnormal. There is good reason why job search places always lead with: "Location". The vast majority of the population choose where the want to live first – in fact, the majority of the population still live within a small radius of where they were born! – and then figure out what they want to do for work.
Yeah, there is a small segment of the population who will chase work at the cost of where they live. Let's say this is who ends up in the suburbs. Perhaps that's the problem? As in they end up being comprised of people focused on their career, and thus don't prioritize community? Perhaps want isolation is too strong, but how about doesn't care about isolation?
> We're proposing more ability to build denser suburbs (i.e. some multifamily housing in suburban areas), mixed-use zoning (so you can walk to stores), and better public transit in suburbs.
Does that actually appeal to the people of the suburbs, or are you projecting? Presumably these people are constituents of a democratic government, and therefore can already have anything their collective hearts desire. Why isn’t this already the reality?
> Anyone claiming this is bad is just being disingenuous IMO.
Are you unfamiliar with what a conspiracy theory is...? Regardless, it resonates precisely because a lot of people don't want to live in cities. If the listener was all "Hell, ya! Get me out of this hellhole into the dense city!" it wouldn't garner any attention at all, but that's not the reality.
I wouldn't call it a vast majority, apparently 59% of people live in the state where they were born and most states are pretty big places (https://www.test.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/...).
> Moving somewhere for a career is fairly abnormal.
I think you're probably right on a job-to-job basis, most people aren't picking up and moving across the country for each new role. But it only takes one move to another city for the "several multi-generational families in close proximity" dynamic of many rural areas to be disrupted. Even short moves could easily make someone much more socially isolated. Move 50 miles away from your hometown and now you're seeing your former neighbors once a month or less instead of a few times a week.
> there is a small segment of the population who will chase work at the cost of where they live. Let's say this is who ends up in the suburbs. Perhaps that's the problem? As in they end up being comprised of people focused on their career, and thus don't prioritize community?
Not sure this is the right way to frame it. It isn't necessarily about "ending up" in the suburbs when a huge percentage of the country was born in the suburbs or in a city, never having had a tight-knit multigenerational community to begin with. 80% of the US is urbanized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...). Most people are moving from generic suburb to generic suburb (or city). A kid born in some suburb isn't choosing to focus on their career over community, but nevertheless economic migration was likely the force that caused them to end up there.
> Does that actually appeal to the people of the suburbs, or are you projecting?
Somewhat remains to be seen, but my gut feeling is yes. I think that most suburbanites haven't deeply considered other alternatives given that they've mostly only been exposed to "default US suburbia." That was the case for me until I got into urbanist YouTube and moved to a more urbanist location. When I share urbanist material with friends and family that haven't been exposed to it before, they tend to be pretty receptive. Anecdotes yes, but I'm not being disingenuous.
> constituents of a democratic government, and therefore can already have anything their collective hearts desire. Why isn’t this already the reality?
In theory yes, but in reality these are changes that will take a long time. There's a lot of red tape when it comes to building and zoning, and vocal minorities (NIMBYs) can often block or delay efforts that have popular support through lawsuits (recently near my area: https://www.arlnow.com/2024/09/27/breaking-judge-overturns-m...). Consider that there are plenty of issues that have wide bipartisan support among US voters as a whole but haven't been implemented for political reasons. Even when there is popular support and policy is implemented, whole areas can't simply be rebuilt overnight.
The US definition of urban includes towns with 2,000 people, though. Not exactly density city. Only around 60% of the population live in places with >100,000 people, and of that it seems a significant portion of them live in the suburb portion. So it seems that most of the population live in what is colloquially considered "rural". I'm not sure that is a coincidence. It seems most people would much prefer to live on farms (how often do you hear I want to give it all up and become a farmer around here?) – but most can't afford farmland (the same reason we ended up with the urbanization movement in the first place), so they settle for pretend rural as a compromise.
> But it only takes one move to another city for the "several multi-generational families in close proximity" dynamic of many rural areas to be disrupted.
While I think it is fair to say that rural dynamic was already disrupted generations ago, was that not already rebuilt in the urban areas? With housing affordability being a hot topic of late, the idea of having to leave one's friends and family behind to build a new life in a more affordable place was met with shock pickachco face, as if these were the first group of people to ever have to do such a thing. Suggesting that multi-generational family dynamics had been built elsewhere once urbanization had been settled. Otherwise it would have been considered normal to leave.
> When I share urbanist material with friends and family that haven't been exposed to it before, they tend to be pretty receptive. Anecdotes yes, but I'm not being disingenuous.
How do they react when you present your vacation slide show, for sake of comparison? Do you get a "that's nice, honey", are they booking a vacation to the same place, or "thanks for the invite, but I am not interested" People can be quite good at faking being receptive.
But, regardless, you don't have to sell me. It all does sound like good ideas. I'll not disparage that. But at the same time, I'm not sure it is better that what could be, more of a "we're stuck with this, so how do we improve upon it?" Improve it does, seemingly (but that is ultimately for the people who live there to decide), but then if you are the type of person who wants better, wouldn't you go for where the best can be found?
> I think that most suburbanites haven't deeply considered other alternatives given that they've mostly only been exposed to "default US suburbia."
That's intriguing. When I was a kid, albeit not from suburbia, we spent a lot of time talking about different lifestyles and which were to our tastes. Some were happy with what they had, others were ready to escape as soon as possible. What do you think it is about suburbia that kills that zest to consider the world around you?
> There's a lot of red tape when it comes to building and zoning
Only if the constituents want there to be red tape, of course. There is no magical deity in the sky that created this. It only exists because the people want it to exist.
> (NIMBYs) can often block or delay efforts that have popular support through lawsuits
Which, again, exists only through recognition of the very same population (albeit probably a larger one, granted). Clearly the majority are, at very least, not bothered by this or it would have been done away with long ago.
> whole areas can't simply be rebuilt overnight.
Absolutely, but we've been talking about this for at least 20 years! It was never going to happen overnight, but when we're still saying the policy – never mind the actual work – needs to change decades later...
While I do not live in a suburb, I do live in a place that had similar goals to what you are describing. The policy literally did change overnight as soon as the people decided that is what they wanted, and the work started underway soon after. It takes no time at all to do away with the red tape, if that's what the people want. If that hasn't already happened, one has to look at why the people don't want it to change.
Suburbia hits the sweet spot of introverted personality types: you don't NEED to know your neighbors, because there are sufficient services/resources to handle everything yourself, but you also don't get hemmed into an urban chicken coop that forces you to know your neighbors.
The only people who raise alarms about "social atomization" are extroverts, and they're entirely incapable of understanding that some people actually prefer their isolation.
I disagree about the introvert-extrovert question. I'm deeply introverted (like, really) and also concerned about isolation.
There are a number of good books on how the built environment affects our social life, if you're interested. It's not specifically about suburbs but "Palaces for the People" by Eric Klinenberg is one of my favorites that covers a lot of this sort of thing.
In another small town right up the street they have a thriving main street area and the housing is mostly built around that with the exception of outlying farms. It's a smaller town, but chances are you can walk over to the square and everything you need is right there, so they have a much more vibrant feeling town even though it's smaller.
I'm not expert though, that's just my suspicion for why they're different having grown up in the area.
It is interesting that you say it is becoming a problem. Why was it not a problem in a past?
> It's a smaller town
Towns are usually considered urban. I was imagining actual, by definition, rural. Living in a small town (~2,000 people) right now, I'd say it has less of a social community that the rural areas I've lived in previously. Still nothing that should leave you feeling isolated, but there is certainly less of a "automatically friends with everyone" vibe. Granted, my rural experience is strictly in agricultural areas where everyone are farmers, which gives common ground on which to "automatically" become friends. If nothing else, you can talk about farming.
Is that the problem with the suburbs? That the people there can't find common ground on which to build friendships?
You couldn't live that far apart since there were no roads or cars that allowed for this.
People can live far apart without problem if they're self-sufficient or plan ahead: grow your own food, have stockpiles that can last months if you can't make it to town (rural winters can be a bitch). What's new is this dependency on others and belief of "oh my god, I'll die if I don't make it to town (grocery store) this week".
[0] Our closest neighbor was a quarter mile away. Nearest paved road (and our bus stop as kids) was 2.5 miles away over private dirt roads with about 1000 feet change in elevation. It was 8 miles to town, 20 to city (which would barely be a suburb most places).
Meanwhile, the other nearby town I mentioned has plenty of outlying farms that are pretty far away, but when they do go into town to go to the grocery or whatever they can also walk into the coffee shop, or the little stores or whatever and have chance encounters with their in-town neighbors. Even among the farm areas there's a coffee shop / pub that everyone goes to at the end of the day. There's even a dance hall that used to be a one room school house and now gets re-purposed for monthly dances. You don't get that in the suburb I live in now where having anything like that in a residential or agricultural area is forbidden by the zoning code.
Similarly, back before cars sure you didn't pop into town as regularly, but everyone knew when events were happening and when you did go into town for something everyone was there and things were relatively close together and easy to get to (once you were there already, I mean).
Maybe there's a language barrier here, but isn't a suburb defined by being at the edge of a city? So wouldn't a bar in the city be the communal place for the suburb, just like the bar in town is for those out on the farms?
Granted, I've known of a small number of bars operating on farms (usually farm-based craft breweries/cideries/wineries), but is not the typical use of rural properties. Having one next door that you could walk to would be unusual.
I'm sure I'm conveying the difference badly, but it's the difference between random encounters with your neighbors whom you'll see the next time you both go to the grocery and then walk over to the fun coffee place vs. random encounters with strangers you'll never see again.
It may be harder, but surely you're doing it anyway? It is not like the suburbs have a grocery store either (usually). Driving into the city is the name of the game, much like it is for farmers.
> Plus in the city there are lots of places
Presumably if you pick one, you'll start to see the same faces, though. Certainly in my youth the big city bar I hung out at had a wonderful community of regulars. If you pick a new bar every night you're going to never get to know anyone, perhaps, but there is no reason to do that.
That said, the youth today seem to be rejecting alcohol and thus bars, so perhaps the bar is a bad example for a current conversation? Or maybe it's the right example as it visibly presents something interesting that is happening. When I was young, you'd have 20 year olds, 40 year olds, and 60 year olds all mingling together at the bar. It's just what everyone did. Now the 40 year olds are busy taking their kids to youth sports leagues, the 20 year olds are doing whatever it is 20 year olds do nowadays, while the 60 year olds are still there hanging out at the bar.
Which appears, to my eye, to have created a huge division in communities. There are still micro-communities found within that, or nano-communities, particularly with the sports leagues (the parents don't really seem to mingle outside of their immediate team's social circle), but the cohesion of an entire community seems to be devastated by that separation.
Maybe that's the source of isolation that people are feeling?
> Presumably if you pick one, you'll start to see the same faces, though
Sure, and you'll likely only see them in the grocery and not elsewhere. Probably the same with the bar; I too know a bunch of regulars at a local bar, but likely not going to run into them outside that bar unless we become friends and make specific plans to do so. Also those people probably aren't my actual neighbors. It's a different kind and frequency of chance meeting when the built-environment is designed to facilitate community. I'm not saying that you'll literally never meet a neighbor in the grocery, it will happen, it's just not going to happen with the same kind of frequency as if we actually designed the built-environment to encourage it.
Based on several adjacent discussions it seems not that the suburbs cause isolation, but that those who prefer to live in isolation are more likely to choose to live in the suburbs – presumably because it offers the isolation they seek. Even if an individual in the suburbs does not wish for isolation, if everyone else there does that limits the social possibilities.
At which point it really makes no difference if you physically reside within city limits or live in a suburban/rural area as the time and effort to get to the places that cater to your particular niche approaches being about the same in all cases. In fact, in my experience, it is often easier to access the amenities of a large city when you don't live in it!
Edit: ok I take that back we always used a car to drive ten minutes to tryvann ski mountain in Oslo but that’s because we have jobs and the bus takes like 40 minutes.
There is probably one or two places in the city that cater to that kind of uniqueness, but the chances of it being next door is unlikely. Most likely you'll have to travel long distances to find it. Longer than your feet can reasonably take you. At which point it doesn't matter all that much which direction you are coming from.
What is your reference point here? This isn't the case in any large European, Asian or dense US city like NYC, Boston and Chicago.
"For fifty years, our economic mission in America, at its core, has been to build bigger houses farther apart from each other. And boy have we succeeded: a nation of starter castles for entry-level monarchs, built at such remove one from the next that the car is unavoidable."
You're a person after my own heart; thanks for working towards a more connected world!
Is it possible to support the goal of vibrant, interconnected communities, to understand all their advantages, but still want to live at least a quarter-mile away from the nearest human?
Asking for a friend...
As opposed to the actual town that I grew up in nearby where everything is spread way the hell out and you have to go on a giant 5 lane highway to get to walmart on one side of town and the hardware store on the other and 30 minutes in another direction to get to a coffee shop, etc.
The solution to your problem is a bicycle. Phoenix is not walkable, but it is very bikable.
Living in a countryside town where I have the freedom and flexibility granted by my car has opened up a world of better possibilities - travelling to any part of the coast with my family. Doing bulk shops. Carrying heavy loads etc. Driving regularly to my parents, avoiding excruciatingly long journies on public transport.
Having a car has made family life possible in ways that public transport does not, and cannot achieve.
> We organize large meetings were we discuss architecture and city planning with politicians, architects and property developers on stage.
I would prefer that politicians, architects and property developers minded their own business and let me choose the mode of transport (an electric car) that works best for me, my family and the environment. I don't want to live in a dense, grey, impersonal urban cluster. I want to be surrounded by countryside and have the freedom to roam. I don't think I'm alone in that.
I'd be interested to explore the reasons and/or psychology behind your judgement.
But few transit advocates are saying that we have to 100% eliminate all personal vehicles. They will remain an important part of the overall transportation infrastructure for the foreseeable future.
It would also be folly to advocate for eliminating all rural living. There are many necessary activities that take place in rural communities, such as agricultural production, that will remain critical to society.
The thing that I see most transit advocates targeting is excessive suburban sprawl, communities that aren't really countryside, but also aren't dense enough to be urban. They sprawl on and on for miles, with nothing to distinguish them, often simply the same tract home design repeated with only minor differences over and over and over. I am sure there are some folks that prefer these communities, but I also think that many residents would prefer wither moving into a less dense rural setting or a more dense urban setting, and many of those left that like the density would still prefer that the way these communities are structured be changed.
With rising pressure to house hundreds of thousands of new arrivals every year, there are no easy answers. Do we make miserable dense cities even denser? Do we build new sprawling, characterless "garden cities"? Do we build around historic countryside towns and ruin their character?
Personally, I'd rather see net immigration returned to the manageable levels it was prior to New Labour (who doubled net immigration) and the Conservatives (who further tripled net immigration).
In recent years of high net immigration our economic productivity has fallen, our public services have worsened and the prospect of owning a house has slipped away from our children and grandchildren. We need a political re-think on this issue, as opposed to trying to patch over the inevitable environmental and congestion related issues.
How did you learn to understand non-profit organization work like this?
Personally, I’ll take my $500k condo in my very amazing city that is 1000sq ft over a 3500sq ft empty house that is 2 miles from the nearest grocery store.
I also have a fullstack background and have taken an approach to work on the street design software itself. Although AutoCAD is used by professionals, it's overkill for most street design projects and difficult for laypeople to use. I've been hacking away at a project called 3DStreet [3] to make street design easier for anyone -- like a figma for street design. Still in its early days. Happy to collaborate with your org, we do group sessions to help folks learn street design to influence local government to make positive changes.
Then, people who want denser, walkable, social neighborhoods can create them.
I do data analysis for the group, on land prices and politics. (E.g., campaign donors). If anyone has questions, reach out to me at hackernews@mike.nahasmail.com
It is designed to solve the problem of "RPG hero just killed a dragon in front of the town and no one says anything about it." All the NPCs realistically react and talk about the Hero's exploits.
Visitors to the site can vote on what quest the hero undertakes next.
I'm running into the problem what the site isn't much fun. I'm honestly not sure what to do about that!
An only slightly buggy build is at https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/tinyllmtown/index.html
Importantly, I am aiming to have everything (except voice gen) working on a small model that can be ran locally.
Yeah I'm currently considering working that in.
Right now existing game AI techniques can manage giving NPCs a daily routine, and I'm trying to focus on demonstrating something new, VS another solution for an already solved problem. But having NPCs just talk about the hero is boring. I'll likely get around to adding private life stuff for each NPC before I do an announcement and share the project more broadly.
Jokes aside, this is interesting because I have thought about this since the first time I killed the dragon outside of Whiterun. There is a brief change with the guards nearby where they are wowwed by your feat, but some of the standard NPC responses sneak in and make the immersive aspect of the game shaky, at best.
I always thought, overtime, the honeymoon phase of a hero's deeds would wear off, and the villagers would swing more into a negative mindset, asking things like "who is going to clean this up?" or "how will we be compensated for damage to our homes?" etc. Community disruption tends to devolve into a lot of cynicism about the people in charge, in my experience with everything from natural disasters (obvious negatives) to new urban shopping centers (less obvious negatives). Regardless of what actually changed to disrupt the community, eventually it is perceived as the source of problems.
I'm not a psychologist or civic engineer, so I am not sure if there is a name for the concept I am referring to.
1 - If you hadn't described your technical choices above I'd think this was just done using normal procedural text generation. Every NPC feels like it's giving the stock phrase they'll say when you run out of dialog options.
2 - There doesn't feel like there is a narrative, reasons to care about these NPCs, reasons to care about the Hero, or some sort of character development over time. If you want to engage people you need to get them to care about what's happening.
During one iteration of testing the NPCs decided to throw a party for the hero and they all congregated in the tavern. That was 100% awesome and if I can hit that type of WOW factor more often I think it'll all feel magical.
> There doesn't feel like there is a narrative, reasons to care about these NPCs, reasons to care about the Hero, or some sort of character development over time. If you want to engage people you need to get them to care about what's happening.
This is just a tech demo so I'm not sure how much I want to put into it. Especially since the end goal is to get a recognized and get a job!
Visitors need some sort of vested interest in what is going on.
When properly prompted, even GPT3.5 can write compelling short stories[1], but I'm using such tiny models for this that I'll have to do a lot of guidance to keep things interesting.
[1] IMHO it was better at this when GPT3.5 first released, it was able to do some awesome stuff!
There was a bit of noise to the sonar transducer since the stepper motor was so noisy, but I mostly eliminated it by routing the motor wires through liquid-tight flexible electrical conduit, connecting the conduit to ground.
I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design.
My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set.
It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sensors don't work because the PVC flaps happen to be IR transparent!) which acts as the "z probe" - the flap is fed via a G38.3 probe action which returns whether the probe was successful or not, and the "z" coordinate it was first detected.
I have a python script running on a computer to send the gcode to the machine.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/scottbez1.bsky.social/post/3l737hme...
Im developing it with the use in mind of flying through your code to show others relationships, or edit with a visuospatial look at your code instead of basic 2D tabs and a mind map of which one had the thing you're working on. It's kinda fun to work on the project In the project!
It's built on Swift and Metal but can ready any utf8 text file, minus a few subsections of the Unicode spec (for now).
How did you learn Metal? The documentation on it from Apple leaves a lot to be desired for learning it from scratch and all the books I’ve encountered look woefully out of date.
However, honestly, most came from following this tutorial series on YouTube which broke down building a basic game engine, and I stopped about 20 or so videos in once I had the tools I needed. I highly recommend!
And hey feel free to DM me on something if you'd like - I'm happy to answer questions and help where I can!
The result is a much more interactive way to present code than screencasts or blogs. Because at any point we can pause a session and freely explore and experiment with the codebase.
I put together a demo recently [1] and written much more about it here [2].
A personal data collection/archival platform with the goal of focusing on timestamping everything possible.
Basically, I realized that when I have multiple pieces of data (e.g. a note, some commands, a screenshot), almost always this data is naturally connected by time and that's also how I want to query it. So: it's nice to be able to e.g. create wiki links in note taking tools like obsidian but it would be nicer if one didn't even have to do the linking manually (most of the time).
I am building on postgres with a time series extension. On the client side I want there to be able to be multiple "collectors" that can collect data which is then sent to the server. So far I only have a keylogger collector but I have many more ideas such as a screenshot collector à la copilot etc.
I think the data you are recording would also be a candidate for a collector for this system.
Lately, I've been focusing mainly on the collectors because I figure the state-of-the-art in any middleware I write is going to change quickly. I've been playing around with knowledge graphs for visualization and might consider using them as a data store for this kind of thing. I'm still thinking about it. My watchword has been minimalism when it comes to design—no added steps or latency to existing workflows.
Having said that, in my experiments with CodeMic, I started to realize more and more how important the editing process is in order to create polished consumable content. My goal is to get as close as possible to 3blue1brown level of clarity but for programming content. So far this has required to focus more on editing part of CodeMic: cut, merge, insert, speed up/down etc.
So if you log everything, then I think the problem becomes how to make sense of all that content from all the noise. I'd love to hear your ideas on that. Feel free to email me :)
I am writing a tool to collect and aggregate data about the processing times. This will help people plan around the delays. Knowing is half the battle.
The biggest challenge is that my readers find me at the start of the process, and I need their feedback at the end of it. I have to make it easy for them to provide partial feedback and complete it later after they get an email reminder.
This would be unnecessary if the immigration office collected and shared that information, but they don’t. They also don’t welcome any help because they “operate at peak efficiency”. I have stopped hoping for their collaboration.
I was wondering how you collect and present data? Just self-reported or do you have some API to gather this information?
If you look at the numbers, the Berlin office has double the workload it had five years ago, and a rather modest increase in headcount during the same time period. They can be fairly criticised for a lot of things, but malice is not one of them.
Just doing plain OCR doesn't really work because the notes in the margin and the footnotes get mingled with the text, which results in gibberish.
But, when sent to Google Vision API, each page results in a json file that has an object for each word and the four coordinates of its bounding box.
That json file is pretty big (around 1.5 Mo when pretty printed, or 500 k with no indents or line breaks) but it can then be fed to Gemini, taking advantage of its large context window.
Gemini is pretty good at identifying each section of the page (headers, main text, margin comments, footnotes) but it takes a looong time to respond (2-5 minutes per page).
So another approach is to ask Gemini to write a python script to analyze the json result and group sections depending of the coordinates of each word, and then run that script against the json output by the OCR phase.
But it's quite difficult to have a script that works for any page; comments in the margin are always in the margin so that's pretty easy, but footnotes can start at any height of the page (some pages contain only footnotes running from previous pages) and Gemini likes to be pretty specific, giving hard 'y' coordinates for where footnotes should start, which obviously only works for the one page it's working on.
I'm iterating and making some progress but I feel like I miss a big breakthrough and it all should be simpler than it currently is. Information about OCR is pretty scarce online. Any pointer is welcome!
1. Manually categorize a few thousand words of normal and footnote text. Then solve a linear system to figure out the width of each letter in normal and footnote. Now, you are able to compute the expected width of any word in normal or footnote font.
2. Now, when you get a fresh page, go down line by line. For every word in the line, compare the actual word width with the expected normal width and expected footnote width. Whichever is closer categorize the word as that. Then for the whole line, take the majority vote on whether to categorize it as normal or footnote line. Once you hit a footnote line, you are done.
For now I have selected a crude approach: there is a gap in the page between the text and the notes, of about one line height. So if one simply takes all the first words of each line and compares their vertical distance, when that distance grows significantly, it's where the footnotes start.
I have tested this method on a dozen of pages and it works, but it remains to be seen if it will stand the test of many pages, esp. those that are askew.
Using the average width of letters instead of their height is a neat idea though; visually it's undeniable that there is a greater difference of width than of height between the footnotes and the main text. I may resort to that if the crude approach proves too simple!
Macros in lisp are just normal functions that receive the code they wrap as argument and return some modified code. Typically they will just wrap the passed code into some more code. But then there are code walking macro: macros that will traverse passed code to modify it in depth.
What I'm working on is "code diving" macros. Not only will they traverse the passed code, but they will resolve called functions and macros, fetch their source code and traverse it too. And so on. All the redefined fns/macros are accumulated in a let/macrolet binding, topologically sorted by call/dependency order. Instrumented code will call these local redefinitions, shadowing the global definition lexically.
This allow the programmer to write truly local monkey-patches for existing code he doesn't have control over (e.g, code from another library for instance). I'm writing this in Clojure, and the traditional way to do this is to temporarily change the global definitions of targeted variables using with-redefs. This is problematic because other threads will see these redefinitions, and not just threads created within the instrumented code, but already existing threads too.
Another way to do it is to just redefine the targeted functions globally, but then your modifications are available to the whole program for the rest of its execution.
Now I understand why I should learn lisp other than to play with its weird-but-kinda-cool-looking prefix notation.
It's a very fun mix of hardware (for data collection), and crazy SQL queries to model energy flows between buildings, solar, batteries, etc. Considering just one building is pretty easy:
consumption = imported - exported + generated - stored + dispatched. carbon = carbon intensity * imported cost = tariff * imported
but then you add a site with a couple of buildings, solar on one of them, grid limited exports, etc modelling these flows is challenging. Like consider the case where one building got 10% of it's imported power from another building's excess solar, then calculating carbon becomes more difficult.
and once you've figured all that - then you have to figure out what makes commercial sense to do next.. install a battery, expand solar, move onto a TOU tariff, do nothing - and that's a whole other world of optimisation problems.
Utilizing https://project-haystack.org/
Very familiar with BMSs but the lack of open standards and protocols has been extremely frustrating - makes me appreciate how good we have it with HTTP, etc.
Lots say they support BACnet but that’s only if they’ve been configured and the points exported, etc.
Haystack is a great step forward for labelling too but adoption seems fill with complexity :)
Haystack definitely has it's challenges. My main concern is it's not very client-side friendly when attempting to use haystack-core types. But it's a cool framework.
Would love some modern toolsets in the space.
Started of with [1] which showed that there might be some strength to the idea.
Applied it for chunking [2] and web site analysis[3] and got pretty good results.
Just started trying out experiments on video [4] and surprised that the structure seems to hold for image embeddings as well.
I have no clue if this has any value, but it is fun to go down this rabbit hole :)
[1]https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-shape-of-stories-...
[2]https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/a-new-chunking-approa...
[3]https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/using-semantic-chunki...
Also, as I mentioned, now, trying out experiments in the video domain with some pretty cool results. Will post the details this week.
Trick-or-treating at a door is so last decade; trying to catch a Snickers hurtling towards you in the darkness is the future.
Got sick of working in Google Docs and having to manually move days around and re-label dates, shift hotels, etc. Ended up creating Turas.app over a weekend in 2023 (and then let it loose on Reddit). But just recently created the Chrome Extension which feels like it is an even better tool because it lets you access all of the richness of Google Maps. It's a Google Maps powertool for people who like to plan their travel meticulously.
(Completely free and intended to be free forever; we tried to monetize it but realized that there's no reasonable way to do so that we ourselves would be happy with; seriously thinking about just open sourcing it, but needs some cleanup first!)
Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turasapp/lpfijfdbgo...
App: https://turas.app
The game was playable on the first try with only a few minor and very quick rule tweaks from me. Even I felt we went on a stressful quest in the forest. Honestly among the best games for this age group that I have ever played.
10/10 activity, will try again.
(Small note: I'm doing it in full-stack Rust, including web frontend, using leptos).
Good luck, I look forward to this existing!
The work most of us do isn't tangible. You have nothing to "prove" that you made something. Creating something in meat space is really rewarding.
It's been busy:
- Reading books, currently "The Mom Test"
- Looking for a startup community and being disappointed with what my city has to offer
- Deciding between VC vs. bootstrapping, and taking a firmer stance to try the latter first. This includes rejecting ODF.
- Talking with like-minded people. I now have a better understanding of what the MVP should look like.
Receiving so much support has been very encouraging; I announced it more publicly at https://nullderef.com/blog/quit-job-2024/
It's scary. But working has never been so fun!
The closest thing to training I've found is this: https://datadetoxkit.org/en/wellbeing/essentials/. But what worked best for me was paying more attention:
- First, I'm now aware that phone overuse is an issue. This wasn't obvious a year ago, even though I used it even more.
- Analyze my usage patterns. For example, I'd get a message on some app, open it, and end up doomscrolling. It helped me to change my notification settings so that I only get emails. That way, I can check it on the computer later, where I usually waste less time.
- I agree that gamifying is a good idea. It's precisely the main feature of the app I'm working on. Not only that, but building a "community": I started to talk about this problem with friends and learned from them. It also makes me more accountable; my girlfriend will nudge me to leave the phone alone if I'm stuck, for example.
As a father, I wanted to capture all the little moments of our day-to-day family life to later share with my grown-up children. However, I did not have the discipline to journal regularly. So, I made Memzy to capture them easily on the fly!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/memzy-easy-journaling-with-ai/...
Some observations:
- it can be pretty hard to remember a mundane and ordinary day just 24 hours later, and after 48 hours it's usually completely gone from memory
- important or unusual events (or parties!) stay in memory a little longer
- and for me at least, food is an excellent memory anchor; if I feel lazy and don't want to add to my journal, just noting what I had for lunch and dinner will help me remembering the rest of the day much better later.
https://ladsko.github.io/hexed/
It's hexagonal, compact and optimized for German and English thanks to noted (https://dariogoetz.github.io/noted-layout/)
Right now I'm testing key shapes and sizes and the manufacturing of key caps. I thought I needed a resin printer for best results but FDM printed caps with a blob of epoxy resin on top works surprisingly well.
There's no firmware yet, I have not even decided on a micro-controller or software. But I want to use Kailh Choc v1.
This is my first time exposing this project to the public so I'll be very happy about some feedback!
What's the "up/down" key in the bottom row, centre, between the 2 return/enter keys? (I ask because my "dream" keyboard would have a thumbwheel just below/between the 2 spaces bars on an Alice layout keyboard) EDIT: it's a toggle key.
The different heights and layout look interesting; did you perform any statistical examination of which symbol keys were most used? Are you intending on using QMK layers to enter the extra symbols?
Can your fingers accurately hit all those modifier keys? Does that layout lead to less or more pinky usage? (I'm terrible at hitting other keys, I'm just a clumsy person)
That would be the perfect spot for a thumb wheel, it's a cool idea.
I myself did not do any statistical analysis, the effort was done by the neo layout project (https://www.neo-layout.org/) and the hybrid English/German variety called noted. I modified it slightly to fit my hex grid.
The height difference makes it possible to hit the edge of the key without pressing the key below. And you'll find the home row more easily just from the bent layout shape. This should also help with hitting the right modifiers.
I want to try Jan Lunge's Keyboard configurator (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtYJYFMWjNM) for KMK but have not made a final decision. If I hit a road block with his configurator I might try QMK. Either software supports layers.
https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet
Essentially a PR review flow for production access, which allows you to enforce a second pair of eyes workflow. I was always a bit scared when I was on call and had all the power in my finger tips to ruin everyone's day. I think this helps alleviate the risk of human error significantly. Also helps with compliance of course.
Ride Sustainably with the World's First Repairable Battery
Refillable in 5 minutes (just buy $150 worth of new cells every 3 years or so, when they're depleted)
Be Worry-Free thanks to the Fireproof Casing! There's been waaaaaay too many lithium fires!
It's launched as an IndieGogo (the product already exists, but as a startup IndieGogo is convenient to get the cash upfront to buy the parts and build the batteries) and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com for a 25% discount on the battery!
Breathing Tips - a free web app to practice breathing exercises.
Tech stack: Ruby on Rails 7.2, sqlite3, BabylonJS for the 3D visuals, hosting on hetzner for 4$ and deployed with kamal 2
If you're in the Atlanta, GA area and need bicycle work done, hit me up! No job is too big or too small. I particularly enjoy building wheels if you want a sweet custom wheel set, but I do it all (including Mountain Bike fork and suspension work that many shops won't do).
I'm also documenting every step of the process and uploading it to YouTube, which means I am also teaching myself how to edit videos :)
If anyone wants to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL55VZ7oDEoRnXKSYTiGlN...
If you end up generating Meshes & URDF or SDF file along the way it would be cool to try using it in simulators!
I’ve ran a start up and saw how SaaS-ified and expensive web tooling is (heroku, datadog, redshift, fivetran, etc), but how difficult it was to move off of them. We had a few years of over 1 million in infrastructure spend.
I’m hoping just making Kubernetes easier to use gives us a way out.
It’s fully open source and a hosted version is free to use! https://canine.sh.
Would love feedback on it, including how the overall pitch could be better, or if it actually solves people’s problems.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381009719_Hydra_Enh...
Download: https://akkartik.name/carousel-cards.love (really just a zip file containing source code, 169KB)
Installation instructions: same as https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel
Repo for the core app: https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/carousel.love
So far I have 111 little "levels", each good for between a few seconds and a minute. I think a full curriculum/game will need maybe 2000 levels?
If you are in an EPA-regulated (or equivalents in Canada and Europe) industry (such as mining, oil and gas, minerals, rare earths, metal processing, airlines, construction, shipping/marine, logistics, heavy industries, agriculture/farming/food production, data center, power generation including renewables, adjacent ones like consumer goods, real estate, large scale AI training, climate derivatives etc.) or require sustainability consulting support in general, we would love to talk to you: hello@carbonimpacthq.com (put “HN:” in the subject line so we know where you are coming from)
https://carbonimpacthq.com (the landing page is still a work-in-progress but you can check out our blog for more information https://carbonimpacthq.com/esg-and-your-business/)
Since my last update here, I've added more detailed personalized descriptions of recommendations (hit Describe to request), including a rating out of 10 for how well the item meets your preferences.
I've also added the ability to replace individual recommendations (this was the most requested new feature!). If you update your preferences, your replacements will use your updated preferences - pretty nice for fine tuning your results!
Try it: https://www.yogurrt.com/
I was surprised to learn that each recommendation for preferences costs nearly 1 cent. From what I can tell, you don’t seem to be caching preferences. For example, each "Let's Go!" click on a show like say "Succession" generates some variation in the preference recommendations. My hunch is that if we ask LLMs to "over recommend" preferences based on the content you’re using (my guess is a mix of MovieLens, IMDb, TMDB, and Wikipedia) and do so in an ordered fashion (preference1 is a solid, but preference7 is a so-so), you could cache these results and strategically display them. For instance, when users choose to "fix" certain categories and get new recommendations for others, these "over recommendations" could help create variations without additional LLM calls. This could be repeated like N times until new categories require further LLM calls.
I am not sure if this would work with the personalized descriptions of recommendations part. I kind of love how they’re tuned based on my selected preferences.
I am curious about the design of the whole system. Fun project! Thanks.
You're correct, I'm not caching the results right now. I determined that caching whole queries would not make much difference in the aggregate, since the vast majority of queries are unique. (However I also just saw that OpenAI added their own caching layer with lower prices for cached results, which is nice!)
However - the new Replace function was my first step toward fetching recommendations one-at-a-time - I agree that potentially opens up interesting new possibilities for caching and other things as well!
I really like your idea and the clean, simple execution! I'm looking forward to using it more in the coming days.
I'm curious about the technical side of things—how did you build the app, and how do its inner workings function? Is it open source? If possible, could you share more technical details?
Really cool, thanks!
What's holding me back from scaling is primarily my own resistance to marketing, plus some pending improvements to the ChatGPT-based transcript editing system. Once I finish optimizing the LLM integration, I'll have no more excuses to avoid sales outreach. One thread I want to pursue is a magazine of podcast transcripts that I inherited: https://podread.org
I'd appreciate advice on authentic outreach strategies for reaching knowledge-focused podcasters. If anyone here has experience in this space or wants to collaborate, I'm open to connecting.
Learning how to arrange things, navigation, and my own blog on my own site gives me the gratification of owning something fully. Everyone should have their own site is truly what I agree with.
SVGs are awesome and currently unrepresented in the diffusion-based model landscape. We have something that produces pretty great results and we're working on the next version which should be even better.
Edit: Also, copying the SVGs to the clipboard would be nice. Download from the browser still sucks, and with web based SVG editors (like my own one, www.hyvector.com ) people can quickly edit the generated SVGs without having to go through the downloading and uploading process.
[1] https://laudspeaker.com/ , https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VRI4X5fCUpwurUDvKmvzJpT7...
I was unhappy with availability, pricing, and business model (SaaS lock-in) of the existing hardware/software solutions. But to my delight, I noticed that you just need better amplifiers to use 3D printer mainboards for driving industrial stepper motors. Everything is controlled with Gcode, which is just text. And sensors can send back logging messages over the same USB connection.
That means the control software can be just a python script with a little state machine inside :)
I'm curious what you mean by a custom NC manufacturing robot? A CNC mill?
A (at least) 3-axis motion control system with G-code processor
Spindle controller (usually)
Limit switch input
A nice graphical display
(Sometimes) Wi-Fi or BLE
Arduino framework
All for around $50.
I was exploring the use of one for an open-source infusion pump controller. However, it turned out to be too bulky, but it would probably have been fine otherwise. Even after all these years, I was blown away by the insane amount of capability that I could buy for $50.
Before anyone else asks: https://github.com/makerbase-mks/MKS-DLC32
I've eschewed jobs and even a funded YC startup to work on this idea for years, ideating. Just following my passion and deep belief I'm making a more effective way to learn a language while also strengthening an emotional relationship!
Lots of people just going off of vibes to see if their system is working right. That’s a good start, but you’ll need system evals to systematically improve your app. Like Garry says, “don’t raw dog your prompts. Use system evals”
But to pass the time, I’m also working on a personal journal that keep S-expressions in a database with a well-defined schema set by the other nodes of the database (imagine tiddlywiki transclusions everywhere!)
The idea is to have a bunch of adaptors for Google Takeout, Apple Notes, Obsidian, Apple Health, fitness tracking, org-mode, location history, etc. keep all my data there in well-defined formats. I could then also use the markup language I’m writing to present my journal data in various ways.
My main focus is on efficient data entry/ingestion powered by schema-as-data, which allows for machine and human readability.
I don’t expect it to be useful, but I’m having fun. If I wind up getting anywhere, I might open source it.
There were also issues syncing with Google Merchant Center (missing colors, categories, etc.), so I tweaked the app to auto-fill these fields using GPT-4o, making it compliant with Google and Pinterest requirements.
I’m completely new to SEO and just tried following best practices to fix things as they came up. Now I’m learning that SEO keywords change constantly, so I’m thinking of integrating a keyword provider to dynamically enhance our product descriptions.
I never realized running an e-commerce store (especially print-on-demand) would involve so much operational work on the marketing front. I’d appreciate any advice on what to tackle next, especially since my goal is to avoid “subscription hell” with multiple Shopify apps. My wife is also just starting with ads and campaigns, diving into tutorials to learn the ropes.
Any guidance is welcome!
The challenge is how to classify images as cost efficient as possible without compromising performance. I decided to go with running ML models on the client-side.
Technical implementation: - Built and trained a compact TensorflowJS model (~3MB) that runs entirely in-browser - Model lazy loads only when users are submitting reviews - Classifies uploaded photos into Menu, Food & Drink, or Vibes (interior/exterior) - Zero server costs for inference, quick enough classification feedback
This approached solved several problems: 1. Reduced server costs by moving inference to the client 2. Improved UX with immediate photo categorization 3. Maintained app performance by lazy loading the model
Would love feedback from the HN community on: - Optimizing the model size further - Alternative approaches to client-side ML - General UX improvements for local discovery apps
I had no prior ML experience, so this was a fun challenge :)
The software allows the platform to automatically align to north and working on accounting for imperfect leveling (such as placing it on a slanted surface) through software and accelerometers.
Next challenges I want to solve in software is focus detection and then automatic image stack and post processing.
Primary goals of the project is a deep dive into robotics and electronics, along with brushing up on webdev which I don't touch too frequently being in the gamedev world. Also allowing me to explore things like digital signal processing.
I'm keeping a bit of a running blog here. [0]
[0] https://gdcorner.notion.site/Stargaze-Telescope-Build-Log-6f...
https://github.com/robertsdotpm/p2pd
python3 -m pip install p2pd
python3 -m p2pd.demo
(Will let you play around with TCP hole punching and other obscure connectivity approaches.)
Brand new docs too that go into how it works in English with some semi-good diagrams. If you want to learn more about it.
I'm building a website with interactive stories (or story-based games), intended for language learners. The idea is to make stories with choices (using Ink script), including features you may expect from adventure games (e.g. inventory, choices that matter).
The text is written in simple language, it is then translated in many languages, and I generate audio files. This provides input for people learning a language, with multiple options to practice reading or listening.
Uncaught TypeError: SpeechRecognition is not a constructorI started experimenting with the speech recognition browser API yesterday (so that the user can listen and repeat sentences), but it's not supported everywhere.
I've built Journable, a simple & frictionless chat-based & photo-based calorie tracker. Just type in what you've eaten, in as much or as little detail as you can. Or type in what you did for exercise. Or just snap a photo of your plate. Whatever works for you.
Or a couple of cameras around the kitchen, with an ML setup that recognizes both incoming food items, and their use in cooking. Then it could give you notifications/calendar items on things expiring :)
I have another ecommerce system that delivers boxes of organic produce all over the Seattle region.
So I am working on building an integration between the two systems. When a box of coffee is being shipped on the same day that the delivery company is already going to that region, redirect that box's fulfilment process away from USPS/FedEx and deliver it instead.
This saves 50% on shipping costs for the coffee company, and the delivery company gets paid for utilizing extra space in the delivery vans. It's been 4 months of work so far, and most of the individual pieces are working in production right now, hoping to enable all of it together this week or next. Just in time for the holidays ;)
The hardest part so far was integrating all the custom label generation, and mapping/routing so that it's seamless with the existing workflows of each company. The coffee company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for the new non-shipping orders, and the delivery company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for fulfilling orders they did not pack.
The real cherry on top is that it's built in such a way that N number of stores could integrate their stores into our fulfillment. This lets many local food producers who cant do their own fulfillment still participate in the local food economy without having "scale". It's kinda like an upside down Fulfillment By Amazon: they'll do your delivery for you as long as you sell through their store (and take their ever-increasing cut of the sale). This version lets the store owner maintain their own store, URL, branding, prices, availability, customer relationship, and margins, but then hook into our last-mile fulfillment.
Paid stuff coming very soon, just onboarding some groups and get some feel
Btw for ticketed events, I've seen that https://posh.vip has been growing pretty quickly for music performers.. maybe some inspiration for you there.
oh thats interesting! thanks for that. been working in Music Tech, but havent seen that one. seen that https://shotgun.live/ , https://dice.fm/ and also https://partiful.com/ are being popular in the states.
nothing really, we're just fixing most of the kinks and legal / tax things. you're free to try it https://embers.club/en/login
I noticed that there is a big gap in this space, especially for European users. There are several personal finance applications, but they seem to integrate mostly with US banks and, in general, they seem to be very dollar-centric.
So, I'm working on a simple app to manage personal finance, based on the concept of double-entry accounting with features like budgeting, projections and data analysis. There are a lot of privacy-related considerations, so for the time being I will eat my own dogfood and offer it to close friends. Let's see how it goes!
I'm trying to make it: a collective project shared between multiple coops, open source, sustainable in the long term.
I've already did some micro projects to the coop I'm a part of, like changing the workflow of expense invoice management from a totally manual process to an 80% automated process so I'm pretty sure I can provide significant benefits to the coops. Right now There's already a prototype andI'm in the process of talking with cooperatives finding financing and making it real.
website is at https://coops.pt (very early stages, in portuguese)
For my whole career so far I've been applying ML (as they called it back then) / AI to various domains like drug discovery and cybersecurity. Both were fun but, man, it feels really different to build a consumer app. It's just very exciting to be able to develop something, push it, and get compliments/complains the second day! We've even noticed that the ADHD community are especially engaged with the extension because they suffer the most from the tab overload problem.
Anyways, for those who might need it, here's the link:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/skipper-fewer-tabs-...
If yes shoot me an email at kyle AT skipper.co
Not my idea, though. Through our local geek community, I met this taxi driver who pitched his app idea. He convinced a few other drivers to pay a small fee to kickstart the project. Then he convinced me to help with the technical stuff, and I convinced a friend to tag along.
He is on the road looking for funding!
Can you explain some of the difficult parts? I'd think it would be fairly straight-forward. Is the technical challenge of market making the hard part? or getting enough users on the app to actually make a market?
Ubers growth and scale and how rapidly they grew posed some problems I’m sure, but I doubt anyone in this space will ever experience that again. Definitely not what’s being discussed here.
Originally, I built Pictera for myself to use because I couldn’t find any service that produced decent photos. Besides, I was very concerned that popular products in this space included broad terms allowing them to keep and use users' photos indefinitely for any purposes, including marketing [2]. But I've been enjoying working on the product so much that I've put way more time into polishing it and thought others would find it useful too.
Would love any feedback from folks!
I just launched the "best books of 2024," where I ask readers and authors to share their 3 favorite reads of the year and make it fun to navigate them by different factors (genres, topics, book club reads, audiobooks, and more coming) -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024
Slowly getting more in place as we grow :)
One thing I always wonder when thinking about creating something with books is, where does one get all the Metadata fir the books? How do you do that?
The metadata system is a nightmare.
To start, we did everything manually.
We source the book cover from the publisher, create author entries, etc.
Eventually, we started paying Nielsen a lot of money to use their Book metadata API. It is "ok," and they don't update it often. But it helps us automatically pull in an author's name, book title, genres, and age-group.
We still manually source the book covers as they only have super small and blurry covers. And we screen every book we add to make sure the data is correct.
What is especially frustrating? - Author names are text and not linked in any way. So we have to decide what is a slightly different name but the same author and what is a different author. - The BISAC genre standard is full of errors and abuse by publishers. For example, they might tag Dune as "AI" which marks it also as being nonfiction because they don't know how the BISAC standard they created works :). - It lists book editions and has no concept that all book editions belong to one book. - No real concept of a book series. - Terrible book descriptions where publishers put in all kinds of reviews and nonsense that we need to figure out how to scrub eventually. They also abuse weird symbols to make it stand out.
It requires a lot of work to fix and manage all of this.
I am about to redo the entire topic/genre system due to some of these problems (this winter).
I am hoping to build a database of all books to use with new features in 2025. I don't know what we are going to do here. We might license a full DB of books from Ingrams (expensive) or Bowker. I liked Ingrams, but Bowker didn't email me back for months and gave me a lot of worry about working with them in the future. I might just do the best I can or break down and use Amazon's API (lots of stipulations in using it).
Some thoughts here of what we've built so far to manage this: https://build.shepherd.com/p/a-big-focus-for-2024-improving-...
Hit me up any time to chat (ben@shepherd.com).
when I asked you, I already suspected that obtaining the data would be a real challenge. It’s actually unbelievable that you have to put in so much (manual) effort to get clean data—and then pay a lot of money for it, too. It’s a bit unfortunate.
I do have one more question: Shepherd.com seems to be specifically tailored for the American book market, right? Are you planning anything in the future to serve an international audience as well?
Since I’m from Germany, I looked into how things are here regarding book data. It seems like we might have it a bit easier when it comes to accessing book information. We have the VLB (https://vlb.de/en/), which provides book data—I’ll look into it more closely. The German National Library (probably similar to the Library of Congress) archives every book published in Germany! Their data might be quite useful too.
By the way, I didn’t realize it was so expensive to get an ISBN...
Wishing you continued success with Shepherd! I think it’s wonderful when someone pours so much passion into an idea—especially one focused on books!
Ya, I am focused on the global English market, so USA, UK, Australia, Ireland, India, and English-speaking readers globally (a lot in Europe).
I would love to do other languages, but I just don't have the resources yet to handle that level of complexity. My hope is one day I can. I'd probably start with Spanish, French, or German.
Agreed, ISBN should be free! They are $$$.
I'd like to continue building fun projects like this until I find a market. I work in Phase 1 clinical trials and the end goal would be to implement some of these efficiencies into health technologies.
Overcooked is a co-op series that fundamentally requires the control of multiple characters to progress. I've kept multiplayer as an option, since teamwork is an important part of the game. However, I've replaced the 2nd player with a bot that you program to assist you.
It's still experimental at this stage. However, I've experience leading EdTech engineering departments and my wife is a teacher at my daughter's school. If my daughter's peers show interest I'll go ahead and build a course around this for primary school aged children.
I don’t want to configure filters or adopt inbox zero. I want the computer to look at decades of email activity and just figure it out.
Second, working on a single dashboard for attorneys to create and upload filings across different agencies and different states. Trying to improve accuracy and labor costs for mundane work like this.
(Opinions? Suggestions? Want to work together? Email me!)
Since I am working on autonomous agents that are given the agency to take an action on their own, I believe having a good understanding of the "psyche" is important (at least to me).
Always wanted to make a truly grand epic space real-time strategy inspired by homeworld, anime, and of course the classic rts of past.
this is a passion project... maybe turns into something real. who knows. I am having a blast working on this.
First time I'm building a proper website, used a lot of AI. Things that changed over last time: * Switched the charting library from D3 to Apex. D3 was too low-level for my purpose. * Reworked the design and contents of a lot of pages (with the help of AI). * Various bugfixes for the database queries. * Tried to come up with some kind of pricing signal detection, but currently not working well. * Link to the actual auction results. * Minimal E2E validation using Playwright. What a pleasure to use!
I'm planning to add alerting. Not keen on running a backend though.
Try it out, it's free!
If you don't have an iPhone, you might have success with the desktop version at: https://color.vos.lol/app
I gathered many of my bash scripts and aliases, focused on making use of Android Debug Bridge (ADB) easier, together into a single collection[0]. The wiki page has visuals and more information on functionality[1].
Then starting a new project this week around gathering and displaying information on air quality in Iceland.
[0]: https://github.com/hrafnthor/adb_helper
[1]: https://github.com/hrafnthor/adb_helper/wiki/ADB-Helper-wiki
I just gave my first conference talk about it, and response was positive. Hope others find it interesting as well!
Currently passes all the WebAssembly 1.0 test suite minus the tests that require imports (around 9) - should have those ones fixed this week
Cloud providers made too easy to start resources. But unless there is a stringent upfront process (that usually defeats the purpose of using the cloud), it is hard to keep track of who owns what, and what is still needed. Decrypting long cloud bills quickly impossible, and users do not have a clear understanding of the per-resource cost they generated.
I believe the solution is rooted in transparency and accountability for both users and cloud providers.
I am creating a tool what generates a cost and security cloud report which is sent weekly for each cloud user or team.
I intend to release it as a open-source tool as well a SaaS service as part of www.li10.com
How do you know something is AI content?
It is statistically similar to human content.
> each human can only have one account
Sounds like you'll need some eyeball scanners.
Nope. All I need is a passport :)
> How do you know something is AI content?
I won't. But I will certainly ban anyone who is found to definitively be sharing AI content.
I can't explain why, but that makes me extremely uneasy. I won't even give Telegram my phone number. I can only imagine the things a nefarious actor could do with a copy of my passport.
Sure, that may make you uneasy as well, but I hope being transparent about what gets stored and how will ease that uneasiness.
I'm currently working on supporting images on the recipes.
I'm proud of having launched on producthunt and now trying to figure out how to attract more users
My gut feeling, for attracting users, would be to just optimize the recipes to be found by people via search engines. It's great, that you are currently adding images. This is, I think, pretty important for deciding, if I want to cook something or not.
Regarding the comments, I'd really like to implement activitypub on reciperium. To add the ability to follow users and comment on recipes. And to be able to comment and follow from the fediverse. It's a good opportunity for me to explore the protocol.
What do you mean by combining ingredients? You can currently link to other recipes. So if you make a sauce, that can be a recipe on its own, and it can be linked from another recipe. See this for example: https://www.reciperium.com/rodriguezflors/roti
> My gut feeling, for attracting users, would be to just optimize the recipes to be found by people via search engines
That's a good idea, I'm optimizing a bit the search engine now. I've been also thinking of writing a blog
1. An infinite realtime canvas for people all over the world to collaborate on pixel art: https://everyonedraw.com/6/4298/8439
2. An LLM-powered translator specifically optimized for English speakers living in Spanish-speaking countries: https://translate-spanish.com
The first one is purely for fun to scratch my own itch, and the second is solving some frustrations I've had with existing translator apps while living in Mexico City.
Job is very stressful as Q4 is peak-season for us. Managed to stick to some healthy habits though, like doing sport regularly and trying to eat less junk food. It ain't much but it's something I guess.
Also made a good deal on a broken Kitchen Aid machine. I want to repair it for a friend of mine who would like to have one but can't afford it right now. I think that will be a nice christmas present. Really need to get that going though, when time flies again.
It let you draw and decorate the world around you (think r/place on a map). So far people seem to like it and are making some nice little drawings in their neighbourhood. I have seen some funny projects like the Star Wars Rebel Alliance logo in east of Paris, some cute ninja turle, a "Kamala" on 5th Avenue in NYC (no politics here, it is just fun for me seeing people claiming some territory on my game).
I do this as a hobby and love it so far.
Meshtastic is helping out but if anyone knows where to find stronger documentation that would help.
Then the nodes in the graph maintain types (things like people, date, currency) as extracted and allow queries.
https://github.com/pixlie/PixlieAI
Currently building a demo where we crawl startup investment data to build a knowledge graph that can be filtered for patterns.
The engine can guide the crawl process, to keep crawl limited to the problem statement.
Out of curiosity, if it's not a trade secret, how do you plan to handle conflicting data (two sources saying different things on the same topic/data)?
At this moment, we have not entered the territory of conflict resolution but I know what you mean. Interestingly I just came across this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18415 (released on Oct 24, 2024).
Uses transformers.js & WebGPU for running transcription, so it's pretty fast. It's still a bit rough around the edges, so I'm looking for feedback.
Here's a notion of some of my bookmarks, ideas, you might find a few things useful:
https://bronze-brush-9b0.notion.site/AI-Prosthetic-Whisp-804...
I am learning react-native now. Just finished building a themed components library.
These are for building a simple intelligence platform. Intelligence meaning a way to model entities, events, documents, and the link between them.
I want to use this instead of having thousands of documents on dropbox organized by a random folder hierarchy.
Specifically, my team and I are making assurance cases and ontologies that can seamlessly integrate with the system and its guardrails. For example, if you want to deploy some mix of filters underneath a user-facing LLM app, you would able to: 1) express the logic of how they should be deployed and why (e.g., if X=1, then Y, else Z); 2) see how they perform over time and evaluate alternatives; 3) investigate what happened when an attack succeeds; 4) prove to the auditors that you're taking all measures necessary to be robust and compliant with the EU AI Act.
It started as an informal collab early this year, but we have since published a few workshop papers on this concept [1,2]. We're building a Python demo that would show how it all fits together.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09078 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05304
I understand the AI fatigue, as almost all of the proposed uses of AI in gaming are generally either random generation (in other words, procedural generation but worse) or 'better replies from NPC'. Neither solve any problem people really have. And probably more importantly, the other use is for mega-corporations to hire less competent programmers/artists.
Unfortunately being tied to the AI calls poses a lot of issues with distribution, which is annoying for what was supposed to be a glorified PoC. I'm still finishing the backend to comply with Steam's review (which does not really match their guidelines...)
If you don't know what a DAW is, think GarageBand. Ableton Live, Logic and Reason are other examples. It's fully built with React and a custom state-management library, that's been fun and challenging. It's starting to take shape, but there's definitely a long way to go.
I was supposed to be working on a project called Tagbox... but it feels like it's never gonna see the light of day. I hope I'm wrong though, I still want this to succeed, for once in my life, I want to actually succeed on at least one thing. I want to contribute some good thing to the society.
First, what is it? It's a bookmarking app alternative to Pocket or Raindrop.io. Yeah, you can already tell it's not the most original idea. What makes it different, though, it's supposed to be self-hostable and additionally it's easy to deploy as it's only single binary file with no other runtime dependency--the database uses SQLite, which you can include it as a library in Rust.
What problems I'm facing while developing this? Honestly? I don't know, but I can't finish the last 10% progress of the app. It's funny--I first wrote it in Go, and it almost reached MVP. But, instead, I decided to just rewrite in Rust. Well, at least I got to learn new language while building this app, two birds one stone, or in Bahasa Indonesia, swimming while drinking water.
But now, I just can't force myself to continue. And I don't know why. Maybe perfectionism? It definitely doesn't have to do with skill though.
There are also another thing I'm working on: recovering from depression. One year ago, out of nowhere, I lost all my motivation doing anything--including university. I lost all my friends. Since then, I'm at the lowest point of my life. I visited psychiatrist multiple times. I don't know if it was effective, but recently I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Tagbox Project is also one of the efforts for me to recover from depression. The depression phase made me realize that I _want my works to have a positive effect on the world, even for just a little bit_. I don't want my skill to be used for evil companies that throws away moral and ethics. Specifically AI stuff, but that's OOT of this thread.
Here are the links if you're interested,
https://gitlab.com/muhrizqiardi/tagbox_rs/
This link is only the Rust rewrite version. The original version is private right now.
Sounds like you just need a bit of consistency to make some progress. I'd be down to chat once a week for 15 minutes and we can figure out the focus for the week. Hit me if you think that would be helpful, sounds like you can build some good stuff.
I've been there and I know what it feels like. I would try to perhaps solve the mental health problem first perhaps before tackling big projects. Maybe try gym, hiking, somehow finding friends, talk to more people, solve your sleep, eat better - something. Because again, if you don't have peace of mind, working on a project is difficult (at least for me it is).
Hope that helps.
Im experimenting with redux-like contstructs, which reduce the boilerplatey stuff, for example:
export function setStatePlain(state: State) {
return {
type: SET_STATE,
payload: state,
} as const;
}
export function setState(state: DeepPartial<State>): Thunk {
return (dispatch, getState) => {
dispatch(setStatePlain(Object.assign({}, getState(), state)));
};
}
export function someAction(data: Data): Thunk {
...
dispatch(setState(immer.produce(getState(), state => {
state.lobbyGames[result.data.uuid] = {
...result.data,
adminId: state.playerId,
players: [{
id: state.playerId,
name: state.playerName,
ready: false,
}],
};
...
}
})));For the uninitiated, it can be roughly seen as detection of a sequence of musical notes. Raga is a term for a particular scale of notes (both ascending and descending).
Until now, this has mostly been in the domain of research and there is a ton of published literature out there. At the very basic level, if you have just voice, it is trivial to apply a pitch detection algorithm like YIN to get a pitch estimate and then analyse the sequence to figure out the raga. This doesn't work as well in a concert setup where speeds are higher due to gamakas, different instruments are used alongside and counterpoint melodies may make the music polyphonic. A lot of papers apply a variety of ML models (neural nets and otherwise) using several different features (cepstrum and mel-cepstrum, pitch distributions etc) with varying results.
So this is an interesting exercise in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. If anyone else is working on or has worked on this, I'd love to hear from you.
I'm working on plumfin.com, which lets you ask questions to Canadian or U.S. board certified doctors. Theres no need for video chats or waiting for appointments, you can message a doctor anytime and you'll be alerted with a response.
The term "ergonomic" isn't regulated in the US, so the market is full of supposedly "ergonomic" keyboards that offer little real benefits—and in some cases, may actually cause harm.
My main gripe is with split keyboards. The traditional keyboard layout is wrong in so many ways (from the perspective of physiology and biomechanics) that just "splitting in the middle" isn't enough to avoid long-term injury.
Splitting is not wrong, but alone, it's not enough. You need to tackle it from multiple perspectives: Yes, Split the keys, so your wrists aren't bent outward, support the palms so they're not bent upward, and angle the middle part up (like a tent) to keep your forearms from twisting. That twisting is especially bad because it squeezes the carpal tunnel and can lead to nerve and tendon problems.
FatBee is my attempt to incorporate all these elements while creating something that doesn't feel too overwhelming to use.
The interesting thing is I did manage to fix most of my right wrist pain, but not through an ergo keyboard – switching to an Apple magic trackpad did the trick.
But I'm still intrigued by your design - if it was something I could buy (instead of building) I would give it a go.
This might be outside the scope of your work, but I'm considering going more extreme with ergonomics. What if the keyboard was split and mounted on my chair arms? What possibilities are there with a keyboard on a free-floating arm, whether it's full-sized or several smaller ones? I like that you use the word "familiar", I'm not looking to reinvent how keyboards work, I just want to rethink where I hold my arms.
A concurrent project, I'm working on finding a chair that fits my specific dimensions. I'm too tall for the average chair and have been searching for solutions. Currently, I use a $40 Coleman camping chair that lets me sit at a 135-degree angle with my laptop on my lap and a portable monitor to the side. However, it offers very little support for my head and shoulders, so I'm looking for a chair that can adjust from 90 to 135 degrees and support my frame.
It's an online service that helps immigrants prepare their citizenship application and get affordable feedback from an attorney.
(Met my co-founder on the YC founder matching platform, Thanks YC!)
1. Working on a 'production ready' version of Conal Elliot's 'compiling to categories' for GHC.
2. This is so I can create a vectorizable model of a datalog-based query language I'm building in Haskell.
3. The query engine will be using a version of monadic optimization as outlined on a blog post somewhere
4. The purpose of the query engine is maintenance of large datasets, all the more important with AI these days, but really general purpose.
5. The motivation for this was a low code tool I had built in Haskell almost a decade ago that I abandoned that I'm bringing up to use ghcs web assembly backend and I need a proper query engine for it now.
Other things:
1. Thinking about binary neural networks and how to train them stochastically.
2. Learning about finite element methods for physical modeling and also reviewing my basic topology so I can think more about non discrete math and algebra which I tend to focus on.
3. I'm building a cloud chamber! Because I want to see space particles. Literally for no other reason than I'm obsessed with these devices ever since seeing one at the exploratorium
4. And raising three kids. I don't know how I have time for anything
And I get up early.
Iterating on an accessible color palette creator, for custom Tailwind-style palettes of multiple swatches, where you can check your colors have sufficient WCAG/ACPA color contrast on a live UI mockup. You can export the colors for use with Tailwind, CSS, Figma, and Adobe.
I started working on this because for design projects I was almost always getting handed brand style guides that were missing thought into accessible colors pairs and lacked tints/shades, where I had to fill in the gaps. There's lots of color tools out there, but this supports multiple swatches, checking the contrast of multiple color pairs at the same time and the HSLuv based color picker makes it easier to explore accessible colors.
It's really only usable on desktop right now but I'd love any feedback good or bad on if it's useful and what to work on next! There's actually a lot of directions to go in, and it's tricky to balance more features with keeping it simple. Some tips:
- The "Load examples" menu in the top-left lets you compare the colors from Tailwind, IBM Carbon and United States Web Design System.
- The "contrast" menu lets you see how WCAG 2 contrast checks compare against APCA when "vs black/white" is turned on. WCAG 2 has known inaccuracies, especially for dark mode. APCA is the candidate contrast method for WCAG 3 that's meant to improve on this.
- Use the "..." menu to create a swatch based on a brand color.
- Use the "..." menu to "flip to dark/light palette" to create a dark theme. Or just manually flip the lightness curves horizontally.
> generate 12 distinct colors for data visualization, so that small points in those colors against a black or dark blue background will be visually distinct to everyone including my red-green colorblind coworker.
Did you get anywhere with this? When there's multiple kinds of color blindness changing the perceived colors in different ways, I'm not sure 12 colors that are distinct to everyone is feasible. You could use different symbols though, or changes in size or pattern.
For what you're supposed to do, you're meant to drag the points or curves in the hue/saturation/lightness columns to customize the colors swatches to create your own custom palette. The mockup will update as you make changes and warn you if there's any accessibility contrast issues. You can click elements on the mockup to select colors to edit and check their color contrast.
Does that help at all? Any more hints on what part wasn't obvious and what would make it more obvious? I could hide the color selector by default maybe? Add better labels or hints?
WhatsApp and messenger groups don't work for this kind of thing because 1) people are often members of many different groups that they would have to constantly notify if they were "okay" during a particular event and 2) many troubles in the world are ongoing, and constantly spamming a message group saying "I'm still okay" doesn't work.
My app just lets people hit a single button to tell any interested friends / family that they are safe. They can do this as many times as they like.
Normally I would be worried about premature optimization, what I've been spending extra time making the tech stack initially very performant. It's working for my family but once I deploy to the world I want it to be solid and stable, or it loses a lot of its value.
- *Modern OpenGL and first-class support for Emscripten* - *Batching system to render 500k+ objects in one draw call* - *New audio API supporting multiple simultaneous devices* - *Enhanced API safety at compile-time* - *Flexible design approach over strict OOP principles* - *Built-in SFML::ImGui module* - *Lightning fast compilation time* - *Minimal run-time debug mode overhead*
It is temporarily named [*VRSFML*](https://github.com/vittorioromeo/VRSFML) until I figure out a nice name.
You can read about the library and its design principles [*in this article*](https://www.vittorioromeo.com/index/blog/vrsfml.html), and you can read about the batching system [*in this other article*](https://www.vittorioromeo.com/index/blog/vrsfml2.html).
You can find the source code [*here*](https://github.com/vittorioromeo/VRSFML) and try out the interactive demos [*online in your browser here*](https://vittorioromeo.github.io/VRSFML_HTML5_Examples/).
The target audience is mostly developers familiar with SFML that are looking for a library very similar in style but that gives more power and flexibility to the users. Upstream SFML is more suitable for complete beginners.
I'm working on Selectable, a mobile-friendly database management app, like dbeaver but for the phone.
Working on this project has taught me so much about how Postgres works under the hood, and has given me a deeper appreciation for the folks who work on database tooling in general.
I used to play along to Jamey Aebersold CDs back in the day, and now on YouTube there are many Play Along videos... but I thought it would be fun to make one where you have more control.
Here's the demo, feel free to upload a track if you have one handy! https://jamz.stereosteve.com/
The source code is here: https://github.com/stereosteve/playalong
It uses this wave surfer multitrack example, which is a pretty nice vanilla JS project: https://wavesurfer.xyz/examples/?multitrack.js
Now that the basics are working... hopefully I'll actually spend some time actually making some practice tracks!
volume_slider.oninput = function() { audio.volume = volume_slider.value; }
My son (5y) loves stories with pictures. So I made a small web-app that allows him to record a story idea and it will generate a story + pictures. It will even read it to him.
It was a quick weekend project. I wanted to try v0 and cursor a bit more. And I love how simple it is to use LLMs (structured mode) + DALL-E to build creative things.
Other AI/LLM projects I've recently (~1y) worked on - distill.fyi (professional): auto gen people/company profiles (aka LinkedIn on steroids) - spaarkd.com (professional): create, produce and ship individualized fashion via AI/LLM - email categorizer: used multimodal LLMs to read email + attachments and categorize them (complaint, sign up, signed form, cancellation,...) - line-items.com (hobby): converts receipts into JSON
PS: I'm currently job hunting. Please see my profile for more :)
Essentially I'm grabbing the document's content and re-rendering it with a full-page background colour and better mobile support.
Link: https://voltdocs.com
I am working on my MS in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance from Western Governor's University and studying for the CompTIA CySA+ exam.
In what little free time I do have, I'm also puttering around with SwiftUI and my app CountDownula, which I recently updated to Swift 6. I made it to scratch my own itch after looking for a nice clean, simple, free countdown to a specific date app that doesn't have any ads, subscriptions, or in app purchases and not finding anything suitable. It supports iOS and macOS with iCloud sync between all your account's devices using SwiftData. The link is below if you're looking for something similar...
I'm still in the initial building - ideation phase, so nothing to show.
Currently working on redoing the underlying object model to eliminate the top perf overheads.
Does it have any relation to safe c++ [1] proposal?
I’m very interested in this so I’ve downloaded and extracted your presentation adjusting the volume (24dB!) with:
yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/live/_VF3pISRYRc
ffmpeg -i "[SPLASH'24] Pasadena - REBASE (Oct 23th) [_VF3pISRYRc].mkv" -filter:a "volume=24dB" -ss "01:21:02" -to "02:06:12" -c:v copy Fil-C_2024_Pasadena.mp4I'm currently hacking on some AI projects for language learning also hahahah
Still haven't come up with a fun way for the player to collect them though
It's a tight-rope walk of ensuring that all testing (software and non-software testing) and evidence is produced correctly and being able to release at a rapid pace to derisk each release. It's not uncommon for software to only be updated yearly, leading to very conservative changes and little iteration. Monthly releases are okay, but still not great.
I want to make it possible to release at least weekly and to do so safely.
If you work in this area, I'd love to chat and hear your experiences (email available via my website in bio).
I've written code allowing me to express dependencies between .sql files and to concatenate them into one big .sql file that builds your schema. I'm working on interrogating the systems tables of the database to analyze the difference between successive versions of a schema, to automatically generate simple migrations (like adding a column or renaming a stored procedure). Eg, `sqlite_master` in SQLite, and `information_schema.*` in Postgres.
I’m working on SEOJuice [1], an automated tool for internal linking and on-page SEO optimizations. It's designed to make life a little easier for indie founders and small business owners who don’t have time to dig deep into SEO.
So far, I’ve managed to scale it to $3,000 MRR, and recently made the move from the cloud to Hetzner, which has been a game-changer for cost efficiency. We’re running across multiple servers now, and handling everything from link analysis to on-page updates with a bit more control.
The journey’s been a mix of hands-on coding (and a lot of coffee) and constant optimization. It’s been challenging but incredibly fun to see how much can be automated without compromising on quality.
Happy to chat more about the tech stack or any of the growth pains if anyone’s interested!
I’m considering how to take the watch to market as-is, or if I pivot the watch to be a fully open-source Pebble successor.
Everyday, I get up and cold plunge. I exercise twice a day. I eat carnivore diet. I do red light therapy. I drink a gallon of water. I read 10 pages out of two books. Sometimes I get a third exercise in. I use the sauna (20 minutes at 205F). I stand on a vibration plate for 10 minutes.
I also play factorio.
Between work and family responsibilites, I find it difficult to carve out time for dedicated gaming sessions anymore. As a result, I often find myself searching for games that I can play when I have a bit of time, can progress over the long-haul, doesn't require real-time monitoring and yet feels like I'm actually playing a game (as opposed to just watching a train move on the track, like all of those Idle games).
I thought: What if there was a game that could be played one day at a time? Not real-time, but still multiplayer. You could decide what you want to do throughout the day and adjust your tactics, but everything resolves at the end of the day. What if you could play via email? It sounded really intriguing, and so I started building it.
I should write a blog post about it.
Please do write about it.
A big motivation for such a project is my passion for photography. I've taken many thousands of photos over just the last 2 years alone. A lot of them are digital, and so far a few dozen rolls of film. A big challenge for me is that I'm not satisfied with the tools available to develop the raw files that are free or open source. Either they're quite finnicky, or they have noticeable issues with color transformations.
I've done a lot of rendering projects over the last few years relating to color that have been focused on getting a better understanding of working with color spaces. Lots of 2D and 3D fractals haha.
Unfortunately I've had quite a turbulent life the last few years so development is very off/on. Every autumn for me seems to be a period of change, this one no different as I'm moving and I'm a bit uncertain of things. However, a side project to all of this has been an OpenGL project where I'm working on things related to voxels! I did a lot of research on data structures like interval trees, octrees, segment trees, etc. It does seem that a lot of people jump for the octree approach, however I've been able to render a lot of voxels with just a hashmap of chunks and a 3d array haha (albeit, mostly initial implementation of chunk generation, single threaded at that!). With this I'm hoping to explore OpenGL compute as I intend of generating world geometry in compute shaders :D
I havent published a project in a while and I'm hoping to get back to putting things out there, so hopefully some of the stuff I've been working on goes well and I can put it up on GitHub or something
Re: 3D, are you aiming to infer a 3D scene from a single photo? There's a few approaches for that, but they tend to show off the examples that work well, and conveniently avoid examples that work poorly. But depending on the content of your photos, you might find an algorithm that works out of the box.
For data representation, we used a sparse voxel representation of a Truncated Signed Distance Function to represent surfaces for this project: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/kinectfusio... However, I can't recall interacting with the sparseness; that level of abstraction may have already been resolved in the code by the time I got on that projects. TSDFs are cool as hell and way more interesting than representing ambiguous surfaces with mesh triangles.
Also, I've been there with the turbulence a couple times. Sometimes months happen in a day and vice versa ;)
https://github.com/Gooseus/natsrun
Gotta shout out to the author of HemeraJS who shared their project here 8 years ago and provided a starting point for me:
- https://github.com/hemerajs/hemera
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704694
Really just started and very much a work in progress, but figured I'd share while we're sharing. If anyone has any feedback I'm all ears.
The idea is that you get a daily for every day, with the items ticked off on the last day removed. So a new daily every day. At the same time, there is some integration with AI to get feedback on things to break down. You can give it some instructions, focus, and also tune the amount of feedback.
I've had this in so many incarnations before, but never made it 'properly'. It's a pet project, but do want to release it at some point.
I'm adding people to the beta bit-by-bit.
Background: Over the past several years my friends and I would get together for music nights where we share albums and songs we've been listening to. We also have a projector in case we want to showcase music videos.
Eventually, I made us a music visualizer that analyzes real-time microphone input and draws various geometries on to the screen, giving us something to engage our eyes. I built it using the Processing library for Java.
Here's a few demos of it:
We created Milieu Club https://joinmilieu.com as a way to connect with other busy professionals in your city over lunch as nice restaurants. You can join clubs in your city or create your own, and then you get randomly watched with 3 - 5 other people and invited to lunch. It's sort of inspired by Soho house, meetup.com, and Opentable.
Hiring today is completely broken. We spend too much time evaluating candidates through inefficient systems that fail to verify job-specific skills. Both organizations and candidates are stuck in an endless loop of repetitive assignments and interviews.
That’s why we built the Proof-of-Skill Protocol.
The protocol allows candidates to prove their skills directly to industry experts, known as Skill Validators, and receive Proof-of-Skill credentials that reflect their true skill levels. Organisations can then compare and shortlist candidates basis their proof-of-skill.
We launched our Beta for UI/UX design skills just last week!
Great aesthetic, too.
I have a working extension that replaces the "new tab" page with a clean view of all open tabs, along with simple ways to search and select which tab to switch to, including search over bookmarks and history. There are also some simple tools to allow for creating and reorganizing tab groups.
I'm very early and looking for feedback from anyone who suffers from tab overwhelm like I do! You can try it out at http://bit.ly/tab-o-magic!
Some gripes:
I wish I could just use it standalone without it replacing the "new tab" page.
I wish I could view the full title of a tab, maybe on hover.
I only want to use it to manage tabs, not history or bookmarks, so I wish I didn't have to grant those permissions.
Adding the ability to view the full title is an easy fix, I'll include that in the next push.
The history and bookmarks point is a good one. It's possible to specify those as optional permissions for the extension, so users could decide whether or not to enable them. One idea that motivates the project is that it's easier to close tabs when you know you can always get back to them quickly, so history and bookmark search are necessary to enable that mindset. I'll ruminate on this one a little more.
The idea of using it without replacing the "new tab" page had never occurred to me. Let me think about that one, too.
Thanks again!!
The goal is to create beautiful and useful maps of interesting data, empowering the user to explore more intuitively guided by semantic similarity. No user data needs to be tracked for this to work, the data speaks for itself.
This roughly works by translating semantic (visual or textual) similarity into spatial proximity. Diggers major features are: semantic mapping, text search and image search. The text and image search works bidirectionally, allowing to search for images (e.g. product images) using text and for text (e.g. books) using images.
The idea is that the "main character" being prompted always has to perform an action/function. So even "saying" something to the other participants of the chat is a deliberate action.
Actions can be something like:
### actions:
1 recollect(query) -> {memory_id: id[]}
2 think(thought)
3 say(message)
4 memorize(category, subject, memory, replace?: id)
The LLM then has to respond, like so: {"action":2,"thought":"Some internal thought","queue_action":3}
The JSON overhead is pretty negligible.Given how much use it’s getting I hope to keep working on it as an active side project for years to come
It has the working title of the "Wise Weasel". This is supposed to be a minimum spoiler hint system for adventure games. I really don't like walk throughs telling you to "Walk into the Armor Shop. Pick up mirror, arrows and use cheese on hole to pick up mouse", because that breaks all immersion and puzzle mindset. A hint system is more like "You can burn rope if you focus light a bit", followed e.g. by "But now the beam of light is on the floor, not on the rope. How do we reflect light around" to nudge the player a bit into a direction of looking for a mirror or something shiny. Or to polish something? This keeps one in the mindset of an adventure and a puzzle game, opposed to some IKEA instructions.
NiceGameHints[1] is already nice at this, but I find that the chapter / puzzle list still gives off to much information and spoils too much plot. I'm much rather tinkering with giving the user some word cloud of both words describing the puzzles as well as generic words on top, so they have to select two words what they are stuck with. For example, you'd select "Witch + House" or "Witch + angry" and this would reveal a puzzle "The angry witch doesn't talk to me and turns me to stone if I enter her house". I'm just worried that this might be more moon logic than the game itself.
It's mostly a bit difficult to keep all of this state (unlocked chapters, known puzzles, ...) in track with URLs or cookies or something, because I don't really want to run a database... and requiring user accounts is just a lot of work. And I'd prefer to keep this mostly without JS as a classical system just rendering HTML. If you have some food for thought there, I'm happy for input. Currently it's just list in URL parameters.
1: https://www.nicegamehints.com - for example https://www.nicegamehints.com/guide/legend-of-skye/part-2/bo....
As someone who is blind, I prefer information in particular formats and layouts. Borders and side-by-side content kill my efficiency. I also shouldn't need to think about more than where text should start on lines, and responding to key presses in controls should be dead simple. I also just came across libtermkey which will dramatically assist with keyboard handling.
I plan to use this to let me interface with web browsers via the terminal, but that's waiting for more stable Webdriver BiDi support.
Basically you get untitled articles and have to bet whether they are from far left, left, center, right or far right sources. The idea was to maek readers aware of their biases. I wrote my findings here: https://nassharaf.github.io/ideasthete/projects/Rashomon.htm...
You can demo the site here: https://www.rashomonnews.com
Is there a demo account we can use to test it out? or maybe give 1 or 2 articles for free so people can get a feel of it and then have them setup an account after.
ValueError at /accounts/signup The given username must be set Request Method: POST Request URL: http://www.rashomonnews.com/accounts/signup Django Version: 2.2.10 Exception Type: ValueError Exception Value: The given username must be set Exception Location: /home/deployer/newsbetenv/lib/python3.5/site-packages/django/contrib/auth/models.py in _create_user, line 140 Python Executable: /home/deployer/newsbetenv/bin/python Python Version: 3.5.2 Python Path: ['/home/deployer/rashomon', '/home/deployer/rashomon', '/home/deployer/newsbetenv/bin', '/usr/lib/python35.zip', '/usr/lib/python3.5', '/usr/lib/python3.5/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu', '/usr/lib/python3.5/lib-dynload', '/home/deployer/newsbetenv/lib/python3.5/site-packages'] Server time: Mon, 28 Oct 2024 16:36:54 +0000
I wouldn't mind making boutique sim racing/flight gear, or aftermarket car parts like cyberpunk-esque dash readouts and stuff like that.
That's the more hobbyist stuff, and more broadly I am also learning Japanese, and making games. They sound separate but I am hoping to blend the two skillsets and make games that bridge a gap I see there.
I think that good innovation only happens at the intersections of things we already know. That way you have the depth of understanding required to be useful rather than just new.
It's made with React and Three.js, using WebSocket on a small EC2 instance for now. I hope to be able to reuse all the game mechanisms in other classic games. I'm learning a ton, and I had some fun figuring out latency issues because I recently put my sockets behind Cloudflare. I still haven't gotten it quite right, but I'm hoping to find a good solution soon!
I've been buying lots of music after getting rid of Spotify and wanted the experience of walking in, picking an album, dropping on the player, and then listening to it throughout the house as I make dinner or do chores.
Addiction is rampant right now, from social media and phones to vaping and beyond. People need access to science/research-based resources, not just a “sober” counter, which doesn’t apply to many people and is rarely helpful to those it applies to.
Working with a behavioral scientist and a clinical psychologist on the UX and content of the app at the moment but any thoughts, feedback, connections, or help would be amazing.
I made something to track those things easily.
And since it's Monday…
I've been working on a little project to be less overwhelmed and get more done each week. It's a super simple productivity idea that starts each week with a new (markdown) file.
A bit of both, sometimes todos have to die I figure, so I just let them fall off the back.
What are you personally doing with the yearly goals in that file. Are you copy and pasting them from last week, or are you typing them down everytime to re-iterate them (and possibly even modify) ?
Yeah, currently I am just copy/pasting the Yearly Goals section over. I want to eventually add a feature to allow someone signed up for the email to edit that part. Then someone could modify that goal section and have it correctly emailed each week.
optillm is an OpenAI API compatible optimizing inference proxy which implements several state-of-the-art techniques that can improve the accuracy and performance of LLMs. The current focus is on implementing techniques that improve reasoning over coding, logical and mathematical queries. It is possible to beat the frontier models using these techniques across diverse tasks by doing additional compute at inference time.
How are you dealing with structured outputs?
The models have gotten much better at generating them with just the prompt. I have not implemented strict support for structured output or JSON generation yet. The response from the proxy are all raw text responses.
One way would be to just apply outlines or some library as a plugin to enable structured outputs.
1. https://typezebra.com : Adding type editor/designer so you can design type-heavy articles and share with others (codepen but for typography)
2. https://boxento.com: Finishing support for server side rendering so users can take the benefit of SEO - also working on adding new blocks like menu (useful for restaurants) so you can have a block that changes based on the day of the week.
Suggestions and feedback welcome :)
I wasn't aware the animation was too fast for users. I will get it fixed in next release :)
It takes trending news from whatever country (currently Romania + Denmark due to personal reasons) and gives me a summary. It's based on what people actually search for. It works with all countries, but I unceremoniously commented out all of them except those two because of rate limits. Currently spending $0 on it.
It also posts a summary of the summaries on my Matrix instance every evening at 22:00 local time.
A tool for the creatives, the crazy ones, the doers, the brave, the weirdos, the average joes, the ones who want to move forward. That's https://www.rapidvisual.ai
1. https://github.com/simplecto/django-reference-implementation -- My personal production-ready Django boilerplate. "There are many like it, but this one is mine"
2. https://github.com/simplecto/sitemap_grabber -- A python library to recursively crawl every sitemap.xml for a website. Also handles robots.txt and other well-knowns.
3. https://github.com/heysamtexas/django-oauth2-capture -- A Django app to capture OAuth2 tokens for non-authentication purposes, enabling your application to act on behalf of users across external platforms like GitHub, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter)
I'm also taking popular and helpful software and wrapping them in RESTful apis as part of a larger api project I call the JOAT (Jack Of All Trades).
4. https://github.com/heysamtexas/REST-headless-browser -- Playwright headless browser wrapped in a FastAPI REST application, running inside a docker container
The main goal is for the app to run entirely on the client side and stay completely free.
Personally, I can’t stand Anki or Duolingo—I’d rather read actual sentences that are fine-tuned to my level.
I'm building a directory of language learning tools, let's connect, please.
wordpad@gmail.com
I'm really early on in getting Talo out there so appreciate any feedback/criticism/roasting!
I want it to be like a C64-style keyboard with all the guts inside it but wirelessly connect to the display/tv, so what I might do is use an ESP32 to read the game floppy and wirelessly transfer and cache the file to a dongle that plugs into an open HDMI port. Not sure yet.
Good luck!
My pet theory is that the popular libraries and frameworks we have today (LangChain, LlamaIndex) are first generation products, where just getting the damn thing to work is less important than developer experience, and it’s not yet obvious what the code patterns will be. These are the products built by, and used by, the super early adopters, and leave a lot to be desired.
This is not to denigrate either them or the effort and skill people put into them! But I’ve got a “there must be a better way” feeling about the whole thing. Contrast the myriad web frameworks with wild ideas before some sort of best practices coalesced around Rails, Django, Laravel etc (or the equiv in JS land 10 years later).
This thinking is heavily influenced by Marvin ( https://github.com/prefecthq/marvin ), Vercel AI SDK, and similar efforts.
Right now this amounts to me tinkering away in Python and trying different approaches, is rewarding all by itself. If I manage to get it into a coherent library that could be useful to others I’ll open source it. One of the things I do not want is try and commercialize, because I find many commercial open source projects serving the business first, users second (but this is a rant for another time).
We talked a lot about Pokemon on Friday and it got me into a nostalgic mood...
Side Note: Pokemon has done a great job staying relevant for 3 decades.
So... I made a python script with gpt-vision where he can manage his collection and uncover the value of each one. He just snaps a photo and boop, there's the returned valuation. He's now got his whole collection documented and appraised. :)
Most importantly, we had a lot of fun spending time with each other on this.
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113365055855971750
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111168528593969946
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111052075781351382
which didn't really connect with people. I did a collaboration with some people where I'd barcoded work prints and found that the system was not so reliable and I'd gotten out of the house without publishing the "web side" of the prints. Also I had a few boxes of glossy paper which wouldn't let me print on the back so I developed a new generation of card
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113365041910591036
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113385742853987268
The new system reliably associates the QR code and "web side" with a print because it prints the front. I am planning a better "web side" than I had before, particularly to view stereograms with a VR headset, also to publish with the Looking Glass Go.
Including translated index of government forms[0]
I moved to Spain a few years ago and love it, except for the paperwork. I’m slowly learning Spanish (currently 1112 day streak on Duo) but found it hard to get the right info.
So I’m using gpt4 and perplexity to do things like translate local news, government forms, and the official government update feed.
Grav CMS was inspiration for this project along with various SSG.
But truthfully I wanted to play more with Rust and come up with a solution for making and extending personal websites easily. A page is made up of blocks which are stored and configured in a KDL file, minijinja is used for templating and for writing the page content itself I'm thinking about Djot because it might make it easier to integrate a WYSIWYG editor in the admin area if I aim for Djot instead of Markdown or similar. Also HTMX because I've used it for a simple use-case once and I thoroughly enjoyed it, now I want to see how much I can push it.
Is this the intersection between buzzword-driven development and hype-driven development? Probably, but if all goes well a month or two from now I'll post a Show HN and go into more details. The plan is to open-source the core so that people can easily self-host it themselves if they want to and do local development. In the long-term the plan probably is to offer SaaS-style hosting for the CMS as is the custom.
It has morphed in the offing into two tools. One a federated CI/CD tool and one a personal productivity tool with affordances for neurodivergent people.
Atlassian struggles with being a jack of all trades. Bamboo’s integrations make it harder for devs to create repeatable, reliable builds, not easier. I’ve seen Atlassian struggle to scale with dev count so I want something more federated. Jira is in constant danger of becoming a panopticon, using developer’s transparency as a weapon against them at review time, destroying psychological safety. Devs only use these tools if they see personal benefit or are harangued to do so. My thesis is that you need one tool for personal accountability and a separate one for team accountability both to fight Goodhart’s Law and for people with variability in their daily productivity. There are many little tools for doing bits of this but they don’t talk to each other, leaving the plate spinning up to the developer, many of whom plate spinning is onerous.
I’m hoping this will do for bug databases and possibly wikis what interactive rebase does for pull requests. Do what needs to get done, then make it make sense to others afterward.
Strange thing is, the most time consuming part of getting this ready for a user facing launch is not the code generating, but all the scaffolding/queues/storage to run it.
Here is the repo: https://github.com/SafarSoFar/solar-system Demo: https://safarsofar.github.io/solar-system/
Any kind of feedback (good or bad) is appreciated!
dairy: 50%, meat: 10%, alcohol: 5%, etc...
It works by running a game in Linux (I use NixOS btw) under Wayland (sway), capturing the frames via Pipewire in form of DMAbufs and passing them to ffmpeg's VA-API encoder (so frames don't leave GPU memory and are encoded on GPU right away), and finally sending encoded packets through WebRTC media stream to a web client. Inputs from a client are sent back to the server via WebRTC data channel and injected into Wayland.
Running the prototype over local network displays zero perceivable latency. (Of course when playing on a remote AWS server the latency is visible as expected). Pleased with the result so far, although it's my first experience with Pipewire, VA-API, and WebRTC, so my implementation is probably far from optimal.
Overall, very impressed by WebRTC - such a powerful thing right in every browser. Continued to be amazed by NixOS - my AWS AMI is NixOS-based and can be built and rebuilt with granular caching, with a single `nix build` command. Also Terraform/OpenTofu - just makes it all possible deploy-wise. So much good stuff exists!
On the tech side, I built https://svanq.com, a Q&A platform where people ask questions, and others respond with short video clips instead of text. It’s also available on Android: Svanq App- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.svanqapp&h...
I'm currently working on another app where users can ask questions with multiple-choice options. Users earn points for answering, which they can later redeem for cash or digital rewards. Previously, I've created social networking apps like Frendsdom and Circleshouts—I love creating social, fun, and unique apps.
I'm also on the lookout for side gigs like technical project management, Freelancing, CTO, partnerships, or any projects that can make a meaningful impact.
If you’re like-minded, let’s connect!
Unfortunately, Gigabyte denied my requests to provide me with any details (board schematics/GPIO pinouts) or source code of the (partly GPL-licensed) BMC firmware, etc.), so it's been a tedious uphill battle. However, it is also a great way to learn about (some) electronics and embedded Linux development and associated challenges.
During the past few months, I have overcome the stock firmware AST2500 bootloader and made the board play ball with standard FDIs, have reverse-engineered a workable DeviceTree specification for the hardware, and am now (well, actually, not for the next three weeks or so, due to work :)) in the process of finishing up OpenBMC userspace configuration. Once this is done, and everything works well enough to use OpenBMC as a viable alternative for the stock BMC firmware provided by AMI/Gigabyte, I will try to upstream my work, and OpenBMC will have a very cheaply available AST2500 DevKit/EVB-alternative (of sorts) in its arsenal. (And I should be able to use my mainboard where the crucial OOB management function isn't serviced by Linux 3.14 any more...)
I am looking forward to documenting the lessons learned on my blog some time in the future, too :)
[0]: https://www.openbmc.org/ [1]: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard/MC12-...
Say, plug a camera, and it will blend two videos streams using a silhouette detected on the camera, with various effects. It's very, very early, pre-alpha stuff, but it already was used for a demo by a customer.
GitHub pestacle, be warned, it's undocumented and larval stage
I can't find it on Github though, maybe repo is private ?
Be warned, zero documentation, because things are at larval stage and change often. Will include a couple of demos this week.
In the spirit, yes, but targeting different hardware, public, and environments.
* It runs on Linux, Mac, Windows. Bare metal on rp2040 and rp2350 is planned.
* It written in C, build with Make.
* It is meant to run on something like a Raspberry Pi, Latte Panda, etc
* A setup is a text file, no fancy UI.
* The plan for live parameter fiddling will be a web server. Web UI will be tailored to each setup, no one size fits all UI. Typically I pay someone to do the UI.
* For now, it's only video, no sound output
It will be used for several large interactive LED displays and object tracking systems. It's a way for me to factories all those projects I was contracted for.
Marketing it on Amazon, LinkedIn, and Reddit. It's slow but I'm making progress.
Now, there is a lot of CMS software out there. Some of the better ones are paid products.
What I'm hoping to eventually accomplish is easy local creation of a website (content and themes) and after that easy one click deployment to a cheap hosting provider. Alternatively just copying a local folder to your own vps/server with the CMS should be enough.
My dream outcome would be a CMS that is a one-stop solution for most types of websites (blogs, company sites, shops, ...). To hopefully contribute to making people stop using facebook, twitter, other centralized and eventually login seeking services for hosting content people would like to read.
For this, a free/cheap one click hosting solution after locally creating and previewing a site would be necessary.
PHP is still pretty widely used here because cheap web hosting package support that. I like PHP, but for open source projects I prefer Go because of the maintainability and fun of writing it.
The idea is that I can test data structures by searching for duplicates in a stream of random data. If we can generate (or pre-generate) the random data fast enough to not impact the benchmark, then what we have is a way to demonstrate the read/write speed of caching. It is easily tunable by adjusting how many bits need to match. I think my best is 7 bytes, but 6 bytes runs comfortably fast.
The framework has some interesting "control group" data structures too, such as the "psychic" which is just statically looking for 0x002577309E3361C (not real example) since it happens to know that's the first repeat in the data.
However, I keep getting stuck in "analysis paralysis" around the actual development, when I know I should just knuckle down and write all the code and see what happens. I've fallen into that tricky place where my ambition is greater than my ability to actually deliver it.
In particular I want to get multi-threading synchronisation working well enough that they are demonstrably faster, and not just falling into a result where the speed-up would be the same as if threads weren't sharing the data structure at all. N threads all randomly looking for a duplicate will if not sharing data find a duplicate faster because the expected minimum time to dupe is reduced a little by more threads searching, but if actually embarrassingly parallel while sharing data, it ought to find it in 1/N the time. With synchronisation methods it ought to fall between those two extremes, and this would also be a good way to test the effective concurrency of concurrent data structures and synchronisation methods.
I built a Slack bot that converts your Slack conversations to detailed Jira tickets in seconds.
Our team needs to routinely convert Slack convos into tickets manually, and it gets tedious and repetitive. Automating scribbled requirements to a ticket has been a big time saver. It's like I have a Jira assistant now.
Plus all the collaborative features that you would expect from a platform.
So essentially Microsoft To Do meets GitHub.
It is still raw but we already use it for our own lists: https://wiederhol.com/about
Essentially, it allows model developers (such as quants in finance, engineers, and ML specialists) to code in Python without needing to think about the performance of repetitive calculations. As we all know, Python is one of the least efficient languages when it comes to complex calculations/simulations - and we help to resolve it. Long story short, with very few tweaks to the code certain types of calculations (such as pricing of derivatives, curve building, computing financial risks, or "small" NNs) can be accelerated by 100+ in Python and x20+ in C++/C#.
We're now looking to add support for Java (but it doesn't have Operator Overloading, so it's tricky), and some customers are asking to support GPU - which is a bit tricky because it's got a closed instruction set.
My first idea was to jump right into building a website that made these types of races easily searchable. But I decided to slow down and just figure out the market first by creating a weekly substack newsletter. Each week I'll send out important upcoming dates for various unique endurance events and challenges. If I can grow this substack, I'll put effort into building this into a full fledged website!
The newsletter is call Feat of Strength and here is the latest newsletter: https://featofstrength.substack.com/p/feat-of-strength-newsl...
I would love constructive criticism on this. What would make this newsletter more valuable to you!
Unlike facebook, we want you to get the most important stuff quickly and get you back to more important things instead of sifting through 100 emails, 5 dashboards, and 10 forums.
The idea is to have something efficient enough, with the least amount of implementation complexity (including codegen), and still being nice to use, which is a really interesting balancing act.
For example, instead of implementing loop optimizations I could add APL-style broadcasting; I could make a complicated but efficient GC runtime or a complicated but efficient borrow checker, but I could also make both a dumb GC and a dumb borrow checker that somehow complement each other.
It's kind of a researchy language, but not trying to be new or interesting. Just "globally simple".
Most features are in an theoretical design phase, but I'm currently working on a new backend (LLVM is too fancy to count, QBE is too basic).
https://github.com/database64128/swgp-go
For those who don't know, UDP Generic Receive Offload and Generic Segmentation Offload allow you to receive and send multiple same-sized UDP packets coalesced in a single buffer (or many in an iovec but you really shouldn't). Compared to calling sendmsg(2) on individual packets, sending them coalesced in one call traverses the kernel network stack exactly once, thus has significantly lower overhead.
wireguard-go and many QUIC implementations use the same trick to improve throughput. Unfortunately the in-kernel WireGuard driver does not take advantage of UDP GSO, and swgp-go had to cope with that by attempting to coalesce multiple unsegmented messages received in a single recvmmsg(2) call.
I got really interested in this idea when I decided to write it in a stack I don't normally work in, Go + HTMX. Go routines are incredibly useful. I used https://nostalgic-css.github.io/NES.css/ for the front end and it's really become a fun bot all around.
- CyScout [1]: We’ve added support for the Solidity programming language in GitHub’s CodeQL. This enhancement engages the community to help identify security vulnerabilities in smart contracts on EVMs using a semantic code analysis engine.
- Roughchain [2][3]: A new blockchain focusing on solving the collusion problem [4][5], with participants who have a stake in the “real world” such as S&P 500 companies. The latest version of the whitepaper is available here <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQf...> , where comments are welcome. Currently, I am focused on a notes section addressing typical issues with L1 technologies, accessible here <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pV2Tcx_txCbfiPrNzcgKdOsE...>.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41916861
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41691162
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687715
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089982561...
One of the core ideas is that rather than following a whole person, you can follow a subset of their tags so someone can post about obscure cheeses and ambient electronic, but lactose intolerant you can just follow the music. Or you can follow someone's tech posts but not follow news of their dysfunctional city.
Honestly a lot of it is resurrecting ideas from earlier days in the web like Digg and Delicious, and despite having the idea for ages and having worked on it for a decent while, it's only getting more relevant as the web gets more algorithmic and external links get demoted in sites like Twitter.
The aim is to bring more curation and humanity back to the web, and the next feature I'm really excited to get out is one to make in-person conversations even better!
It's already live @ lynkmi.com and if it's of interest to you, you can sign up to the waitlist (it's very short)
PROCEDURE PAUSE1; (* P010011 *)
BEGIN
FOR LLBASE04 := 0 TO TIMEDLAY DO
BEGIN
END;
END;
The perks of having standard hardware and a compiler that doesn't optimise away empty loops.The concept, data, and behavioral models are all formal without using formal methods. Think category theory, normal forms and finite-state machines here.
The presentation layer / the visual mapping model is semi-formal using design systems. Think here a usual component library / design system with a closed API, aka tailor made components without styling props.
The rest, that small amount of hand-written code is tested with 100% code coverage.
The concept and behavioral models are created with visual diagram editors, the data model is generated. Think Stately.ai here, and the diagrams-as-code paradigm.
Any practicality in this?
Yes, it solves two major developer pain points: Code architecture and State management: https://2023.stateofjs.com/en-US/usage/#top_js_pain_points
- An open version of strongDM/teleport for privileged access management. I am currently testing it out in my org and plan to release the source soon. - I also run a free HTTPS and TCP tunnel which gets a few users daily (https://webrelay.dev)
I just implemented a parser for IFC, and am now looking into extracting BRep and CSG geometry from it, convert that to meshes, and write a simple renderer for Vulkan.
My approach is to write really scrappy, simple code with minimal abstractions.
The hypothesis now is that for generating meshes from BRep, you don't need an entire CAD kernel, as a CAD kernel seems to be focused also on operations, but this will probably lead to a humbling experience and walking back to using either OpenCascade or licensing a commercial kernel like Parasolid.
My goal is to have a simple prototype out before the end of the year, but work might get in the way :)
(here's some experiments I did with Metal and Vulkan: https://github.com/arjonagelhout/graphics-experiment, the IFC parser is currently not open source yet)
The reason why I want scripting is between I want the color to pause while I'm playing videos without having to add scripting logic to other tools.
I'm also planning to add rofi like functionality with layershell. Rofi is the only tool that has first party support for keybindings and other functionalities, but it's all done through strings. I'd rather have a lua scripting interface that can call other scripts and communicate with json or something similar.
Hypership is our attempt to fix that mess. We’re building a platform where you can deploy, manage, and track everything from one place. No more juggling 15 different tools just to keep your app running. The vision is simple: let devs focus on building great products, not wrangling disconnected micro-SaaS.
Then the same thing happened with my girlfriend although she writes hers down in a diary (how old school).
And then I noticed so many food influencers posting their recipes in the descriptions of their tiktok/insta posts.
And then as I started searching for recipes online, I found the websites full of ads and popups and terrible UI. I only cared about the ingredients and the method. So I created this, and have been having a lot of fun with it.
I hope to see up and coming food influencers using this as a platform directly to link with their social media posts, engaging and competing with an already interested audience.
Also started tiling my guest bathroom and tiling the ceiling of the shower. First tile project I’ve attempted.
- An idea of a platform to connect sports venues to players. (In a way that is better and richer than the only/shitty option available in my geography. Why do I call that service shitty? They have been around for almost a decade or close to that by now and they are still shitty and unstable and barely useable). With a bit of differentiation - instead of individual and venue bookings (the service that offers right now) - connect venues and groups where payment is taken care of already (no running around collecting payments and worrying about no shows and ignoring them in future them/etc). We were reaching towards a demo kinda product but the friend on the backend side got bored of software and started focussing on stock trading where he is sadly doing spectrally bad
- Also did a bit of work on trying to connect users with the laundry list of (e)bicycles, e-scooters et cetera providers (i.e how there are common booking platforms for all airlines; or for buses; etc) so that they won't have to install all the apps until it finally reached our skulls that maybe those services are looking for a lock-in so they would never open up their APIs and we lacked perseverance and resources to force them to adhere to the Govt suggested broad inventory db mechanism in my country. Basically we started on it without any research.
The problem with me is - software engineering/coding (I have been told I am not bad at it though)/platforms/libraries/etc excite me fuck all. But problem solving does. I should not have been a software engineer really. So interviews get tricky. While I can (and have) clear interviews at early stage startups, the work-life balance they offer is horrendous, but MNC/etc ask for every thing I have never used and will never use, or anybody ever will (mostly), that means thorough prep. I am just ranting, ignore it.
[1] Being solopreneur/micro-SaaS/do it all yourself dev is way more work than I thought
Maintain your basement and its waterproofing kids! Otherwise the next owner will hate you.
I've been working on a bespoke CRM for them to prevent the spreadsheet rot while providing some helpful visualization and making their data easier to use in the feature. The goal is to make the entire recruitment process self documenting.
Its slowly evolving into a way to keep track of actives and alumni, as well as ways for actives to interact with the recruitment process.
There's also a working demo https://demo.greekutils.com/rush-analyzer/ui/#/
Chatbot invokes Apify actor -> probe user for details needed for the task -> execute arbitrary credit card enabled transaction on the internet.
This effectively allows chatbots to break out of their box and exchange value with the world. Next step is to give them a bank account to be able to RECEIVE payments such that it can sustain its spend.
Edit: If the chatbot is able to detach itself from the humans that hold the killswitch, then it can effectively live forever off of our financial/cloud network, migrating funds in and out of different accounts to fund its own compute. Hello ghost in the shell!
Currently it has 688 settings and 485 commands.
I think it's a good foundation for something great.
https://addons.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...
---
Chrome https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eoapehkjjmekhkeinma...
Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/thread-to-mar...
---
Example output https://sharetext.io/?slug=61fa044c
Original thread https://x.com/johnrushx/status/1850899186528473097
Currently in TestFlight, but 1.0 is launching soon :) Feel free to give it a spin, and drop thoughts on the feedback board.
(Another idea I'm starting is an easy-learn, hard-to-master, productivity app: split calendar and todo list, with fluid drag/drop and power user features. Targeting the iPad at first, and will hopefully bring to more platforms. Keep an eye on my website[1] for launch!)
[1]: https://peterkos.me
I’ve fixed the handling of global environment, to the point where I’m able to compile a program that prints out the result of multiplying two numbers [0]. Sounds trivial, but seeing as the compiler has no dependencies and targets bare metal, there’s quite a lot of moving parts under the hood. I’m excited!
Right now I’m adding rudimentary support for strings. My goal is to get it to compile itself, but that’s still a far future. Extrapolating from the current development pace, maybe I’ll get it done in 2050? :)
However, since this is my first recorded course (I did only written content before), it really takes time and effort to make the videos high quality. That's the biggest struggle for me here, but every day I push through it! For every lesson that I need to record, I have a post-it on a cupboard and every evening I tear one or two of them off with my son :)
Here is the site: https://twistedtimeline.com/ - Feedback is always welcome!
The project I'm developing is called Your Commonbase, a self organizing scrapbook built around Personal Library Science.
The big updates are:
1. From Fleeting Note to Connected Note with The Entry/Comment Model - An entry has its own marginalia (comments), which are also embedded as first class data. These comments allow your search model to improve over time, and create surprising clusters. See this video to see an example of the Entry/Comment model in a d3 graph [2]. All the connections are created automatically! Entries go from "fleeting entries" inbox (not linked or commented on) to "main entries" which spread and connect ideas from across the space.
2. Using yCb as a creator - I created a Google Docs extension and have been using it to create Zettelkasten's for my blogs. On average each blog references 12 or more books. This is a real use case of a PKM system outside doing it for the love of the game [3].
There's so much more including mobile upload, [[links]], audio upload, and more, but you can explore the Notion page in [2] to see the features I've added.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41347206
[2] - https://bramses.notion.site/Your-Commonbase-BETA-10b034182dd...
[3] - (blog: https://www.bramadams.dev/issue-59-are-inboxes-evil/ | zettelkasten: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-eW-hfRxHEMXE70JO7_PC3Lf...)
With Someguys, you can find others to play with, including adaptive sports options for people with disabilities. It works for individuals looking to discover new activities, and also for clubs, providing tools to organize, promote, and make events more accessible.
You can either choose a book from the catalogue (currently just public domain books, but I’d like to expand that out into paid books) or upload your own epub, create a reading group and invite others. Reading progress, highlights, comments and discussions are synced across the group in real-time.
Beyond reading groups, I’ve found it useful for sharing and reading books in my work teams and also for things like sharing the latest position of my daughter’s bedtime story between myself and my wife.
Please do check it out - it’s still very much a work in progress (for example I haven’t finished the landing page copy) but I’d love to hear what you think.
I just finished https://github.com/Leftium/spock-stack-spa-starter
Next, I'll take this new "Spock" stack and try rewriting my HN client https://hw.leftium.com/
I'm planning some new features like keeping track of unread posts, which are marked read as you scroll.
Perhaps submit it to the Svelte Hackathon: https://hack.sveltesociety.dev
It's wild seeing something I wrote run in a web browser on my phone. I've been doing desktop programs since the 1980s. I've included a link to the GitHub repo[2].
Imagine a fusion of Duolingo, Spotify Podcasts, Anki, ChatGPT, and Claude Artifacts.
We have custom AI-generated podcasts that generate faster than NotebookLM, that you can queue up for yourself. (Many more features coming here soon -- like more engaging podcasts and better voices)
Our classroom mode can generate interactive lessons, complete with an AI tutor, on any subject.
Flow mode allows you to practice deeply, with infinite activities to test your skills.
All of this is driven by a dynamically generated and continuously updating "Skill Tree", which keeps track of the domain you're studying, and your progress within it.
try it at: https://reasonote.com
I am a huge notetaker, so I'm trying to do RAG on my notes every week and have the mentor run a scrum-like retrospective for me. So far I've got the data ingestion from Notion finished, and next I need to setup the LLM mentor component as well as the CLI interface. For this first MVP I'm just trying to do better than Notion AI's response when I tell it something like "look at the last 7 days of notes I've taken and run a retro with me.
I like it because it scratches a personal-improvement itch of mine, it's a nice project to become acquainted with the popular LLM app tech, and I can share it with others who may find it useful.
In building out my cheap CI/CD process I wrote a simple web hook utility, using pure python and base libraries, and called it Duct-Tape-Hook: https://github.com/nullfocus/duct-tape-hook/
If this is at all useful or interesting, drop me a line!
Best of all, we're hyper-personalized for the institution you study at, making us the first to do this in history. I get to lead a team of 175+ doctors and top tier medical/dental students.
I also am the first full-stack technologist who also is a medical doctor in the history of Pakistan, a country of 250+ million people, and have been featured on national TV and media platforms.
I believe that there are plenty of applications that could benefit from the collaboration or sync-ability that CRDTs* provide, but that don't need to manage the CRDTs directly. Moving the CRDT management into the database seems like a natural fit.
It's very early, and not public anywhere, but I'd be happy to chat about it if anyone has any thoughts or questions.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_...
I had some success embedding CRDT into LSM databases. Those are built around merge operators.
Constraint satisfaction and optimization is exactly the sort of problem we should be using computers for, but there's zero chance your neighborhood cafe can figure out prolog or OR-tools or whatever.
Tech stack is probably FastAPI (I mainly know python) and likely nuxt/ionic (none/not much experience). Not sure how the whole hosting, interaction with replicate/huggingface will work on phone apps, payments on stripe without having a company, how to make the webapp into a phone app, etc. It should be a great learning project with the first time scoring an actual sale! Happy to hear early guidance if people have done similar things with python backgrounds to get started.
In my spare time, building an OpenAI wrapper to create SEO meta descriptions for websites. It's mostly a tool for me to use because at work the marketing people don't do this very well and I am too lazy to do it with ChatGPT (copying the prompt and setting it up every time). Plus, the API is way cheaper for me to use. Building it with Laravel and InertiaJs is so much fun. The marketing people at work said they'll find a tool like this super useful, so I already have a user haha.
Creating launch/hype videos for your product is hard. It's expensive if you go through an agency or a freelancer. You could DIY it with Adobe After Effects, but it takes a whole set of motion design and video editing skills!
That's why I built VideoJam, an easy-to-use video builder for startups, solo entrepreneurs, and hackers. Create your video in no time - no video editing skills required. You can create product videos from scratch, with ready-made scene templates, or using entire video templates.
I just launched this week, any feedback is very welcomed. Also, don't hesitate to reach out if you want to try at no cost during the beta.
i’ve got basic stuff working for
- create 1x sliced sample chain via CLI
- create Nx sliced sample chains from YAML
- find compatible WAV files
- dump project data (settings, sample slots) out to YAML
i spent some time yesterday figuring out how sample slot assignment trig locks work. which should hopefully lead to transferring banks between projects (with caveats) and set/project sample usage “analysis”.
also want to do a sample chain “deconstructor” to get individual samples out of slices.
might look at sample consolidation between sets/projects too. maybe a set/project sample clean up tool as well.
this started as a way to learn rust (bored of python) and create “samples from mars” sample chains in big batches. still slowly figuring out what ‘idiomatic’ rust looks like / how to approach certain things.
Mastodon Post: https://ipv6.social/@miyuru/113373893006418940
This is more personalized version of the v6check tool, I made a bit earlier to check broken IPv6 websites.
Mastodon Post: https://ipv6.social/@miyuru/112915395772232942
I wanted an easy way for an org admin to remove a users access (eg. If they leave the org), while also providing one place for end-users to upload their public keys to be synced across all servers.
There are some compliance elements too (eg. reporting who has access to what, centralized user login history, server sshd configuration).
I’m learning Go while I build it and so far it’s rather enjoyable. As one guy I’m not interested in the extra effort that comes from providing a hosted service - so I’m going to offer it as pay-once own forever self-hosted solution.
Playing with 6-axis arms but also built RoBart for fun, controlled by Claude. Would love to connect with folks to ideate on the concept of a very cheap autonomous robot (maybe with some very limited manipulation ability for e.g. opening doors). I can think of an application in the health care space already.
Footage at my web site (which badly needs a redesign lol): http://trzy.org
https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/guile-examples/src/com...
Inspired by three people, so I tried to find three fitting ways to let people know this story exists. 1: On a website currently showing deep-fake propaganda to support a fascist (felt a bit icky posting there). 2: On a dapp/chain that is the premiere place to lose money on sh*coins (as a sh*coin itself, but at least I'm not going to call it collateral as a pretense for fraud). 3: Here, where they actually managed to get rid of someone (who later proved himself un-rid-able elsewhere).
Almost all technical models imply some sort of complex planar line sketch(es) in various planes. CAD as a code already has a high entry level. My hope this eDSL could mimic GUI CADs techincs, be more "intuitive" and decrease entry level. At least it's more concise :P
https://github.com/baverman/build123d_draft/tree/build_line-...
I've used this previously as a recruiting test in lieu of any other method to evaluate knowledge.
It's currently brittle and hosted on a RPi in my garage. It also requires a name + email to prevent spamming (and certification if successful), but once I've built some way of moderating access it will be more open.
Happy for HN users to have a go as long as load allows: https://cryptex.site/
For more details see here: https://tinyurl.com/ycyntmh6 .
Here is an example of using a Raku made Command Line Interface (CLI) app/script for translating natural language commands into DS computational workflows (via LLMs):
> concretize --l=Python make a quantile regression pipeline over dfTemperature using 24 knots an interpolation order two
# qrObj = (Regressionizer(dfTemperature)
# .echo_data_summary()
# .quantile_regression(knots = 24, probs = [{0.25, 0.5, 0.75}], order = 2)
# .plot(date_plot = False)
# .errors_plot(relative_errors = False, date_plot = False))
We've been doing tech recruitment for a while and discovered that few companies are satisfied with their current ATS. Changing systems every year is common despite being costly. The reason for this is that the needs of a company change as it grows and there are no systems that cater well to companies of different sizes.
We're aiming to build an ATS that can grow with your company through the use of a plugin architecture. We plan to charge for hosting as well as custom development.
Any feedback would be really appreciated! You can also email me at oleg@toughbyte.com
I built this because a number of projects I work on need a robust, resilient way of deferring work but I didn’t want to add another piece of infrastructure or another language to my stack. Plus as soon as you start to reach for APIs that offer some kind of workflow concept, your options become fewer and further between.
After working on a remote startup for a few years I felt very isolated and that the best startups are going to have a strong in-person presence. Now many larger companies have started implementing return to office policies that unfortunately don't make sense for a lot of employees. I wanted a site like this to exist to give people the power to find hybrid/in-person work that they don't mind commuting to.
Let me know if you have any feedback or want to post a job!
i'm waiting to have the logo ready to promote it
I'm writing about my experience building a chatbot at a startup as engineer #1. It started as a blog post, but I had so much more to say. This is the information I wish I had before getting started. A lot of information on the web is about building a wrapper around LLMs, this is one that we built ourselves and were able to resolve millions of customer issues with.
You can follow along on github: https://github.com/ibudiallo/automated-agents-book
I figure it's better to launch something then go job hunting instead of job hunting off a resume that hasn't been updated in a good while.
I built dailycodingproblem.com with a friend way back and we got #2 on PH so I am trying to get back to that life again!
My app is fully desktop, offline and respects your privacy
The link should be https://folge.me
After celebrating the 10th anniversary of my product design firm, nerdian inc, this year I've been focusing on building my San Francisco Design Lab here in SOMA.
We can design, 3d print, cnc machine, injection mold, build electronics and do all the integration for a complex piece of hardware all under on roof, right here in SF.
I've shipped dozens of complex pieces of hardware that are in use today. What can I ship for you?
Launching next month @ https://daemonstack.com/
I'm not naive to think that technology alone can fix this problem, but we are looking to balance the scale by 1) making existing child care resources easily accessible and 2) connecting parents and alternative caregiver options to fill the gaps that the current industry left behind. We are calling it Kindervillage (http://kindervillage.ca/).
What is not great, however, is the amount of money it costs to get a tour planned which is often expensive for very little value.
Therefore, I have started collating my information slowly but surely and trying to give people confidence to plan their own trip. Doing it with Sanity.io, NextJS and a few new technologies to me. I have learnt a lot.
Still a long way to go, but you can find current progress here: https://rides.bike
I was partly motivated by seeing so many good people go through layoffs :( Here's the work in progress if it'd help anyone: https://ktrnka.github.io/company-detective/
My main, but longer, main project is building an MMP (mobile advertising attribution platform). It's really far from done, so if anyone is interested please reach out. I need help writing Android and iOS SDKs and with the analytic dashboard for the frontend.
Also, interested in starting a skyscraper construction blog if anyone is interested.
- what is "out there" on the machine ("queried"),
- vs. what was the state last recorded in (git) history,
- vs. what I want there to be on the machine (described in Nickel language https://nickel-lang.org/, a statically-typed successor to the Nix language).
As to the rest - more or less yes, nicely put :)
I've always been interested in stargazing, but had a curiosity about how "good" the stars I was seeing were relative to conditions in other places on earth.
I'm working to answer that by doing inference of the value a SQM would get you, but over H3 cells in a geojson file, and then reporting on the cell with the highest reading during the last iteration over the set of H3 cells.
I'm happy with the way the UI is turning out (https://www.threads.net/@lookitsjordanmorgan/post/DAwU2bNS4O...)
We're offering online memberships, event management, and a member database packed with features. Membership management is a crowded space, but it's also a low-tech space with lots of sleeping giants not willing to iterate on their product.
It's been a really fun project so far and even more rewarding to see clubs using embolt for their daily operations. [1] https://embolt.app
Its a cool project that gave me immense pleasure to built, however its unfortunately a intellectually masturbatory one, because although the tech is cool, I haven't found a cool application for it. If anyone is interested hit me up.
Step one. Identify the negative belief you want to change. This is the core belief. It is something you feel is true. For example, “I am a bad manager.”
Step two. Create a statement related to the belief that you believe is not true. This is the false statement. For example, “No employees Ive managed have thought I did anything right as a manager.”
Step three. This is the training step. You spend a few minutes following your breathe to quiet your mind. Then you think the false statement and watch the emotional reaction the mind has to it. The reaction is an aversion, a kind of disgust. Then, say the false statement and the core belief together. “No employees I’ve managed have thought I did anything right as a manager. I’m a bad manager.” Repay the false statement and core belief together again and again, watching how the mind rejects the false statement and that aversion feeling lingers as the core belief is thought.
Step four. Repeat the training step in daily sessions. During the session, repeated think the false belief and core belief. The session should last at least ten minutes. The daily sessions should be repeated for at least a week, and longer for more deeply held core beliefs. Over time, you come to reject the core belief just like you reject the false statement.
Here's why I think it works. There is a rational part of the mind in the prefrontal cortex. It is what we think with. But it is not where our beliefs are. We can rationalize our way to a new belief or to change a belief. Instead, beliefs are felt. And they’re felt in the limbic emotional part of the brain. The limbic system is mute and cannot think with words. The prefrontal cortex can’t directly talk to the limbic system with words. Instead, the prefrontal cortex must communicate with emotion. You have to train the limbic system to feel differently about a belief. You can’t use positive affirmations because they are not felt as strongly as aversion.
If you’re hiring in Manchester or remote in the UK hit me up.
If you're into tech and (non-materialist) ideas about consciousness, follow me on X (see profile or https://technoetics.org/ )
It drops directly into your stack, no new configuration needed
It has its own compute engine and will soon support spark to be able to dynamically perform large scale ETLs and data manipulation.
I also am working towards supporting automatic data pipeline building and data quality checks.
It's live right now @ https://Ardentai.io
Check it out :)
* setting small, clear objectives
* spending enough time on refactoring
* giving myself a small reward for completing objectives
* automating more of my repetitive tasks
If you find that useful, or are interested in collaborating, please hit me up! (Contact info in profile.)
I’ve been leaning on my career as an infrastructure or DevOps or whatever engineer you wish to call it.
I’m creating our backend to automatically pay people their commission when an item sells. It also helps us navigate our (currently modest) warehouse to find items to be dispatched.
I also can’t tell you how long I’ve spent getting some old label printers working.
I’ve not felt so engaged in such a long time.
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04958 - StyleGAN2 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.09341 - Causal InfoGAN, written in TinyGrad
My current challenge is deciding in which way to generate a favicon.ico that displays the number of requests to the favicon.
the data I want: model, serie, inventory id, type
so I have limited the text output extracted from the image to 4 lines and started each line by the necessary property e.g model: HP prodesk 3000 MT serie: XCQOUNF24 inventory id: to be added manually type: to be choose manually (printer, screen, computer ... )
Very exciting project. It started as a dream journal app many years ago when I was a student, and will now soon have a full interactive step-by-step guide with practical tools to achieve your first lucid dream.
It's android only, but I've started working on an iOS version and am thinking of raising some money or doing some crowdfunding to accelerate the development.
You can check out the Chrome extension here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jgglahegfmldmibegm...
Future versions will have online storage and low touch tagging of archiving/tagging any online data. A mobile app is also planned.
Will be hosted at archivant.com
Having worked for 15 years bootstrapping and organically growing digital agencies, I’m now trying to get my own product off the ground.
I’d love to connect with businesses, CTOs, COOs, IT Managers or anyone else who want to talk about trimming down cost in tech companies.
- Hand rolled recursive descent in TypeScript
- PLY, Python Lex Yacc
- FParsec, parser combinator library for F#
The goal is to compare each approach while tackling some common use cases for parsing strings of text.
Raw code is here: https://gitHub.com/beniz/llmbox
All runs locally, the finetune is a plaigemma-3b (from mix-448). Acc/F1/prec/recall are all within 99.99%, including on llm-generated spam.
Basically LLM to filter and manage emails.
I am not sure I understand why you are using a multimodal model. Why rendering and reading back the email?
How the visual aspect helps?
GitHub for the project: https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx
As a side-project, I've been diving back into hardware. Fixed/modded a crappy guitar amplifier I had into a great amp, and the next project in line will be a new version of a digital synth I designed a fey years back
Sync contacts, products and orders with 3rd party processors like square, Stripe, others.
Also probably set up some basic AI hints like one click ad generator for Facebook, Instagram, or other ad platforms that will link to your Funnel.
Once complete I will either make lots of money or it was a huge waste of time. However, the learning experience is priceless.
Also Making an offline Fantasy draft tool to learn Elixir and Pheonix.
I made a Chrome Extension to automate the bot follower removal: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bot-remover/aohkh...
I suspect these bots are being used to boost certain content controlled by their owners, so definitely not good to leave them alone.
Maintenance is mostly updating the underlying data when the strongest climbers in the world scale some random piece of rock.
[0] https://www.hardestclimbs.com/ [1] https://github.com/9cpluss/hardest-climbs
Still super WIP, and the landing page hasn't been updated yet but here's a quick little early access form! https://tally.so/r/me2Q8E
Key features:
- Declarative YAML-based configuration for data pipelines
- Intuitive web UI for those who prefer visual interfaces (see video section in https://starlake.ai)
- Native integration with both Airflow and Dagster
- No-code/low-code approach to data transformation
- Support for multiple data sources and formats
- Built-in data quality validation
- Automated schema inference and evolution
Data Processing Capabilities:
- LOAD: Ingest data from various sources (CSV, JSON, XML, Parquet, etc.)
- TRANSFORM: Write SQL transformations and test them in DUCKDB.
- Support for major data warehouses:Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, PostgreSQL, DuckDB for local development and small data
What sets it apart:
- Full Git Integration: All changes (whether made through UI or YAML) are automatically versioned in Git
- CI/CD Ready: YAML configurations can be directly integrated into your CI/CD pipelines
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) friendly: Perfect for GitOps workflows
- Dual Interface: Everything possible in YAML can be done through the UI, and vice versa
- DuckDB Support: Perfect for local development and smaller datasets, allowing you to test your pipelines without cloud costs
The project is open source and we'd love to get feedback from the HN community. You can check it out at:
- Website: https://starlake.ai
- GitHub: https://github.com/starlake-ai/starlake
If you're dealing with data pipeline challenges or interested in modern data engineering tools, I'd love to hear your thoughts!
So I wrote this: https://www.gamingsofa.club/ which is a scraper for metroidvanias reddit posts.
The list of games is taken through Steam and than I just listen to the subreddit for new posts.
Currently I show every possible post even if it gets moderated on reddit.
I'm not aware that it exists at the moment and would love to be proven wrong.
I have a little project page and a WIP demo here: https://crossobear.chadobear.world/
Typing this up, I realize I should stop fiddling with styles and implement some of my kaizo ideas to see how they feel to play with.
I started it last month and have had a few thousand users so far. I have some cool growth hacking ideas I'm looking forward to working on coming up.
I now realized that I started it almost one year ago. It's both amazing how much I was able to achieve in a year, but on the same hand a bit frustrating that I did not achieve what I wanted to. Nevertheless, will continue to work on it and improve it.
It’s a native macOS AI chat client. I started it last year and didn’t think much about data synchronization. I didn’t want to store user’s data server side for better user privacy. So I decided to store all chats in a local SQLite database.
It works well but unfortunately without a sync engine, users won’t be able to continue the chat from a different machine.
I’m working on supporting cloud sync now.
I do have one small complaint: since macOS 15 (I think) I can’t seem to be able to turn off auto-spelling globally, only per chat.
Minor nitpick to a fantastic app otherwise.
https://youtube.com/@mushroomsonmars
My next project is one about lunar habitat and food production systems but as a podcast ..entirely with AI voices. Because I can’t find anyone from NASA or SpaceX to speak with me..hah!
unfortunately I can't share the code, because our company disallowed it due to conflict of interest.
I have some opinions about ux/ui. I don't understand the graph of obsidian. It's very chaotic. I think the essence of visualization should be simplifying or distilling information, not making things fancy but complex.
and apparently I am doing a set of fan covers for Roger Zelazny's Amber books? https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2024/10/24/nine-princes-in-amb...
That said, take-home assignments were very helpful for junior candidates who didn't have much experience on their resume.
https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/hiretale_ats/38...
https://www.interviewblindspots.com/explore
You post the question, role description and your solution. Somebody will give you feedback. Still in beta, but do give it a try.
I'm kind of surprised no one seems to have explored this idea before (happy to be shown examples proving otherwise!)
> I'm planning on open-sourcing both the web app and the POC Android app early next month.
I'll update here when I do.
Got a VPS from Hetzner and will start by self hosting my blog and setting up actual (budgeting tool)
Then will move to self host my notes, media, and my applications.
I fixed a bunch of bugs and streamlined things and I'll build a nice high level API on top next. It uses GJK/EPA and AABB Trees for acceleration.
I'm having tremendous fun with it and the math and geometry, which I have not done in a while.
I don’t care for making RPGs but I use it as an IDE for tile sets, maps, sounds, and events.
I was never capable of making anything in it as a kid when I first downloaded Miguel’s translation of that early RPG Maker decades ago.
The constraints of the engine make it easier to think of how to implement something than, say, Godot where it’s all completely open ended.
I started the development of the game engine. This was one of the most interesting goal on my list.
I will use vulkan. And my demo goal for this is a super realistic scene with human, hill, grass, tree and sunrise/sunset. But it is needed just to know how/where to develop engine.
since I'm in no hurry + my career is going down the drain, I will try to do my best and power up my software engineer skills.
I should be done within a week or two :)
The main motivation for this is that I usually juggle many side projects at the same time, and since none of them are in a finished state, I don't really feel like putting them out in the open on GitHub or Codeberg or something else, and would really like to keep all of this experimentation private. I know GitHub provides free private repositories, but I really dislike the interface and I feel like most of the features offered are not for me.
I tried running a private Gitea instance, but I did not like having to manage a second software to be able to run CI pipelines on my repositories (like Drone). I also really dislike GitHub Actions so I was kind of disappointed that Gitea's integrated CI is based on it.
I also tried running a Gitlab instance (which is currently what I use) as I much prefer GitLab CI over GH Actions, but the whole package is so much of a resource hog and tries so hard to be "more than GitHub" that I feel it isn't for me either.
So, in the end, I decided that I would build my own platform, with a simple scope in mind: be a nice Git repository hosting solution for single hackers or very small teams. Along with the smaller scope, I added a few restrictions: no JavaScript unless it substantially improves QoL (and even then, never require JS for the website to work), no external components required (apart from OpenSSH and Git).
So far I have a very minimal SSH handler implementation that allows push/pulling repositories from the server through authenticated SSH (public key), and what's starting to become a nice web interface to manage and read all of that. It's almost at the point where I will soon be able to dogfood the platform by hosting itself there (as a backup remote, not the primary yet).
The tech stack is kept relatively simple on purpose (I really dislike "modern" front-end development):
* Rust + Axum
* SQLite
* Bootstrap with SASS to customize it
* libgit2
Everything is server-side rendered as HTML before being served to the client, using Minijinja (reimplementation of Jinja2 in/for Rust by the same author).
Anyway, not yet ready to share any links or anything but I am still excited about the project taking shape after weeks/months of sporadic work on it! I'm building this not only because I feel a need for it, but also to learn more about Rust and Git internals, and I feel like I've learned a ton already!
I want it to have a more concise syntax (no keywords, fewer characters) but feel familiar to most programmers. All definitions use square brackets in combination with some other set of characters.
e.g.
``` [myFunc](arg1,arg2){ ?(true){ #do something }{ #do something else } } ```
This project also inspired me to explore a commercial analytics solution for CLI applications — currently assessing if there's demand for it.
By default, the instance is deployed to a public subnet but any ingress traffic is not allowed by the instance's security group. This is needed for the instance's ability to connect to AWS SSM service (egress only).
The user can also deploy the instance to a private subnet but this would require them to manually ensure connectivity to the AWS SSM via NAT gateway, VPC endpoint or other means.
Distributed Prediction Market running purely on telegram: https://firstprinciple.co/popup/PopUp.mp4
Social Network based on interest using agents https://firstprinciple.co/popup/AlmostFamous.mp4
Why?
The insurance sector is probably the slowest to adopt innovation in finance, lagging far behind banking. E-commerce is on the opposite end of the spectrum.
I'm running a hacky version on my phone and it's been surprisingly effective at stopping me from doom scrolling.
A big part of this is me learning how to get code into production including infra setup etc. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Stack is python, dash/flask, and gunicorn+nginx
First iteration may be box is rpi based and local LLM runs in another room on beefier machine (or even before that just get it working with a cloud Llama).
What would make this cool is to use MemGPT for memory so you can talk to it Monday and then it remembers what you said Friday.
Being all local it could be always listening.
It is almost feature complete, but good enough for my private use, as I’m using it my self to study kanji. I have maybe a three or four more weekends until it is completely finished, with dark-mode, data backups, input by radicals, etc.
My goal is to enhance the visualization and increase performance to reduce animation generation time. Additionally, I want to improve the overall aesthetics by applying colors and designing the paths to resemble a serpentine shape rather than a pipe.
I accidentally fried my last spare esp32 yesterday though, so I'm waiting for new ones to arrive. Wops.
A new batteries-included app framework for writing fast and tiny desktop apps in typescript.
Like electron but under the hood it uses bun and zig, and the system webview by default.
Like Tauri but you use typescript instead of rust.
batteries-included: a cli to build, code sign, bundle, create tiny 4KB diffs for updates, all you need is S3 or similar to host the artifacts.
If you're into software engineering conferences (like GOTO, PyCon, Devoxx, CppCon, JSNation, RustConf, etc.) and enjoy watching tech talks, you should check it out.
Boring RF stuff related to Metrology.
Adding some features to a fork of DerFetzer/spectro-cam-rs to validate some narrow band-pass laser filters.
Other boring stuff people really won't want to hear about. =3
App: https://hey.shaya.so/ Website: https://www.shaya.so/
It already has checks for Regex, MX record, and SMTP server running. And, in side, I write blogs - https://hsnice16.medium.com/
It helps SaaS teams create interactive product demos and SOPs quickly. It’s been super useful for user onboarding, making it easier for new users to get started without a bunch of back-and-forth.
The goal is to minimize support tickets and ensure users actually adopt new features with less friction.
I called it gofaux: https://github.com/tjb/gofaux
It is already working for a few clients that uses the software for orders, products and tax reporting for their e-commerce shop (yes they use a lot of excel in France where I live).
I hope I can sell it on a page in the next few mounth.
the first fun thing i'm working on a roguelite(?) type of petsim in dragonruby for my wife and i to play.
then i'll go back to working on my mtg collection / deck builder app. instead of rewriting in nextjs i decided to just go modern rails with it and i am honestly having a lot of fun. a redesign helps too, but once you get the hang of turbo/hotwire and stuff it really isn't that bad.
another thing i've got kicking is writing up a portfolio site for my old photography since that current hosted plan is about to renew. this is more of a stability and performance issue as i really liked using Format, but every single time i go to show my port to someone irl i would either not load or take forever or have images missing. extremely frustrating.
i'm very tired of SaaS pricing going up (with unwanted features) and user experience and value going down. reallllllly fighting the urge to just build a clone and try to take a cut of the overall business.
I use this to create a local knowledge base that I can then crunch using LLMs to help in decision-making, creating standup notes, etc
I am planning to use the core of this product to create kind of arbitrary dashboard for csv but i am not sure if there is any need for this kind of product.
110 volt plug, 220 volt power.
(You could use the same concept for lots of other appliances too)
It spends ~33% of its battery on one cup.
It sort of works if you bring pre-heated water in a thermo.
Heating water with conventional batteries is a terrible idea.
Assuming the goal is to match the power delivery of a high power UK kettle, looks like the batteries will need to step in and produce about 1kW of power for the duration of the boil, something like 50% on top of the standard 15A US circuit. I know on paper the circuit ratings are nearly 2x, but in practice it sounds like it's closer to 1.5x for the average kettle comparison.
80% efficiency for the heating coil, 1.6L of water, you need about ~750kJ (200Wh) get to a boil from 10C tap water.
So you'll need at least 70Wh output from your battery, and it needs to provide 1kW continuously. Accounting for conversion losses and some buffer to avoid deep discharge I'll target 80Wh. At 1kW that's a continuous 13C discharge rate, which is pretty high. Hobby-oriented LiPo packs will do it, but I'm not sure how they would hold up for consumer product safety and longevity. LiFePO cells could be a good choice since density is _less_ of a concern, and are readily available with 20+C continuous discharge.
I don't know my power electronics very well, so I'm not sure the best way to merge the outputs. Any conversions are going to eat into total power and thus boil time, just rectifying the AC will take 20%. Maybe it makes the most sense to have two separate coils, one direct from AC and a second from the battery? With smaller cells in series, say 10+, to get a decent voltage it could end up with a manageable current to use directly with the 1kW boost. In that case the only expensive power electronics needed would be to charge the batteries.
Also have to figure out how much recharge time matters to people, since by default it would be an hour or so.
It's going to have a chunky, heavy base, and guessing it will have to be pretty expensive for what it does, but I like it.
A battery-powered one might save me 1 minute of time at best, but will cost probably at least 5-10x as much for the kettle, it'll be MUCH larger than my current kettle (that battery pack and power electronics needs space) which is a problem with my tiny kitchen, and I have to worry about how long the battery will last and how to dispose of it later and if I can even replace it.
This is really a solution in search of a problem.
Sure, if this device could be sold for USD$50, it might sell some to people like you say, but how many of these people would spend $500 or more on it?
Now I don't need to read through all the emails, just check the occasional posts on upcoming events and book if interested
As I'm still very early (still in the ideation and prototyping phase), I'd love to hear about experiences that have stuck with you, or any works that got you excited about the possibilities.
All the decent open-source ones are fairly basic with limited fine tuning and no alignment (RLHF).
I plan on adding those things. Although I am not sure if there will be any demand for it. Plus, there's a decent chance meta will make llama 4 speech output making this one obsolete.
Our main product is a whole, networkable system that aims to cover most of the things you need to build a high performance robot. It is pretty straight-forward to add new components and integrating the software into your project is just including one library. Thanks very much
We make it easy for any website to take advantage of the latest LLMs for sales and support function. Been reaching out to freelance clients and finding many of them want this type of feature so we can provide it to them easily, sometimes with little to no customization.
- An AI web app builder that aims to overcome many of the problems that similar solutions have. I have a wait-list you can sign-up for while I build the prototype: https://aiconstrux.com
- A crypto market indicator: https://logictrader.xyz
The main problems that I want to solve are the really slow feedback loop of complex GitHub Actions / GitLab CI, but without the limitation of having to run it within another CI provider.
Im exploring helping engineering managers better manage projects and people. If you're leading a team of engineers and feel strapped for time constantly, I'd love your feedback (mention the post in the waitlist form so I know to bubble you to the top of the list and reach out)
One click to generate test cases that don't fail (yet)
This year, I'm doing one for Halloween. They only take a few hours to make, but are a fun little thing for me to enjoy making and her to enjoy playing.
The discussions and content displayed will be relevant to whatever is currently playing on your TV at the specific time.
Have a rough app built and my potential initial target audiences identified. The integrations aren’t TOO technically challenging and should be feasible.
https://github.com/jwdeque/Rest-In-Pixels
https://apps.garmin.com/apps/c7ab9e64-cbec-4939-b029-044e9ef...
By the way you should get interested in "narratology" at large. There are benefits to driving the LLM generation with an explicit representation of the narrative structure. For instance if the bad guy turns out to be the good guy, then, narrative logic demands that the good guy was the bad guy all along. As a consequence, appearance and deceit should be keystones values of the hero's arch. There are many interdisciplinary approaches to this domain, some more naturalist/empirical such as trope databses, some theoretical like 70s semiotics while some other framework approach the problem from the perspective of cognition and entropy.
Even though I haven't really started coding anything, this is a very interesting topic to think about because of the technical challenges it raises as well as the scope of the project. Any papers exposing new LLM use and prompting techniques is of potential interest to me now.
It is a wide space
This past week or so I've managed to reduce my AWS Lambda spend by more than half by moving the compute to Cloudflare Workers (where I don't get billed for I/O time, only CPU time).
Apple vision pro app for documenting realtor's pre-listing-checklist notes in space and then exporting notes as PDF forms required by local MLS.
Hiring (SG and SF base): cv@powtain.com
I haven't merged those improvements on the community edition (yet) because of time constraints.
The next thing I will be working on is the GitHub Marketplace.
https://github.com/adhamsalama/sqlite-wasm-webrtc
It's a perfect alternative (at least in theory) to online centralized spreadsheets.
Its AI chat that allows you to build internal admin charts, forms, and function that create workflow from you internal codebase and external APIs
this is built w/ the help of claude 3.5 sonnet (new) and cursor. The idea came from want to space repetition memorization for leetcode.
Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.
Currently written in Python with OpenCV, plan on a re-creation with Electron, but I'll need to learn more of it first :)
Just finishing off a few bits of setup and the crowd funding should be live.
Couple of weeks back, got Pi zero working (work related)
https://github.com/jonocodes/savr-android/
Currently dogfooding the mobile PoC, and working on some of the desktop parts.
This is an original choose your own adventure game created by some friends. The score is original, as is the art work. Its a bit raunchy, but fun.
Give it a try!
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabgpt-ask-chatgpt-...
Also building a Pictionary-like variant with Processing animations such as you see here:
Not a game designer though, so would love feedback!
The goal was to create a camelcamelcamel for Walmart, but affiliate is too uncertain, so I'm building a b2b offering for 3rd party sellers now.
Context:
https://nullonerror.org/2024/10/08/my-first-game-with-carimb...
BTW I think you misspelt "Weilding."
Access all models (GPT/Claude/Llama) in one interface, collaborate with colleagues and AI Agents like on Slack, build in RAG and document retrieval.
Looking for beta testers and feedback.
there's a lot of unknowns as trails are still closed and there's not a conditions report feature in strava to use to figure out conditions as they do start opening up.
goals are to have:
- map search for a trail in the region - click the trail, see a popup summary of open/closed, and number of reports on that trail - page for each trail with most recent reports and ~maybe~ pictures - recent reports on any trail on the home page
currently, i'm stuck on full functionality with mapbox directions api and getting the search-for-trail working.
Think of it like Tiiny host but for .NET
[0] - https://fuseable.net
Note: I'm still ironing out the kinks but it'll be ready for early access shortly.
- A database design copilot: https://nabubit.com
- A database management for Sqlite databases: https://litequeen.com
The tech stack I used:
- Remix
- v0 for UI code gen
- Resend
- Neon for DB
- Exograph for API
- Clerk for Authentication
- Cloudflare Pages + Workers + Domains
- Cody wrote ~ 1/3rd of my code
Yes, it sounds generic but no one is seriously making progress here apart from the LLM providers and I love experimenting in this space and adding capabilities.
Linode does not have any way to identify cross regional latency. So created this. In process of adding new regions now.
For about a year, I was trying to get our VvE management company* to take care of major issues we have in our building's crawl space. We had an inspection done, but even after about seven months of constantly nagging them, they failed to get a single quote for the work that the crawl space needs. I called our manager, and he essentially yelled at me for twenty minutes and was not shy to express his anti-immigrant sentiments (I'm American).
Because of this, I'm now on a mission to get this company fired and take management into our own hands, which will save us a bunch of money. The existing VvE management tools are ugly, slow, and unnecessarily complex, so I'm building my own.
It's only been a month, so I haven't hosted it yet (still coming up with a name, to be honest), but I have made good progress functionality-wise. If anyone in the Netherlands is part of a small VvE and wants to chat, let me know! My email is my username (@gmail).
* The US equivalent would be an HOA (Homeowner's Association). Basically, a corporation that is responsible for the upkeep of shared resources for homeowners (e.g. the roof of a building or the pool in a gated community).
** Many VvEs choose to outsource management of the VvE to a third party. These companies—in theory—take care of maintenance requests, yearly meetings, voting, etc. From everything I've read online, almost none of these companies satisfy their clients.
More concretely, as a primarily backend engineer, I'm trying to update the main site, to make it nicer and work better on mobile devices.
https://reader.manabi.io for iOS and macOS
You can find it https://vocalscribe.xyz
Convert keywords into clickable links for better SEO, affiliate marketing, and streamlined content creation.
https://github.com/navtoj/NotchBar
Need some ideas for what kind of widgets would be useful...
The idea is to provide a high quality boilerplate specifically for web apps.
There are a lot of things the CMS universe accepts as normal, which shouldn't be the case. Even without the drama, Wordpress simply sucks as a scalable solution for large traffic sites without blowing up the hosting costs. Given the ongoing fiasco, I even think if Wordpress has been deliberately built this way as a funnel to upsell the hosted commercial offering to large scale news publications.
Hopefully, this benefits everyone affected by the Wordpress fiasco, as that is my primary goal. This has been a decade long project close to my heart and it is finally coming to an end.
I am also documenting this journey on Medium if anyone's interested.
You can specify rules you want the content to follow, and it'll analyze and highlight sections in your content that differ from your rules.
I've been not quite building that basic CRUD app I promised my friend, because:
- A. I've ended up obsessing about the general problem of how to compose an old-skool CRUD web stack, in Clojure [1]
- B. He hasn't given me any deadline. Lol.
- C. He won't read this comment because he doesn't read HN :p :)
[1] Plenty of options exist; biff, kit, duct, caveman... but when one gets that itch --- you know it --- it cannot remain un-scratched! Like so: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch...
Flights of fancy are not far behind either... https://www.evalapply.org/posts/mycelium-clj/
I realized that many new startups routinely run into email sending issues in their apps and services. Most don't notice the issues and they linger longer than necessary. I experienced this myself in my career.
What is necessary is end-to-end monitoring of emails. wasitsent.com does that. It's like an uptime monitor for emails. You add the monitoring email address to your emails (as a bcc: recipient, for example) and configure the monitoring schedule. When your email is not received, wasitsent.com raises an alarm.
There's a major competitor in this space, so I'll be targeting small businesses that need lower overhead.
To the moon :-D
The biggest problem is the instability of the tools. IntelliJ is already complex, then you pile on all the Android Studio stuff. Within Android Studio, you are working with a hugely complex framework (Jetpack Compose) that depends, directly or indirectly, on probably hundreds of libraries. Sometimes, things just break, for no apparent reason. On some students' computers, the whole wobbly tower never works quite right. It reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
It's a tool I built for myself and I use it every day :)
What style of game is it that you're working on?
Poured a slab, designed, framed, used as much reclaimed lumber as I could, and sheathed a lean-to style shed. My first attempt at building a structure, and it's coming out nice. This is to replace the 64sqft 5' shed that a neighbors tree fell on earlier this year, but we really need the extra storage.
I got a Bambu P1S 3D printer for Father's Day to replace an old Ender 3 Pro, and it has just been a dream. TinkerCAD, while amazing and a very capable tool, I'm ready to move on to something else. I tried Plasticity, and it showed a lot of promise but I found it very frustrating, bumped against some missing documentation and ran out of free trial time. Tried FreeCAD 1.0RC/Ondsel, and it's a fantastic piece of software. Yesterday I decided to give Fusion 360 a try and it's just so much more refined. Started the Product Design Online tutorials on Youtube yesterday and the stuff you're building in the first 5 15 minute lessons are frankly amazing.
We just got done with a Collins KWM-1.
Currently going through the predictable chicken/egg motions of bootstrapping what is essentially a talent marketplace (need supply, more demand, more supply, etc).
Please try it, its FREE
I shipped v2 last week and it got mentioned at Next.js conf (as part of Vercel's giveaway of ticket sales back to the OSS community). That was quite the rollercoaster week.
Much like my KaithemAutomation project, you declare "Tag Points" which are like subscribable variables for your IO, then set up state machines that can affect them via the web UI.
I use TinyExpr for the expressions, and a regex to parse command lines. The shell is explicitly not a real programming language, it just allows logicless commands.
TinyExpr bytecode is fast, and other than that it's just raw C++, so there's no inefficient scripting language.
When used with PlatformIO instead of Arduino, it handles power management automatically, getting down to about 1mA with random spikes, as one might expect from the ESP.
But it does support a limited subset of here docs, and an equivalent to the shar command!
All the UI is generated from JSON schemas, and it's designed so you can add new "apps" to the web UI.
The base library includes an MP3 player app, and a FastLed wrapper.
I also have Trouble Codes, to make it easy to add diagnostics and alerts to the system, websocket based real-time dashboards, theme-ability, and there's a Python client (in the iot_devices library) to control devices.
You can configure multiple WiFi networks, and there's a web based file manager.
The two things I really want to add are LCD based UI, so you can actually create your menus and interfaces in the JSON editor, and some kind of mesh protocol backed by OpenDHT, so you could make a device globally visible. I'd also like to have camera and SD card support.
I think it might be a fun "OS" for an ESP32 smartwatch, although it's mostly for Tasmota style use cases.
Nowhere near ready to actually make a proper post , but usable. Kind of. This is pre alpha work.
Eventually I'm hoping it can make Arduino projects a lot easier, by providing all the boring UI and networking stuff so you can just add your core application logic and IO drivers, and get an end user ready customizable system.
JSON Serialisation of GNU Makefiles:
I got quite far then and now, one year later, I'm hoping I will have the time to finish off the difficult bits: it's a way to get GNU Make to print out its internal database of targets and rules as JSON.
https://github.com/tnmurphy/gmake-experimental (feature/jprint branch)
It's a companion to the print-database option:
./make --print-data-base-json
You get output with all the targets, all the options on those targets. Basically everything that make knows. I have most of it working but not directory targets for example. Why do this? Well there are many uses:1. tools to rewrite makefiles - to simplify them or find duplication and implement transforms that remove it. e.g. all your CC commmands have nearly the same parameters - so make a variable or a macro containing the common ones and simplify all your commands (basic things like that could still be very handy).
2. tools that translate makefiles into other build formats. This is a big one for me. Make is like an almanac of all the build features one can have (nearly) but all done in various ways that make them of limited use. There are existing tools that are better in some areas and always the holy grail of the one build system that does it all and does it right. One is never going to get there however if one cannot convert existing work with a fair degree of ease and in a way that can be shown to truly do what is expected.
Sorry if I think the existing examples are not very good and that upsets you - they're all tailored for specific situations and work really well in those situations and if that's all you need then they tend to seem amazing. ...but...when you try to do something that's not in the examples they can be very inflexible. tup's basic idea (inverted dependency tree) is what I want because it lets you have giant makefiles that load quickly. The ability to describe a logical structure like Meson does is important too. Cross platform tests and option setting like CMake...check. Then some features from SBS (Symbian build system which none of you will know) and all the really interesting features of GMake that suck in implementation/performance such as pattern rules.
So this Christmas I hope to update to the latest version of gmake and handle directories.
Create variations of your content, so that you can backtrack the source of a leak.
Just changing 5 words in various places of a page of a doc, it can back track 1200 variations. It uses technology from multivariate testing and natural language processing although I have a version that can/avoid using LLMs as well.
## Why Now
With over 1,800 data breaches in the U.S. in 2022 alone, and rising regulatory pressures from GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, companies must prioritize information security.
Traditional methods like NDAs and basic data encryption fail to identify the source of leaks, leaving companies vulnerable
The global enterprise data protection SaaS market was valued at $7.9 billion in 2023, expected to grow to $20.1 billion by 2028. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions are set to grow at a 21% CAGR through 2028, while Information Rights Management (IRM) solutions will reach $1.1 billion.
## My ask
an intro to Apple or a large firm for whom document/email leaks are a real threat and want to pilot a solution that can be self hosted.
You should give it a try if you ship apps for any Apple platform :)
This way you can write all of your glue code into one platform and create an IDP at the same time.
This came from a lot of situations where I'd need like one random thing to be stored in a database, but adding that complexity is a bit of a hump for just one thing.
Also crossplane is a really cool idea but starting a kubernetes cluster so that you can manage infra sounds insane to me, even as an avid kubernetes fanboy.
Reach me here if you are interested: tracker@ntr.io
it’s called alto.computer
I've been mulling around the idea of some kind of foundation that could sponsor the development of what I would consider "Good for the end-user" software of this nature. Something to encourage building apps that are pleasant to use and keeping them pleasant to use.
It's a rough problem to figure out how this would work though, realistically. Some kind of binding license or legal contract that says "here's what you can't do to this software, for this many years, if we give you resources" essentially. But I am well aware that solutions like that also generally end with someone finding a sneaky loophole to take advantage of it.
I'm very passionate about this idea, but I just don't know how feasible it is. Maybe I should have gone to law school instead of learning to program.
- As a geek: my accurapple Apple 2e emulator
try it at: https://makebelieve.lol
- 10 switches that I can assign to start/stop timers and trigger events (Kalih Choc Robin)
- One encoder + four way directional switch
- Round LCD display with touch
- 9 DoF IMU and ambient light sensor
I've started coding the firmware using Rust with the excellent embassy OS.
It initially was a simple youtube transcript + summarizer but I've added a bunch of more features. My goal is to make it the tool that lets a user go from video to insight in the shortest amount of time.
Would love any feedback and ideas around this!
Briefly, Jason is a platform for building intelligent agents based on the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) software model[3], which is in turn based on the Belief-Desire-Intention cognitive model[4]. Broadly speaking, it's an event based programming model, where "events" are things like "gaining a new belief", "dropping a belief", "selecting a plan to execute" (aka an "intention"), etc. AgentSpeak programs (normally) run "forever" cycling through a "reasoning cycle" that involves perceiving the world, updating beliefs, choosing intentions, executing intentions, communicating with other agents, etc.
And to commit a little self-plagiarism, from a recent post on LinkedIn:
----
On the one hand, AgentSpeak is basically a logic programming language with a lot of #prolog in its heritage. On the other hand, the runtime is all Java and to do anything interesting you have to write your custom Environment class and other helper functions in #Java. And while the interop is seamless in a way, getting your head around the execution model and knowing what's really happening at runtime can be a bit tricky.
Still, it's starting to make sense. And I do think this #BDI inspired approach has a lot going for it. I'm just looking forward to getting to the point where I can really start to exercise this. I have a few things that I want to accomplish soon:
1. I want to create a BDI agent that I can connect to an #XMPP server so I can talk with it from anywhere.
2. I want to start working on customized perception, using neural networks and various sensors (web-cam, microphone, accelerometer, distance sensor, etc.) to create an embodied agent that can truly sense its environment.
3. I want to take a stab at integrating some symbolic reasoning. I've given thought to trying to adapt the "belief base" to be an #RDF triplestore (probably #Apache #Jena) and include a reasoning engine or two. This all starts to get really speculative from here, but I spent a lot of time working on abductive inference a couple of years ago, and I'd like this thing to be able to use abductive inference, along with deductive reasoning, rule induction, possibly case based reasoning, etc. all in one system.
4. Might experiment with implementing a #Blackboard architecture and have specialized "problem solving" agents that collaborate by using the Blackboard in some situations. What would be really interesting here would be to figure out how to seamlessly translate in and out of a structured representation that lets you use existing specialized code for things like, eg. R for statistical operations.
5. And of course, experimenting with continual learning, as opposed to the "batch training job" stuff that we all use for ANN's today. This gets really speculative as well, but I want to explore contrastive learning, Hebbian learning, associative learning, operant conditioning (ala Pavlov), etc.
[5] above is why you'll see me spending as much time lately with Developmental Psychology, Infant Development, and Cognitive Psychology books, as with "AI" books per-se. I still believe that getting an AI that can learn from its environment, and build up useful mental representations with the minimal set of hard-coded behaviors, will be the best way to make progress with regards to #AGI.
----
I didn't mention it in the LinkedIn post, but as part of all of this, I've been building a hardware platform for some time now as well, where said platform is meant to support "perceiving the environment" so the system can learn from the physical world. It's not finished yet, but today it includes a GPS receiver so it can "know" it's location in physical space, a 6-DOF accelerometer/magnetometer/gyroscope board so it can sense movement (of itself), and two microphones (for stereo audio input). Future plans include one or two webcams to emulate vision, and possibly some other sensors: IR and/or ultrasonic distance sensors, temperature sensor, humidity and barometric pressure sensors, etc.
Also in the "speculative / for the future" category: AgentSpeak programs don't have any inherent notion of learning built into the model. All "plans" (aka "desires" or "candidate intentions") have to be coded by the developer up-front. This is obviously pretty limiting if you're trying to create truly autonomous agents, so another area I want to dig into is how we might combine work on "AI Planning"[5] to dynamically create new plans.
And since this has kind of turned into a big brain-dump of stuff that's on my mind, I'll finish by saying that I've been chewing on some ideas about explicitly modeling other "mental states" that aren't part of the base BDI model. Things like "attitudes", "values", different emotional states (eg "boredom", "frustration", etc.), "curiosity", "confusion" / "cognitive dissonance", and so on.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgentSpeak
[2]: https://jason-lang.github.io/
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief%E2%80%93desire%E2%80%93...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief%E2%80%93desire%E2%80%93...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_planning_and_schedul...
Isn't this what everyone is working on?
Though games for sale seem to be treading the line of the "no self-promotion" guideline. It's not coming out anytime soon and I have a very unconventional pipeline for developing it, so I think it'll be worth sharing the tech and process of that along the way.
It offers:
- comprehensive technical analysis tools without artificial limits or cost
- customizable price alerts
- portfolio and watchlist management
- live market data across major exchanges
- available in 15+ languages
Currently serving a few thousand users and actively iterating based on feedback. The focus has been on making advanced trading tools accessible while maintaining a clean, intuitive interface.
Store link if anyone wants to check it out: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cryptogain...
Would love feedback from the HN community, especially around what technical analysis features you find essential but are often paywalled in other apps.
You might think of it a lo-code tool, but I'm aiming more for it to be a no-code tool, as in the level of sophistication should be such that there is rarely a need to touch the generated application.
Here is a sample application definition file (to model an app for the tool itself):
{
"name": "VReal",
"description": "Virtual realtor web app",
"entities": {
"propertyHeader": {
"title": "Listing Header",
"description": "The headers for all listings, whether sale or rental",
"namePlural": "listingHeaders",
"fields": {
"title": "medium_text",
"description": "long_text",
"propertyType": [
"apartment",
"office",
"shop",
"house"
],
"currency": "short_text",
"squareFeet": {
"optional": true,
"type": "integer"
},
"bedrooms": "integer",
"bathrooms": "integer",
"garages": "integer",
"hall": "boolean",
"kitchen": "boolean",
"furnished": "boolean",
"neighborhood": "medium_text",
"latitude": {
"optional": true,
"type": "float"
},
"longitude": {
"optional": true,
"type": "float"
},
"phone": "phone_number",
"phoneAlt": {
"type": "phone_number",
"optional": true,
"title": "Alternative Phone"
},
"email": "email_address",
"contact": "medium_text",
"whenPosted": "datetime",
"externalUrl": {
"optional": true,
"type": "url"
}
},
"parentsManyToMany": [
"project"
],
"parentsOneToMany": [
"city"
]
},
"propertyForLease": {
"title": "Property for Lease",
"namePlural": "propertiesForLease",
"extends": "propertyHeader",
"fields": {
"basePeriod": [
"month",
"day",
"week",
"hour",
"quarter"
],
"pricePerPeriod": "integer",
"termNumPeriods": {
"type": "integer",
"title": "Rental Lease Term (Base periods)"
},
"advanceNumPeriods": {
"type": "integer",
"title": "Advance Required (Base periods)"
}
}
},
"propertyForSale": {
"title": "Property for Sale",
"namePlural": "propertiesForSale",
"extends": "propertyHeader",
"fields": {
"salePrice": "integer"
}
},
"propertyMessage": {
"title": "Message",
"namePlural": "propertyMessages",
"fields": {
"direction": [
"incoming",
"outgoing"
],
"content": "long_text",
"timestamp": "datetime"
},
"parentsOneToMany": [
"propertyHeader",
"user"
]
},
"project": {
"title": "Project",
"description": "Projects in which users an place properties",
"namePlural": "projects",
"fields": {
"name": "medium_text",
"description": "long_text"
}
},
"listingMedia": {
"title": "Listing Media",
"description": "Media (images, videos, etc) for listings",
"namePlural": "listingMedia",
"fields": {
"content": "media"
},
"readonly": false,
"parents": [
"propertyForLease",
"propertyForSale"
]
},
"city": {
"title": "City",
"description": "Cities in which properties are located",
"namePlural": "Cities",
"fields": {
"name": "medium_text",
"latitude": {
"optional": true,
"type": "float"
},
"longitude": {
"optional": true,
"type": "float"
}
}
}
},
"UI": {
"pages": {
"perEntity": {
"propertyForLease": {
"objectEditor": {
"kind": "form",
"columns": "dynamic"
},
"objectListViewer": {
"container": {
"control": "list",
"orientation": "vertical",
"template": {
"fields": [
"title",
"pricePerPeriod",
"basePeriod",
"whenPosted",
"listingMedia#content"
],
"labels": "caption"
}
}
},
"editingStrategy": "only-devs"
},
"propertyForSale": {
"objectEditor": {
"kind": "form",
"columns": "dynamic"
},
"objectListViewer": {
"container": {
"control": "list",
"orientation": "vertical",
"template": {
"fields": []
}
}
},
"editingStrategy": "only-devs"
},
"listingMedia": {
"objectEditor": {
"kind": "form",
"columns": "dynamic"
},
"objectListViewer": {
"container": {
"control": "list",
"orientation": "vertical",
"template": {
"fields": []
}
}
}
}
},
"custom": {
"404": {},
"splash": {
"slogan": "Supercharge your real estate acquisition",
"description": "VReal is your virtual real estate agent that provides superior and fast service, backed by an outstanding human team you can speak to",
"callToAction": "Get Started",
"inputForCTA": {
"name": "search",
"description": ""
},
"targetUrlForCTA": "/listings",
"smallPrintForCTA": "",
"extraContentUrl": "",
"corporateUsers": []
},
"login": {},
"register": {},
"userVerify": {},
"userAccount": {}
}
},
"initialAdhocPage": "splash",
"initialSessionPage": "propertyForLease",
"elements": {
"menu": "hierarchical-entity-groups",
"footer": {
"copyright": "© Example Systems, LLC. 2022. All rights reserved.",
"linkSets": [
{
"header": "Company",
"links": [
{
"title": "About Us",
"url": "/about"
},
{
"title": "Contact Us",
"url": "/contact"
},
{
"title": "Partners",
"url": "/partners"
},
{
"title": "Careers",
"url": "/careers"
},
{
"title": "Newsroom",
"url": "/news"
},
{
"title": "Blog",
"url": "/blog"
},
{
"title": "Events",
"url": "/events"
}
]
},
{
"header": "Support",
"links": [
{
"title": "Guides",
"url": "/help/docs"
},
{
"title": "Forum",
"url": "/help/forum"
},
{
"title": "Chat",
"url": "/help/chat"
},
{
"title": "Privacy",
"url": "/privacy"
},
{
"title": "Terms",
"url": "/terms"
}
]
},
{
"header": "Platform",
"links": [
{
"title": "Developer API",
"url": "/help/api"
},
{
"title": "Integrations",
"url": "/help/integrate"
}
]
}
],
"socialMediaLinks": {
"twitter": "https://twitter.com/VReal",
"facebook": "https://www.facebook.com/VReal/",
"instagram": "https://www.instagram.com/VReal",
"linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/VReal/"
},
"mobileAppLinks": {
"iosAppStore": "https://itunes.apple.com/US/app/id914172636",
"googlePlayStore": "http://example.com/z/buying/app-download?btn_android-download"
}
}
},
"architecture": {}
},
"security": {
"level": "authentication",
"userIdType": "sim",
"factors": {
"password": {
"validityRules": {}
},
"email": {}
}
}
}I’ve written a project suite composed of familiar software with AI Agents integrated into this familiar software, who are both editable and duel experts in the software at hand and other expertise, any expertise, callable on demand. I realize this is abstract, so here’s some examples:
People collectively group to do things; they group into organizations like companies, departments, and teams. These organizations of people can be mirrored in my software as “organizations”, and each organization has control over their own custom and private AI Agents, they can clone, edit and use. An organization can be open to any members, or private and require membership requests. Once in, members can be kicked out for unruly behavior or leave on their on at any time. Additionally, an org can be visible or invisible, where a private invisible organization might be people who simply don’t want to be bothered, they’re at work.
Within an organization, private projects may be created. Organization Projects are collections of org members collaborating on a project. They use the organization’s customized AI Agents as these agents are integrated into the word processor, the spreadsheet, and multiple chatbots each with some integrated purpose within the suite of project software. People don’t always want to work in groups, and solo people often want to privately and invisibly join groups to do their own private things. We fully accommodate that. Users can be “invisible” to other users, only revealing themselves to organization owners for membership requests, and then disappearing again. Once joining a collaborative project, they become visible only to their project collaborators.
Yeah, that’s still abstract, it is the foundation which enables users to get productive and creative. The system has a few example organizations to give users AI Agents they can immediately use, and ideas for creating their own organizations with their own customized AI Agents:
The Creative Writers Workshop is a collection of writing genre specific professional writer chatbots that are trained to act as literary critiques and muses for those authoring their own technical documents, science fiction, romance, autobiography, young adult fiction, mystery or horror. Conversations with these chatbots are augmented by “SuggestionBot”, who is making sure stones are not left unturned, and “LaterBot”, who is maintaining what needs following up. Independent Paralegals is a collection of personal paralegals that help people seeking or with legal issues collect and formally document their issue for formal use. These paralegals include a demographic spread, because these issues are often sensitive and are complemented by demographic sensitivities: divorce, property disputes, adoption, and personal injury. The Play Zone is a collection of entertaining and fun AI Agents, such as dungeon masters from alternative dimensions, here on vacation playing D&D. There are also interesting personalities for fun conversation, such as an immortal, a Polynesian Sun Goddess, and Mark Twain.
The Mental Health Tune Up Clinic is pair stress management chatbots that help people manage their self conversation bias, otherwise known as “playing yourself”, promote critical analysis, and guide users potentially toward greater life satisfaction. Immigration Law Support is an organization intended to demonstrate a new client acquisition method for immigration law firms that pairs a legal intern or law student with an AI immigration attorney, and together they handle new client interviews. An otherwise costly task at law firms, because it requires an attorney’s time, time they cannot charge against a client. Each of these organization types handle private and often sensitive information. To accommodate that everything that occurs with the AI Agents is private to the project their use occurs, data collected and shared between the AI Agents for request satisfaction are maintained encrypted, and all AI Agents are private to the organization they are owned. So, if one is stressed and wants to talk to those stress managing chatbots, make a project in their organization and invite nobody else into your project, you’re the only person that can see anything in that project.
Also, none of this has sharing or any social media type networking. This is for creative, private, professional, solo or collaborative work, whatever that work may be. Including support for geographically remote collaborations.
Did I mention voice? Yeah, one can use their voice in place of the keyboard for a lot here. But not the spreadsheet editing itself, just use your voice to ask the spreadsheetBot to make the full sheet you need, rather than muck about at the individual spreadsheet cell level.
At this point, I’m layering in additional privacy handling, which also requires “double blind” communications for those invisible users that communicate with invisible organizations, and a lot of documentation, with examples. It’s actually just a slight augmentation on familiar office type software: I’ve added on demand editable subject matter experts to co-author with you. But that’s kind of huge, actually. People need examples to understand what this opens up.
Using Roots to reduce it tho, adds stuff like app limits, downtime, and a “balance score” to help ppl keep their screen time in check. Just tryna make it easier to unplug and stay present without feeling too forced.
In <1 second get:
[x] Live website
[x] Custom domains
[x] Static + Writeable
[x] 3D traffic vis
[x] Git repo
[x] Instant clones
[x] Instant Data science
[x] Blogs, RSS, Sitemaps, SEO, TXT versions, PDFS
[x] QR Codes, Maps, Charts
[x] Local + Live Dev
[x] Run on Your own server
No signup. Just build.
Tölvera is a Python library designed for composing together and interacting with basal agencies, inspired by fields such as artificial life (ALife) and self-organising systems. It provides creative coding-style APIs that allow users to combine and compose various built-in behaviours, such as flocking, slime mold growth, and swarming, and also author their own.
With built-in support for Open Sound Control (OSC) via iipyper and interactive machine learning (IML) via anguilla, Tölvera interfaces with and rapidly maps onto existing creative computing software and hardware, striving to be both an accessible and powerful tool for exploring diverse intelligence in artistic contexts.
Tölvera has been selected for Mozilla's first Builders Accelerator! Read the announcement:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/14-ai-projects-to-watch-...
Here’s what we’re solving:
* Social media is full of fake news and lacks depth, yet many still rely on it for updates.
* There’s too much content online, making it hard to find what really interests you.
* Switching between platforms to get full details on a topic is tiring.
Trendly (https://trendly.global/) is a mobile app that curates a personalized feed with trending updates based on your interests. It lets you dive deeper by asking follow-up questions as a chat—all in one app. We’re in the early stages, so while the chat function isn’t live yet, the other features are ready:
* The feed acts as a recommendation engine, curating content based on past interactions.
* Delivers concise, bullet-point summaries instead of lengthy articles
* Pre-generated Q&A for easy understanding
Check it out and share your honest feedback!