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Cook4986on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

SliceIt! is a multi-view 3D cropping utility with a radical 90s aesthetic:

https://slice-it-chi.vercel.app/

Needed something quick and simple for trimming meshes and my daughter was playing Bop-It. Enjoy!

Cook4986on Solar-based sleep patterns compared to modern norms

Building on this, I’ve observed nightmares (I.e., particularly intense, terrifying, or otherwise challenging dreams) guarantee a good next day.

Cook4986on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

https://chatpak.store/

Group chat photobooks. Automatic layouts, no editor/app, unlimited free previews. Build a hardcover (up to 1000 image) and ship it in minutes.

Wanted a physical souvenir for everyone in my long running signal chat but didn’t want to spend hours curating in editors.

Cook4986on The happiest I've ever been

Existence is suffering. But there are moments that make it worthwhile. When you have a kid, you not only get more of those moments, but you give those moments to people in the future.

Cook4986on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)

“Autotomb” identifies physical objects/artifacts/specimens mentioned in Egyptological (e.g., Giza) excavation diaries then generates (Meshy) 3D model sets based on those descriptions which are deployed in in virtual reality (AFrame). The output is like an immersive word cloud but the words are 3D objects and you can navigate the scene with your body. Still early days but the desktop pipeline is functional: https://github.com/Cook4986/AutoTomb

Cook4986on I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions

Here’s a (free) 3D printable version I designed a few years back, for just this reason:

https://sketchfab.com/cook4986/collections/instructional-che...

The Knight was by far the hardest to design, but the 3D aspect helps visualize movement across two planes (I.e., jumps)

Cook4986on Show HN: AI mentor in your iPhone that collects your memories and gives feedback

Looks great, guys. I'm interested in enabling SAMA during consulting calls only, for cross-pollination, which would make an Outlook (calendar) integration super valuable.

Cook4986on The bill of materials for the Apple headset leaked

Imagine if the whole internet was VR ready? MyHouse.pk3, I’m looking at you.

Cook4986on A working implementation of text-to-3D DreamFusion, powered by Stable Diffusion

Currently working with a student group to build out a 3D scene generator (https://github.com/Cook4986/Longhand), and the prospect of arbitrary, hyper-specific mesh arrays on demand is thrilling.

Right now, we are relying on the Sketchfab API to populate our (Blender) scenes, which is an imperfect lens through which to visualize the contents of texts that our non-technical "clientele" are studying.

Since we are publishing these scenes via WebXR (Hubs), we have specific criteria related to poly counts (latency, bandwidth, etc) and usability. Regarding the latter concern, it's not clear that our end users will want to wait/pay for compute.

*copyedited

Cook4986on What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

From “A college mystery: the story of the apparition in the Fellows' Garden at Christ's College, Cambridge Baker, A. P / 2nd ed. 1925”:

https://youtu.be/5JDxyVpmbJA

Cook4986on The saga of Apple’s troubled mixed reality headset

Andrews, C., Endert, A. and North, C., 2010, April. Space to think: large high-resolution displays for sensemaking. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 55-64):

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1753326.1753336?casa_toke...

There’s much more. Search “sensemaking” or “immersive analytics” on Scholar. Depth and width of field, achieved via stereoscopy and tracking, is well documented as a performance enhancer when it comes to generalizeable task completion in VR.

Cook4986on Ask HN: What projects are you working on this weekend?

Revising a sci-fi story about the first pizza place on Mars: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wdwj6fn2qjywoct/Best%20Pizza_Cook2...

Also, trying to figure out how to distribute ~1000 arbitrary meshes in 3D space (https://github.com/Cook4986/Longhand), and installing the window AC units (Boston suburbs).

Cook4986on The Zen of Drinking Alone

Three beers max. No whiskey on a weeknight. Wine is a wildcard. You have to blast off. You have to get outside your own head.

Cook4986on A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

Full-text transcription of individual notebook pages (annotated images + .json + .txt) generated with a combination of Handprint (https://github.com/caltechlibrary/handprint) and Microsoft's Read API: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hkpqsnk858pzu7f/AADnCzr7tabArQ_xq...