Well, that’s exactly why I worry when walking around with noise canceling phones. Because all those people driving cars oblivious to their surroundings
287 karma · joined August 7, 2020
Things like ”If you want, I can also show a very fast Photoshop-style trick in Krita that lets you drag-copy an area in one step (without copy/paste). It’s hidden but extremely useful.”
Every single chat now has it. Not only the conversational prompt with “I can continue talking about this”, but very clickbaity terms like: almost nobody knows about this, you will be surprised, all VIPs are now using this car, do you want to know which it is? Etc
It seems a tricky one to code the way I did the engine, but I’ll give it a try
One thing I am exploring is that, with LLM (and enough $ to pay the tokens) you can filter out offenses and hate speech in player communications.
All typed message is effectively translated by the LLM as “coach speech” and what is put in the UI is the LLM output. Sure, it is not exactly the player words and can get expensive, but I think it can be a good solution
It is a pretty fun project
It is a comeback from a post that stayed for a few hours in the front page a few years ago. Also, it is a useful, non-AI slop, free product. So when it got none upvotes it made me think how I don’t understand HN community anymore how I used to think I did.
Here is the post for the curious
Show HN: (the return of) Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email
Yes, I went with Postgres to be safe. I am still serverless, but now there is Vercel doing a good job for serverless DB. They integrate with Neon, which makes Postgres serverless possible.
More things are into Vercel as well, as the cron jobs, which I used to use AWS only for that. Much easier now in configuration by code through Vercel.
Anything goes wrong with Vercel or Neon and I can just export my whole DB and go for a regular server anywhere.
There is a lot a of ambition and uncertainty in it. I always enjoyed writing (whatever the context, not only fiction) and now I enjoy getting better at writing fiction. I enjoy being part of a group of other wanna-be writers with the same goals and challenges. I made real friends this way. I enjoy listening podcasts, videos, interviews from experienced authors. I am even enjoying more working on some software side-projects that are related to literature (in general or my own).
At the same, there is very little chance that this endeavor will have any financial return. In Brazil, where I live, you can count in the dozens the number of writers that live solely from the income of book royalties and in the hundreds the number of writers that live from literature (royalties + workshops, online courses, literary services, etc).
So, even some successful authors that have decent number of readers (for Brazil's context) and some awards, have a day job.
This, interestingly for me, who has a well-paid job, removes the pressure of this project of mine. Since it is an art project, to not have the pressure of needing to earn money, actually makes my art better, I have more patience and time to reflect upon it (ironically, increasing my chances to earn money through my art).
But I still have the pressure to earn readers. It's not like I am painting paintings that I am happy enough to complete and leave them on my house studio. I am not doing art for myself, but for others. That's where the ambition part come from. Which I like.
I don't think this comes from a mid-life crisis, as I write short stories since my twenties. It's only now that I have the time, money, and, I might say, wisdom to be able to do it seriously. Writing is one form of art that benefits a lot from like experience.
Just to share what worked for me, and maybe you can find something for you that fits the bill of being an ambitious project that you hope to achieve something meaningful from, but that it's not necessarily attached to financial outcomes. The privilege of being able to be professional about something that might not return more money, even if successful, is something that I treasure a lot.
https://twitter.com/BookReviewAi
I find the results very interesting. Like this "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" one.
As a side-effect, I just noticed that I prefer a long markdown file with proper headings (and an outline on the side) than Milanote's board view, which initially felt like a more free form better suited for unorganized thoughts and ideas for writing that I had (I use it for my fiction writing).
I still can have documents as a list of loose thoughts, but once I am ready to organize my ideas, I just use well written and organized headers, edit the content and now I have a really useful view of my idea.
One neat thing that emerged is that it can be used to create mnemonic phrases (by generating one-word-verse acrostics).
This is not only a theoretical risk. It happened. A Brazilian soccer team, Chapecoense, hired a private airliner to get them from Bolivia to Colombia. Due to some bad luck, airport closing hours and whatnot, the flight plan had to be changed and the plane was fueled below what the regulations required. They were getting close to the destination airport when they got a low fuel warning. More bad luck and in the airport of the destination the flight control asked their flight to wait while another plane had priority in landing.
There were alternatives to redirect the flight or request priority to land, which they only requested when it was too late and the plane crashed due to fuel exhaustion. 71 of 77 people in the plane died in the crash, including the pilot.
The pilot was also the co-owner of the airline, so there is room to speculate that he didn't want to promptly admit to be low on fuel and require priority to land, or divert to another airport when the low-fuel warning appeared, because he would have to admit that he fueled below what the regulations asked. He could face the consequences, like a fine or losing his license.
I might forgot or misunderstood something, but more details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMia_Flight_2933
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case
It confuses me, a non-native English speaker, a lot too. I hate it.
A lot of good, working machines, nice staff, no tricks to keep making you consuming unnecessary stuff or stay there more than you would want to. Just a fun place to be -- if you enjoy playing pinball of course. Cheap too.
This is the page focusing on convincing writers to sign up. It is a two-sided marketplace (writers and readers), but since I am just starting, there are no published writers yet -- who write in English at least. So if you write fiction of any genre, professionally or not, I invite you to try it.
Confabulists is the culmination of several personal experiences. First, I am trying to start a new career as a fiction writer, which is hard. It is one type of content or art creation still heavily controlled by gatekeepers -- book editors. Amazon created a good option for self-publishing, but since it is not "media", it does not offer much opportunity for growing an audience. Or retain it, as there is no guarantee that a reader of one of your books will even know about the release of your latest one. In contrast, creative people that work with visual arts have TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch. Audio creators have the video platforms as well, but also Spotify, Deezer, Bandcamp. And finally, creators of the written word benefited from the resurgence of newsletters.
Substack took it to a new level, attracting great thinkers and journalists with a good model for these professionals to earn their money a bit more directly. I am a big fan of Substack. I created my newsletter there early on and tried three times to get a job there as a software developer (always politely rejected because they don't hire globally remote). But, despite a few recent efforts, I don't think Substack is a good place for fiction writers.
The main thing is that writing fiction takes time. It's hard to post new fiction weekly. And fiction is about past, completed works. Something that the current media landscape, newsletter tools included, strongly incentive against. You should always be creating new content. A new subscriber only gets your future work. Past texts are for those with a neck for digital archeology. That's why I created Confabulists. The main difference in the tool is that new readers, when they subscribe to an author, choose a book and start getting that book in installments from the first chapter. Completed books matter. "Old" fiction attracts new readers.
Another experience that led me to Confabulists was a free site that I built and launched in a Show HN [0] a couple of years ago: https://serialliterature.com
It was built for reading public-domain classics in installments delivered by email. Just like Confabulists is for new authors. It got some traction here on HN and proved to me that people really engage in reading fiction in their email inboxes. At this peak, right after the Show HN, it had 800 active subscribers receiving installments from a book. Today, after two years, with zero marketing effort (I never even posted again on social media or anywhere), there are almost 200 active subscribers. No available book lasts that long in weekly installments, so these are either people who subscribed to a new book or new subscribers that found Serial Literature through word of mouth. For a zero-marketing effort, I consider this good retention and evidence that reading fiction through email has its audience.
I am solo on this. From idea to coding, to copy and design -- this last one with AI help with the illustrations. As a Brazilian and wanting to publish my work on it, I created it initially in Portuguese [1]. It was great for the beta reading of my first novel. And useful to find and fix some bugs and iterate the product until I had a solid solution. I think it is good enough to try to reach more people with its version in English.
I hope some fiction writers on HN find it useful too. Thanks!
Thanks!
I already built it, although it is in Portuguese. https://www.confabulistas.com.br
It would be easy to translate to English and try it in the US market. Is there any interest for that?
It is just like Substack. You create your page, people subscribe and get your fiction by email. The main difference is that people can read your books from the beginning, from the first chapter, in installments. With Substack (or any newsletter platform) new people can only get the future emails from the time they subscribed. In my site people will receive the first installment/chapter of the book (you can have several books published in there, one can be "Short stories").
It has the "paid subscribers" feature also.
I built it mostly to myself, as I am starting a side-career as a fiction writer wanted to own my audience. Fiction writers currently don't have a good platform to both distribute their work and gather an audience. What I built does the job pretty well I think.
Any interest?