There are always plenty of ideas, the hard part is figuring out which ones are worth any of my time. Right now I'm working on a spreadsheet that turns everyday spreadsheet users into programmers. The absurdity of the ambition is not lost on me.
At the moment I'm working on FastHash[1], a pet project of mine to port a few high-performance non-cryptographic hash functions to C#.
I'm also trying to build FastLinq, a value-by-reference Language Integrated Query (LINQ) optimized for high-performance scenarios. It is kind of a weird mix as LINQ in .NET is known for its high overhead.
Finally, I'm working on an Office setting synchronization application. I heard a podcast with Paul Thurrott complaining about the lack of sync solutions, so I thought I would do one for fun.
Also currently thinking about building a Python 3 search library to be used against Google App Engine. Google deprecated the one from Python 2 and recommends using Elastic Search (which means you're no longer dealing with a Serverless solution)
I just restored some backups from 1995, and am digging through that archive to see if I can pull out the multi-tasking libraries I wrote for Turbo Pascal under MS-DOS. No practical use, mostly nostalgia.
I didn't document things as well is I should have, of course I was the only user, and had no thought that future me would be looking at it 27 years later.
I'm still working on Fresh Cards[1], a flashcard app I've written for iOS and Mac.
I'll admit that it started out as "yet another spaced repetition flashcard app" but over the past few months, with constant UX refinement, I've forged a unique approach (IMHO) to how you review your cards and browse your deck. I've received a lot of good feedback from users in my Discord, so I'm constantly changing things up to improve it.
I will say that the Anki import isn't 100% at the moment, but works reasonably well for simpler decks (ones that don't use HTML or javascript). I'd like to get to 100% Anki compatibility, but it will require some additional features to be implemented first, like a templating system.
A lots of fun things, feel free to connect with me on Github if anyone would like to chip in and help:
- An Electron template with built-in secure features. I regularly maintain and update the template so it's supported with newer versions of packages.
- A collection of free, public-domain recipes. I've wanted to do some version of this for _years_, but am finally getting around to do it again. This time, I'm paying chefs to create recipes for me that will be licensed as public domain.
thinking about converting my new tab extension --
https://new-tab.vlad.studio/ -- into a real website, accessible from any browser, not just Chrome. As always, it is harder than it seems.
I'm really interested in exploring some AI ideas related to emobidment. To that end, I needed a "body" to put an "AI" in. So I started out by gutting out an old boombox, and putting a Raspberry Pi, a USB powerbank, and a USB charger in there. I also built a power supply multiplexer board that can allow switching from the battery to the charger, and back, without causing the Pi to reboot. And that stage is pretty much where I am. Getting that multiplexer thing built proved more challenging that I expected, but that's a story for another day.
Next steps are to start adding sensors to allow the "AI" to experience the physical world. Plans include:
1. GPS module, so it can experience motion and sense its velocity and location in space, etc. The same board also happens to be a cellular data board that will allow the device to upload data to the cloud.
2. One or more accelerometers for more localized perception of motion / orientation in space.
3. One or more cameras for vision. Ideally two so it can do stereo vision and have depth perception, etc.
4. One or more microphones to receive audio.
5. Anything beyond that is getting into pretty speculative area, but I can imagine adding sensors for temperature, barometric pressure, and other environmental factors, and even get into "senses" that humans don't really have, like sensing IR, ultraviolet light, electromagnetic radiation, magnetic flux density, etc.
Now obviously a Raspberry Pi doesn't have enough computing power to do a whole lot from an AI perspective, so the basic concept is to have the data being received by the box pushed to a remote server, where complex training and reasoning stuff will happen. Modules can then be pushed back down to the box so that some operations can be executed locally. That's where both Wifi and cellular data come into play. One of my "next steps" right now is to get the cellular data board configured, and figure out how to get NetworkManager to seamlessly switch between that and the various Wifi AP's that will be available depending on where I take this thing.
Anyway... there's a lot of speculation to all of this, and a lot of it is still very fuzzy in my mind. But the basic concept is simply to focus on the idea of how an AI can learn from physically experiencing the world in a way that's loosely analogous to the way a human does. If you've read any of Ben Goertzel's stuff and are familiar with his whole "baby AI" notion, then you may recognize some spiritual kinship in terms of thinking. I've been heavily influenced by Ben's work, and by OpenCog[1]. In fact, OpenCog (or some parts of it) may become part of this project before all is said and done.
rasp pi cluster could add more computing power for cheaper.
Well, I don't have room in the physical case for more Pi's as it stands, and TBH, I'm not terribly interested in running a cluster at home. It might mean spending some money, but I'd rather just do it all in the cloud. One advantage to that is I can easily scale things up and down dynamically, and I can use a mix of CPU and GPU (or even FPGA) instances without having to go out and buy a lot of expensive hardware.
Not to say that I would never bring part of it "on prem" and run out of my home, but right now the cloud approach feels more manageable.
I just finished grinding to meet the submission deadline for a contest Webtoons is running. The chance at 50k and a development deal sure made it worth pretending I had a work ethic for a couple weeks when my Patron campaign was gonna pay me for it regardless.
I'm gonna take a break for a few days, maybe draw some self-indulgent porn, then clear out my commission queue and start working on the second half of that story.
Harvard CS50, I was coding a bit as a kid in the late 90's in BASIC, and have been in tech most of the past decade, but never went beyond HTML, CSS and grabbing a basic script off Stack Overflow since then, so now I'm trying to learn the foundations of CS and eventually teach myself a language or two so I can evolve from building mini projects in no-code tool to making more meaningful things and more powerful apps.
I'm still working on collAnon[1], a private discussions platform(behind a PWA) with bias avoiding intent through temporary anonymity of the answers(which also means that discussions have an end date).
In the latest development I decided to change route and make it freemium, with all the previous premium features now available to everyone.
This is to make it more appealing to try this kind of discussions that are not your usual way and give ample breath to use all the features until this platform finds its audience I hope ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm working on Cling, a training community for rock climbers.
Rock climbing is a complex, metric-driven, and growing sport that doesn't have good-enough tooling in tech. Outdoor vs indoor is very different, so we're focused on significantly improving the climbing gym experience for now.
What made you choose to build an iPhone app before an Android app? I'm curious where that debate stands in the last few years as I haven't seen the arguments for a long time.
Main reasons for me are speed, quality, and showing proof of market.
I have worked on Android previously, but I'm much more familiar with iOS. In a space with competition, product quality is one of the important factors to gain user interest. That's also the reason I didn't go with React Native, since the tech needs will grow to a point where I won't be able to provide a good enough UX. Once I've proven value, I can hire an Android dev.
I’ve been working on needle[1], a CLI tool (and associated library) that can detect openings/intros and endings/credits across TV or anime episodes. It decodes audio, fingerprints it in chunks, and then compares chunks across files to find common sequences.
The end goal is to use the library to build a Jellyfin plugin (C#) that handles skipping intros. I think I’ve figured how to call a C library from C#, but there is a lot of work to do to actually get a functional plugin.
A handheld, esp32-based implementation of the pico-8[0] console. Basics work already, sidetracked into writing a terrible Lua to C++ compiler to squeeze some extra performance out of some pathological-case games.
* Improving the largest bilingual Manx <-> English Corpus + Search Engine. It's recently become the #1 point on the Isle of Man's 10 year language plan, and will probably end up informing a new dictionary for the language
* Generating a machine-translation system using the above, probably also adding Manx to FLORES-200
* (maybe) Generating a Text to Speech engine for another language
* Moving my book over to my new laptop, and grinding it out to completion
* Scraping websockets to improve the accuracy of bus timetabling. Eventual aim to improve the experience of using the bus to reduce the number of cars on the road. Probably some F# webservice handling most of it, with React Native (web)app, distributed via NFC tags/QR code.
The idea is to make apartment living less lonely, and generally increase goodwill between apartment neighbors.
Non-apartment people are not being excluded, but I think apartment living has lots of unique issues that homeowners - even, say, townhome and condo owners - do not have. And, realistically, you have to start with a focus on something -- some one thing -- in our case, it's apartment-living.
51 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadIt’s not a new idea but we’ve done one huge pivot this year focusing more on a b2b/healthcare market
https://github.com/nnextdb/nnext
I'm also trying to build FastLinq, a value-by-reference Language Integrated Query (LINQ) optimized for high-performance scenarios. It is kind of a weird mix as LINQ in .NET is known for its high overhead.
Finally, I'm working on an Office setting synchronization application. I heard a podcast with Paul Thurrott complaining about the lack of sync solutions, so I thought I would do one for fun.
[1] https://github.com/Genbox/FastHash
Also currently thinking about building a Python 3 search library to be used against Google App Engine. Google deprecated the one from Python 2 and recommends using Elastic Search (which means you're no longer dealing with a Serverless solution)
I didn't document things as well is I should have, of course I was the only user, and had no thought that future me would be looking at it 27 years later.
I wish I had a way to retrieve the data, assuming it's even still good.
I remember using a parallel port driven magnetic tape drive to record them. Probably a device that tar(1) was originally designed for :)
What medium did you use?
I'll admit that it started out as "yet another spaced repetition flashcard app" but over the past few months, with constant UX refinement, I've forged a unique approach (IMHO) to how you review your cards and browse your deck. I've received a lot of good feedback from users in my Discord, so I'm constantly changing things up to improve it.
[1] https://www.freshcardsapp.com/
I will say that the Anki import isn't 100% at the moment, but works reasonably well for simpler decks (ones that don't use HTML or javascript). I'd like to get to 100% Anki compatibility, but it will require some additional features to be implemented first, like a templating system.
Signing a session claim to "log in" means I can authenticate users without storing any sensitive information.
- An Electron template with built-in secure features. I regularly maintain and update the template so it's supported with newer versions of packages. - A collection of free, public-domain recipes. I've wanted to do some version of this for _years_, but am finally getting around to do it again. This time, I'm paying chefs to create recipes for me that will be licensed as public domain.
[0] - https://github.com/reZach/secure-electron-template [1] - https://github.com/reZach/open-recipe-project
Next steps are to start adding sensors to allow the "AI" to experience the physical world. Plans include:
1. GPS module, so it can experience motion and sense its velocity and location in space, etc. The same board also happens to be a cellular data board that will allow the device to upload data to the cloud.
2. One or more accelerometers for more localized perception of motion / orientation in space.
3. One or more cameras for vision. Ideally two so it can do stereo vision and have depth perception, etc.
4. One or more microphones to receive audio.
5. Anything beyond that is getting into pretty speculative area, but I can imagine adding sensors for temperature, barometric pressure, and other environmental factors, and even get into "senses" that humans don't really have, like sensing IR, ultraviolet light, electromagnetic radiation, magnetic flux density, etc.
Now obviously a Raspberry Pi doesn't have enough computing power to do a whole lot from an AI perspective, so the basic concept is to have the data being received by the box pushed to a remote server, where complex training and reasoning stuff will happen. Modules can then be pushed back down to the box so that some operations can be executed locally. That's where both Wifi and cellular data come into play. One of my "next steps" right now is to get the cellular data board configured, and figure out how to get NetworkManager to seamlessly switch between that and the various Wifi AP's that will be available depending on where I take this thing.
Anyway... there's a lot of speculation to all of this, and a lot of it is still very fuzzy in my mind. But the basic concept is simply to focus on the idea of how an AI can learn from physically experiencing the world in a way that's loosely analogous to the way a human does. If you've read any of Ben Goertzel's stuff and are familiar with his whole "baby AI" notion, then you may recognize some spiritual kinship in terms of thinking. I've been heavily influenced by Ben's work, and by OpenCog[1]. In fact, OpenCog (or some parts of it) may become part of this project before all is said and done.
[1]: https://opencog.org/
rasp pi cluster could add more computing power for cheaper.
Yeah, I'm fairly excited about getting into it.
rasp pi cluster could add more computing power for cheaper.
Well, I don't have room in the physical case for more Pi's as it stands, and TBH, I'm not terribly interested in running a cluster at home. It might mean spending some money, but I'd rather just do it all in the cloud. One advantage to that is I can easily scale things up and down dynamically, and I can use a mix of CPU and GPU (or even FPGA) instances without having to go out and buy a lot of expensive hardware.
Not to say that I would never bring part of it "on prem" and run out of my home, but right now the cloud approach feels more manageable.
https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/the-sins-of-chloe-fran... if you would like to read a story about a witch and her demon girlfriend punching a rich white asshole.
I'm gonna take a break for a few days, maybe draw some self-indulgent porn, then clear out my commission queue and start working on the second half of that story.
Found a new (to me at least) directory traversal on a webserver the other day. was pretty jazzed about it.
In the latest development I decided to change route and make it freemium, with all the previous premium features now available to everyone.
This is to make it more appealing to try this kind of discussions that are not your usual way and give ample breath to use all the features until this platform finds its audience I hope ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] https://collanon.com
Rock climbing is a complex, metric-driven, and growing sport that doesn't have good-enough tooling in tech. Outdoor vs indoor is very different, so we're focused on significantly improving the climbing gym experience for now.
https://www.cling-app.com/
I have worked on Android previously, but I'm much more familiar with iOS. In a space with competition, product quality is one of the important factors to gain user interest. That's also the reason I didn't go with React Native, since the tech needs will grow to a point where I won't be able to provide a good enough UX. Once I've proven value, I can hire an Android dev.
https://ngrid.io
Launching soon.
Join the discord https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG
Looking to get back into doing TopCoder after a 10 year break.
Later on planning to add figma plugin & github repo support for paid software or source code.
The reason is I want to be able to sell ebook while I’m writing and collect feedback from the audience who’s bought on presale.
The end goal is to use the library to build a Jellyfin plugin (C#) that handles skipping intros. I think I’ve figured how to call a C library from C#, but there is a lot of work to do to actually get a functional plugin.
[1] https://github.com/aksiksi/needle
Lives at https://github.com/davidventura/picopico
[0] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
* Fixing AnkiDroid to migrate to Google's Scoped Storage model without trashing user data: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki
* Improving the largest bilingual Manx <-> English Corpus + Search Engine. It's recently become the #1 point on the Isle of Man's 10 year language plan, and will probably end up informing a new dictionary for the language
* Generating a machine-translation system using the above, probably also adding Manx to FLORES-200
* (maybe) Generating a Text to Speech engine for another language
* Moving my book over to my new laptop, and grinding it out to completion
* Scraping websockets to improve the accuracy of bus timetabling. Eventual aim to improve the experience of using the bus to reduce the number of cars on the road. Probably some F# webservice handling most of it, with React Native (web)app, distributed via NFC tags/QR code.
Aim is making it an email drip campaign tool with best UX.
https://MyApartmentFamily.com/
The idea is to make apartment living less lonely, and generally increase goodwill between apartment neighbors.
Non-apartment people are not being excluded, but I think apartment living has lots of unique issues that homeowners - even, say, townhome and condo owners - do not have. And, realistically, you have to start with a focus on something -- some one thing -- in our case, it's apartment-living.