Ask HN: What are you *not* working on?

i stopped working on https://github.com/andrewarrow/cutlass

it was a way to generate FCP (Final Cut Pro) xml files.

Was a lot of fun for a few months but that's kinda typical for me. I seem to always move on.

(1) Around the Christmas break I made a chess program in Python that was good enough to challenge my son who was a serious beginner. I did some work towards a Java program that would be able to respect time control that I could take to the chess club but my son got into sewing rather than chess and then got into the guitar which is really his thing. (The other night he unplugged one subwoofer from my A/V system and hooked it up to a prototype 1-string electric octopus’s!). I really gave up on this one.

(2) I have a QooCam Ego stereo camera so far my main way of sharing images is the red/cyan anaglyph which only goes so far. I want to make something for sharing them online, that probably includes some UI I can do to adjust the ‘stereo window’ by shifting the images horizontally and something where you can walk around in an art gallery. It can all be done with WebXR, three.js, A-frame and all that but to get it to work on the Meta Quest 3 I’ll need to be careful about memory management. Might do it someday but I am so busy taking photos, developing photos, posting on my socials, and trying to sell more sports and event work.

(3) I want to build a general purpose text classification framework that automatically trains and selects from: bag of words, ModernBERT + pooling + Classical ML , and ModernBERT + (Bi)LSTM. I was working to build one in 2017 at a job which was marginally successful, today I know a lot more and the technology is better. This is blocked by transitioning my ‘nemesis’ system for collecting training data to Postgres away from arango though maybe that’s an excuse because if I didn’t care about my other projects in the queue I could start working from Kaggle downloads which I need to do anyway because it has to be ‘general’ and not just work for my problems.

I am not working on:

- An entirely user-mode Docker container runtime for Windows, which based on my initial research would have to be qemu running Linux slowly. Maybe it could all be WASM'd into the browser (even more slowly)? The interesting part there would be interfacing storage/networking vs. the browser.

- Nested Windows RDP X509 [smart card] authentication through Guacamole or other browser-based RDP client into another RDP session.

- Free backup as formerly offered by CrashPlan "Home Family" sharing ended in 2017, using empty hard drive space of people you know and trust. Version 2 would support a virtual file system allowing specifying the number of redundant copies of replaceable rarely/never used operating system and software files to pull over the network when needed instead of duplicating on all computers, ideally with a slider choosing between disk space and network bandwidth. I considered licensing VirusTotal so my file system for anything that might exist on another computer is basically a SHA256 hash list + local cache, but that costs enough it would have to be a commercial business.

- My no longer supported Amazon Glow, a $250 refunded Amazon experiment that was the most awesome piece of technology connecting children with their relatives I've ever seen. I'd like to be able to deploy my own software but I'm guessing it remains as locked down as the Echo etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/hardwarehacking/comments/119acbh/re... https://instrumental.com/resources/teardown/amazon-glow/

Anything that involves a large corporation. Everything they touch just gets worse and it's not like they're even effectively extracting rent. It's all just incompetent administration sucking oxygen out of everything.