Software engineer & free-software enthusiast. Worked once as embedded developer and digital systems designer in areas such as energy production, telecom, automotive, maritime. Currently working in architecture software.
Made a musical instruments app for Android
https://github.com/jmiskovic/hexpress
Also made a live coding VR environment
https://github.com/jmiskovic/indeck
I'm on Mastodon, say hi!
https://fosstodon.org/@j_miskov
I like that there is a fallback to read the full text, but why are there two such app modes? I think if the main (non-popup) one should absorb the other's features like scrolling and bookmarks.
For some texts the layout is also important to understand the context. Poems, structured text, paragraph breaks. If you read word by word and stumble into block of structured text, it's a lot of friction to figure out. I would love a background low fidelity representation of paragraphs, like the minimap in code editors, with the current word highlighted there. It could be passively monitored for places to switch mode to reading the full text, and to keep spatial orientation around character dialogs and such. It would have to not draw attention to itself though.
The theme circle icons are not useful, they should preview text background and color.
I see Dyslexic font is already built-in!
Code is not available? It would be fun to hook this to browser extension to fast-read article in a ReadKinetic popup.
I didn't mind the controls at all, they are obviously for touch and not mouse and it seems inspired by video player controls. This is a kind of app that you spend hours with, so better to have more features and options than to be beginner friendly. Very nice app, I like it so far.
Computing power is crazy cheap and does not help. The perceived slowness is because the taken measurements are averaged over second or so. When you step on the scale your weight shifts around and that affects the measurement by far more than half a kg. Averaging gives you better accuracy and more confidence in the result but it doesn't improve the measurement precision.
The scale precision comes from calibration of the measuring mechanism done on factory line at certain weights. If your specific body weight is far from the weights used in calibration, or too much time passed, then the calibration doesn't help much.
A better microcontroller doesn't help at all. Even a cheapest uC from decades ago is good enough. Better ADC and gauge sensor would help, but even more important is good analog engineering to produce self-correcting circuits with decent noise rejection.
In general this category of products is more for tracking changes in your body weight than getting the precise absolute value. And the body weight changes a lot just from hydration level, so the ±.5kg tolerance is considered good enough.
Bad code is result of not following enough good practices rather than following one too many. Goto creates too much cognitive load. It had to be phased out to make room for better ideas on describing the intention with code more clearly.
Two recommendations for puzzle lovers that like more open ended challenges:
Deadly Rooms of Death has same movement style as SSR. It is amazing series of games each with unique mechanics. It often evokes that feeling of being in active communication with puzzle author through evolving level design.
I've also enjoyed Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times, a recently released gem. It is completely opposite of SSR, with how broadly you can approach the puzzles depending on which spells you have available (with many parts becoming too easy if you postpone them). Many games design their puzzles with a single solution. Rhell takes approach of "you cannot pass here, let's see you try" which is a fun spin on the genre. I also enjoyed how you gain abilities through game. In many modern games you unlock higher jumping by collecting skill points and spending them on skill tree. Here the same ability is emergently and organically incorporated into game mechanics. Over the playthrough the player collects new spell runes; at one point you gain rune to apply the spells to yourself. By assigning a combo strong-raise-on-self to a hotkey, you empower the character with the higher jump ability and stop using the normal jump. There's all kind of crazy and innovative ideas in there and the entire game is delightful.
I'll add, if you have a VR headset, modded HL1 runs beautifully on it with full hand controller support for gun aiming and crowbar smashing. I've also heard lots of praises for HL2 VR mod bringing the game to new levels, I have yet to try it myself.
That's unfair. Binary driver blobs are blackmail: "you bought the hardware, but parts of the laptop won't work unless you agree to run this mysterious bundle insecurely". Open weight is more like "here's a frozen brain you can thaw in a safe harness to do your bidding".
Unfortunately when the software is done, the product lifetime comes to a close soon after. Everything around the product changes and the software needs to change to keep up. Smart lightbulbs need apps to keep working and you get kicked out of app stores if you don't keep up with never-ending churn Apple and Google imposes on you.
The only way to run older games is to use emulators and other 3rd party effort, that also needs to be continually updated. When you claim that any piece of software is done and completed, you've only externalized the effort required to keep it useful.
I absolutely agree with your pushback against feature creep. That is unfortunately a reflection of internal corporation value system, while the successful open source projects often know where to draw the line.
Do an experiment. Take any single photograph and try to recreate any aspect of it with the AI. For example, try to match overall vibe of the color palette _exactly_ as it is on your photo. Or try to match the exact camera angle. Or exact composition. How many slot spins did it take? How many would it take to match multiple aspects of a single image?
Creativity involves an extra step, imagining something in your mind eye and then bringing it to life. Not settling for whatever comes out, but demanding more. As you learn any craft your ability to articulate increases beyond happy little accidents into intentional mastery. Not so much with AI.
The argument about killing creativity makes a lot of sense to me. Our brains are inherently lazy and always they seek paths of least resistance. That's the intelligence, basically, strategizing for best outcome with least effort. AI models require ~zero effort to map your prompt to a mere sliver of the entire possibility space. How can we then convince ourselves to spend weeks or years to try to reach some novel art styles, when they require so much manual labor and the attention muscle that we allowed to deteriorate away?
Maybe? I block popups, use privacy badger to deprive the usual suspects of my data, use one extension for finer control over video playback speed and one more to make reddit redirect back to old interface. I only use 7 of them because of security nightmare they are in general.
I also hate concept of summaries, as well as related concept of AI text inflation.
I'm also against any third party being involved here. I'm pointing out the potential of AI in the browser, but for me it has to be locally run or it is a no go.
My point is that browser plays a central role in our digital interactions. Extensions help with smoothing out the experience. LLMs could write those extensions, or serve as an agent to further make the online interactions more pleasant. I could see myself using it to either optimize my existing experience, or to vastly broaden the communication surface in directions that currently hold too much friction.
The rest was a joke, sorry if it made your day worse.
Right now all the sites I frequent are good enough, otherwise I'd drop them. I don't interact with Discord, Bluesky, X, Instagram at all, and I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of high quality interpersonal communication because I have low tolerance for their UX and their lack of respect for users.
I find it very hard to believe that either every site you interact with works exactly as you want it to work, or that you have the time/capacity to adjust them all with custom extensions. I get that there are downsides but you don't see any upsides?
A browser with current definition obviously doesn't "need" AI. And we also know all too well how it's going to turn out - they will both use the AI to push ads onto us and also collect and sell our personal data.
However, a strong locally-executed AI would have potential to vastly improve our experience of web! So much work is done in browsers could be enhanced or automated with custom agents. You'd no longer need any browser extensions (which are privacy nightmare when the ownership secretly changes hands). Your agents could browse local shops for personalized gifts or discounts, you could set up very complex watches on classified ads. You could work around any lacking features of any website or a combination of several websites, to get exactly what you seek and to filter out anything that is noise to you. You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain. With an AGI-level AI maybe even the Reddit could be made usable again.
Of course this is all assuming that the web doesn't adapt to become even more closed and hostile.
I was talking about web as technology stack. The tech is battle proven and capable. I had great success in getting some ancient web projects to run locally, less luck with Windows projects and even less with Linux sources.
You are right that by the nature of web the long term stability is not guaranteed. The ecosystem could do more to encourage decoupling and graceful degradation. About 95% of modern web is competing in sharing your data to even more "parties with legitimate interest".
This is easy to fix with local storage. You reopen the tab and you're right where you left it. Unfortunately the companies see it as an opportunity to lock users in with cloud saving.
The allure is that the web is the most open, most stable and the most cross-device platform we have. Almost anything that was made for web still works today, with Flash and Java applets being the two big exceptions. Following the Lindy effect the self-contained web apps of today will still be operational far into the future.
Contrast this with Android's pathetic record of constantly breaking backward compatibility and restricting what software the users can even run on their devices.
Exactly. They have this text on patreon about page, just not on project readme. The rest is the copy/paste from there:
ACID DROP is a custom firmware designed for the LilyGO T-Deck, an ESP32 microcontroller popular among DIY enthusiasts. Unlike any existing firmware, Acid Drop is built from the ground up in C++, aiming to bring a wide range of features to the T-Deck. Currently in beta and under active development, we have plans to include IRC, SSH, ChatGPT, Gotify, Wardriving, and Meshtastic integration. With a focus on privacy and security, we're implementing features like WireGuard support, MAC address randomization, and secure boot.
We also have big plans and active development underway to make ACID DROP a powerful tool for pentesting. Planned features include creating Wi-Fi access points, executing evil port attacks, performing deauth attacks, and conducting BLE attacks. These tools are intended for testing on your own devices, giving you the ability to explore and understand security vulnerabilities in a controlled and ethical manner.
Made a musical instruments app for Android https://github.com/jmiskovic/hexpress
Also made a live coding VR environment https://github.com/jmiskovic/indeck
I'm on Mastodon, say hi! https://fosstodon.org/@j_miskov