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Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

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691–700 of 913 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#692
I've built a lot of chatbots specifically in the space of retreving and updating large databases, where business users can query their huge database instead of sitting and writing SQL queries.

I am planning on building a run club app next trying to build a community of my own

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#694
I made a home dashboard (that I access on my iPad) that talks to my Philips Hue bridge for controlling my house's lights, and also shows train arrival times + what my dog should be clothed in (if at all) for her walks (there was a smallish period of time here in nyc where one day you'd have to wear a jacket and the next day you'd be sweating even in shorts). It also shows our family calendar (wife + self) - all family birthdays in the next 4 days, any events, etc

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#695
The Ubuntu DDoS drove me to build a new apt-cacher with two goals: be able to supply typical packages when the upstream is unavailable and be more reliable than the existing apt-cacher/apt-cacher-ng. It's looking like I'll be doing a 1.0 release next week (it's been in beta for ~3 weeks).

https://github.com/linsomniac/apt-cacher-ultra

We do ground-up respins of half of our dev+stg cluster every morning, to test our automation, but this didn't work during the DDoS. I disabled those respins for the week of the DDoS, but if we had a fire at the office and needed to bring back up our dev+stg environment that would have been a problem: our normal ansible automation wouldn't have worked to set up a new dev+stg cluster.

apt-cacher-ultra has an "adoption" process where when it detects new repo meta-data it holds off on serving it up until it has downloaded any changed "hot" packages (packages we've fetched in the last N days), then it switches over to that new snapshot of the repo. I've been able to shut down our upstream Internet and then do a new OS install and apt update+upgrade it successfully.

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#696

On my list of build it from scratch has always been to build a programming language. So with the help of AI I was able to get it done! Why did I build it? At work I've seen two major problems with our ai workflows/ skills libraries. There is a lack of determinism when your whole workflow is a markdown file of 100 steps, and markdown skill libraries lack composability. Meaning we violate things like DRY in the all the…

I’ve got a lukewarm IQ, would you mind explaining and example/use case for this?

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#697
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956, before I was born. AI itself is even older than that (e.g. William Grey Walter's robots, Elmer and Elsie in 1948), but it was called cybernetics back then. I've been doing symbolic AI, on and off, since the 1980s.

I assume, though, you mean LLMs. I haven't used them first hand, but I have fairly recently implemented a multi-layer artificial neural network in C, mostly as a learning exercise, but as I had previously built a speech spectrogram in Lisp, I thought I'd try to use it to recognize phonemes, with one hidden layer. The Lisp communicated with the ANN via a Unix pipe. It worked reasonably well for just vowels, but when I added other sounds (e.g. l, r, s, z), its performance deteriorated. I think the C is bug free, but I don't know an easy way to train the ANN. I've tried adding to the training set, adding an extra layer, changing the number of neurons in the hidden layer. The usual debugging skills don't seem to help there.

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#698
Built a pwa (NextJS, Mongo) to manage a friend group prediction game for the World Cup. Every year someone from the group would volunteer to put together an excel sheet, collect predictions, etc etc. It was A LOT of work, so decided to try building something with Claude. https://toqui.app/en

It’s getting good traction in South America!

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#699
A vocabulary flash card app. I know I know, there's a million.

None of them had share extension feature so whenever you are reading on the web or in a book you highlight the word share directly to the app and it automatically looks up the definition.

Also added a voice review (with gemini native audio model) so you can chat your reviews.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vocabulary-flash-cards/id67750...

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#700
post #80

I have made a TUI tool for organizing and authoring sermons written by myself. It also has a third mode for reading one or two bible versions in parallel. I love the interface and keep adding features to make it easy to navigate in and something that actually helps me to organize and write sermons. Some features are to have notes at specific places in the bible, summaries, notes, exports to html/pdf, metadata for eac…

"Hi everyone, today we're going to read the book of Acts." opens terminal (made me smile)

I could, but I would most likely print out a copy from the pdf export or bring a tablet. ;-)
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