It still sounds quite complicated because you’re creating all this stuff but there has to be some overhead of keeping it all running, repos, hosting, builds etc. I feel like there needs to be a mash up of agents-cloud-MSAccess to actually make this into an accessible way of building for the average person. People build spreadsheets to provide them themselves with “apps” all the time, so it needs to be at that level of ease.
Software for One
181–190 of 301 posts
Re: Software for One
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s not like “play more music like this” is something we ever needed AI for. Borderline off-topic, but I love how fast the goal post moves. A decade or two ago "Similar music to this" was definitively in the realm of AI/ML, now it's some full-stack dev's afternoon to implement.
What are you even talking about? No, of course music recommendation systems had nothing to do with LLMs two decades ago (which is obviously the crux of the discussion), that is insane. And no one has said anything about a “full-stack dev's afternoon”, I’ll kindly ask that you don’t straw man. No goal posts are moving, that fallacy does not mean “argument I don’t like or understand”. What happened to good faith discus…
> What are you even talking about? No, of course music recommendation systems had nothing to do with LLMs two decades ago (which is obviously the crux of the discussion), that is insane.
Of course not, but just some years ago, when people talked about "AI" in ML circles, they weren't exclusively talking about LLMs, which you seemed to have automatically and exclusively associated "AI" with. It's much larger than just LLMs, although the ecosystem is flooded with LLMs at the moment. I thought this very movement, where tons of people, not just you, have this "AI === LLMs" association, when again, it used to not be so.
Re: Software for One
#183I joked a while back that it was faster to vibe-code a white noise generator than to download a white-noise app. I've since tested that theory on the Google Play Store (iOS has one built in), and it was depressingly true. The slow part was trying to find an app that didn't waste your time with ads.
The signal to noise will be so high that we will resort to technical magazine to find out useful apps. Just like the old day without search engine.
Re: Software for One
#184This is nice, but Apple essentially blocks sideloading (outside test flight environment) and Google is moving there as well. While it has never been easier to produce individualized software, it was never more difficult on the official platforms, unless one wants to create their own OS (at some point that might be possible as well).
maybe we need more like raspberry pi smartphone-sized tablets projects so people can sideload whatever they want like like "RasPad" (or other devices like the Pinephone)
Re: Software for One
#185Side note, why not just deploy onto a VPS and save the money from using hosted services, as well as protecting yourself from when they inevitably go down? The CBA clearly shows that while active development is going on its trivial to have hosted service subscriptions because the AI sub is way more, but what if that sub disappears? You're left paying (relatively) exorbitant amounts compared to $1-10 per month per VPS…
Thought the same thing, sounds like the apps are web apps based on the stack, which means all these apps could be build with Go, Datastar (or htmx), and sqlite and hosted for a fraction of the cost.
Re: Software for One
#186It's somewhat unfortunate that programming is still pretty hard to start with. Early home computers would boot up with BASIC. Granted, the user experience was horrible, but at least you could start programming right away. What is stopping us from creating an operating system that has programming as a first class citizen? There is JavaScript in the browser, but that still feels as an afterthought, and incurs all kinds…
> What is stopping us from creating an operating system that has programming as a first class citizen? Isn't that just any computer booting into a terminal?
That would be the 1980s approach. I would be more interested in being able to read an email and then say something along the lines of:
in context/mail:
when today/evening:
if content excites me:
send alert
Re: Software for One
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran across WebXDC this past weekend, and I'm intrigued. I've built a few apps on it already, and I'm very pleasantly surprised by how cleverly inverted the whole model is (in combination with ChatMail). Delta Chat is available on iOS, I believe. I use Arcanechat on Android. https://webxdc.org/ https://chatmail.at/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/delta-chat/id1459523234 https://arcanechat.me/ The beauty of the ecosyst…
Interesting. What apps have you built? How/where is state maintained?
Yeah, it's a pretty fascinating architecture. I already have a side project called AppDeck where I've been buliding out a WebDAV server and a suite of HTML apps that know how to save modified copies of themselves back to the server. I've been using it for a couple of years, and the suite is growing - tools, apps, games, etc.
My son had written a game like this called "Quantum Chain" that had basic leaderboard functionality. That was the first app we ported: the platform injects the webcdx.js shim, and we update Quantum Chain to post messages to it when someone finished a game with a high score. This is replicated out to the relays the same way every message in the group chat is. When the app fires up, Delta/ArcaneChat replay all messages that are typed for that app back to it, and it restores it's state that way. There's some localstorage caching to make this a bit more efficient as the stream grows.
So it's a bit like several services reading off the same kafka stream to stay in sync.
I've since ported over (and massive improved) my implementation of KenKen, which also has leaderboards. I then took on realtime gameplay: a card game my family likes called "Shithead" that supports 2-6 players. I built a first version in about 6 hours, and I'm still working out session management (so folks can join and leave games and everything syncs properly). Still a couple of edge cases to fix, but overall, it been trivially easy to bring over webapps to the platform that already exist, and a few hours of effort to create a new one.
I'm pretty thrilled with the whole ecosystem, as it gets me away from all the BS the companies have layered on top of the basic "Apps with Friends" experience ArcaneChat offers.
Re: Software for One
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran across WebXDC this past weekend, and I'm intrigued. I've built a few apps on it already, and I'm very pleasantly surprised by how cleverly inverted the whole model is (in combination with ChatMail). Delta Chat is available on iOS, I believe. I use Arcanechat on Android. https://webxdc.org/ https://chatmail.at/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/delta-chat/id1459523234 https://arcanechat.me/ The beauty of the ecosyst…
Interesting. What apps have you built? How/where is state maintained?
Related: You can perfectly well upload WebXDC's to your "Saved Messages" channel (the channel where you DM yourself) to have a single user app running on the platform. It already has close to 200 apps of various sorts you can try from the default "app directory", but of course any site can be used as the directory.
Re: Software for One
#189This is nice, but Apple essentially blocks sideloading (outside test flight environment) and Google is moving there as well. While it has never been easier to produce individualized software, it was never more difficult on the official platforms, unless one wants to create their own OS (at some point that might be possible as well).
What's the current state of web apps on IOS? Does Safari yet support local databases well enough to build useful web apps?
Pretty much every app I can think of building for my family could just be a website iff local browser-resident persistent data was a thing. (And in some cases I wouldn't even need that if they were going to be always-online.)
Re: Software for One
#190Oh my this is so true:
* I waited for Duolingo to support Mongolian for years, and in one evening, created my own DuoMongo https://github.com/matusfaro/DuoMongo
* I wanted an LLM to mock up a server to speak arbitrary network protocols across any layer (e.g. http/tcp/bgp/snmp/arp) for protocol development/testing/cybersecurity and I got it: https://smotanacom.github.io/netget/
* I wanted a way to inspect/route LLM calls coming from my laptop, something like OpenRouter, but locally running, so I built LocalRouter: https://localrouter.ai/
No one is using these, but I love them!
Also it allows me to prototype so quickly, currently had an idea on a Language Server Protocol (LSP) that compiles English language into a set of software requirements (Intermediary Results) and to generate code and tests against those reqs.