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Software for One

ajwaxman.com

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Re: Software for One

#261

Post by copperx »

rvz wrote: post #12
fny wrote: post #2

This is such a romantic idea, but unfortunately Apple and Google are hostile to this model. Of the two, iOS is /worst/ for running vibe coded apps. You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week. Distribution is a also pain in the ass even for personal use alone (you can't just toss around an IPA). Finally, so many useful APIs are totally locked u…

> You need to pay $99 a year to be an Apple developer if you want your app to live on your phone for more than a a week. No complaints over paying more than >$100 a month in subscriptions with coding agents but $99 a year is some how too much? Yet another reason why “developers” are just consumers that are selective complainers that want their tools to cost $0.00. Clearly as already stated in the article, hosting and…

> Clearly as already stated in the article, hosting and distribution is not free.

That's the point. We don't want hosting or distribution.

Re: Software for One

#263

Post by [deleted] »

runarberg wrote: post #254
yen223 wrote: post #131

I 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.

I mean white noise generators are literally less then 20 lines of JavaScript. I wrote one (without an LLM) just now in less then 10 minutes: const audioCtx = new AudioContext(); const sr = audioCtx.sampleRate; const buffer = audioCtx.createBuffer(2, 2 * sr, sr); for (let channel = 0; channel { source.start(); }); document.body.append(button);

[deleted]

Re: Software for One

#264

Post by IanCal »

tptacek wrote: post #208
IanCal wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recommendation algorithms are, frankly, weird as a user. Something watches your tiny interactions and, with zero concept of anything happening, gets surprisingly good at predicting your next interactions. It’d be like eating and having an alien with no concept of food or taste staring at how much your facial muscles change and making notes. Then recommending places to you based on the other people they’ve been studyi…

They are weird. But stuff like this solves one of my great challenges in life, which is that I've got many tens of thousands of songs in my library but only manage to hear tiny repetitive epicycles of them. I don't want a tight rotation of the same 200 songs, and I don't literally want to randomly walk my whole library, and I don't want to allocate lots of time curating exactly what I'm going to listen to. LLMs are g…

Oh I mean LLMs are the opposite, they’re not the same blind optimisation thing weirdly watching you with no core understanding. They’re great for this kind of thing.

Re: Software for One

#265

Post by chrysoprace »

SyneRyder wrote: post #74
chrysoprace wrote: post #4

I'm building a podcast app just for me, because the podcast app I typically use (PocketCasts) is really good but there's just a couple of features I'd like and they don't bring out a lot of new features since it's not a monthly SaaS. LLMs are a good help here because side projects typically slow down for me when I run into bugs / troubleshooting. So while I genuinely believe struggle is necessary for learning, being…

> ...they don't bring out a lot of new features since it's not a monthly SaaS. But it is! The Patron level of Pocket Casts is $15.99 / month! I used to love Pocket Casts, but it didn't have the ability to easily add an RSS feed URL locally without submitting it to their index - which I don't want to do with my AI's personalised morning podcast (and that's another category, Podcast For One). I've had to use AntennaPod…

It wasn't when I bought it and I was grandfathered into a perpetual subscription. I don't want it to be a monthly SaaS, I guess was my point. It does most of what I want it to do and that's fine.

AntennaPod is good but it really lacks in UX polish / defaults. I say go for gold and make your own personal apps. My personal podcast app won't do what your idea of a personal podcast app should do so you can make the app that you want with an LLM subscription.

Re: Software for One

#267

Post by forsalebypwner »

mft_ wrote: post #233
mercutio2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to pay Apple $99. You can make perfectly good apps that run great with a free account. They expire in a week instead of 3 months (for TestFlight builds). That's it. You can redeploy with minimal effort. You have to reauth with Apple every ~30 days. The reauth is the only part of that you can't have a cron job run (you need to authenticate the keychain). For normie folks, the hoops here are mildly annoy…

> You can redeploy with minimal effort. Can I ask what your workflow is for this "minimal effort"? Maybe I'm missing something, as I thought it would require manual faffing with laptop, Xcode, etc. every week? (PS I've tried the two prominent sideloading approaches, but couldn't get either of them to work on my iPhone.)

AltStore, Sideloadly, SideStore all have mechanisms for automating the weekly redeploys, to name a few.

Re: Software for One

#268

Post by up-the-hill-4 »

kubanczyk wrote: post #258
runarberg wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you want to learn Mongolian or did you want to play a video game where you pretended to learn Mongolian. Because if it was the former, plenty of resources have been available for you for years. You could have walked into your local bookstore and bought a textbook, hired a tutor on italki, downloaded an anki deck, listened to MNB broadcasts etc. etc. I think LLMs are pretty similar to DuoLingo. It is a tool that m…

My anecdata is that both Duolingo and LLMs are useful in learning. Yes, you have to put in the work. Seeing the usual HN hate on Duolingo specifically, I wonder whether it's blind. I might have missed scientific research about it causing cancer.

Responding with my own anecdata: Duolingo is not bad, but better options exist, in with a gap in quality and quantity that you might as well just use those (admittedly, I have been learning Spanish and Japanese, languages that have a lot more resources than Mongolian).

Speaking with anyone who has intensively learnt languages, FSRS is the best way to remember vocabulary (you will need a separate source to actually learn it). And I've found that books often offer more structured practice and introduction. After you've outgrown books, picking up words from real conversations / media is much faster and makes you more likely to actually remember them.

And for Duolingo, there are many things to nitpick about. The obsessive gamification, the hearts (and the current energy) system that prioritizes getting answers correct by guesswork and cheating or being limited to a few minutes a day, the company firing chunks of it's core translation and language staff.

Duolingo is more than adequate, however, if you plan to do 5 min / day and just want to keep a streak going. I have seen people who have gotten real results from it too.

Re: Software for One

#269

Post by callc »

storus wrote: post #246
callc wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/sideload/install/g Sideloading implies a subversive action, which we should not be primed to think.

Sideloading also means installing an app you don't want to publish on any marketplace (for your own or family/friends use). Is there a better word for it?

Installing.

The ability to install software on your own device should be independent of any marketplace.

Re: Software for One

#270

Post by efortis »

For the backend of my personal webapps I’m using Nginx with its WebDAV module.

WebDAV is a protocol for managing files. So I basically have plain json files I read and overwrite.

  GET /mydata.json
  PUT /mydata.json
For auth, Basic auth, which is built-in in the module and in browsers. so it’s just a text file with a username and a hashed pwd.

On the phone, I “Add to Home Screen” from Safari

For backups, in my home router I have a cron that rsyncs the json files.

The VPS costs $12/mo

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