tjohnell

Hi all - I posted about Pike several months ago that garnered some attention and wanted to follow up with my project that spun off from that - creating an open dataset for U.S. interstate highways powered by OpenStreetMap data.

I'm fully prepared for one of you to crush my soul and link me to a dataset that already exists that would have made this project dead simple. I was unable to find really simple interstate data that provided directional corridors, ordered exits, and POIs with reachability & drive-time, so I made it for Pike and now I'm making it available to YOU!

Who knows - this could be the last model we see from Anthropic. Or it just becomes the wild west and we figure it out as we go.

I’m good with just tailscale and self-hosted web-apps. Seems the main selling point is either native UX or reduced barriers to entry security-wise. I like barriers to entry.

It will inevitably learn how to think in a way that translates to one (moral) meaning and back but has an ulterior meaning underneath.

I’ve been doing a ragtag version of this with sub-agents, TTS, and STT in Claude Code. Real-time would be pretty awesome, even if it’s just orchestrating other agents. I’m might have to try this on top of my Claude agents. I don’t think the model doing the talking necessarily needs to do the heavy reasoning - just needs to have context on your other agents, delegate, and remain present.

Slop’s Law

If it can be slopped, it will be slopped.

Please share the repo for the API and we will happily provide technical feedback.

AirPods are criminally low on that list.

Hi jmx, I hadn't considered that scenario. I'd be happy to as long as Apple doesn't have me jump through too many hoops. I don't mind a few hoops though.

I'm also interested in your second bullet. The likelihood that you're passing by a cool outdoor event while blazing down the interstate is a lot higher than if you're staying in town. The data would be very difficult to source.

Thanks for the ideas though. Give Pike a try and let me know what you think.

No Android app - however, using the current app as the spec, it would be interesting and fun to take on creating the Android version. I really don't believe it would be that hard. Stay tuned.

Author here - I agree with you :)

Hello, I appreciate the kind words. When I realized that radial search just wasn't going to be accurate (and potentially harmful given people might exit onto another interstate thinking they could grab some Wendy's), I posited to Claude: "I need to understand reachability of a POI from an exit, reachability being defined as driving time less than X amount of time". Claude then suggested two open-source projects: Valhalla & OSRM. I haven't done much research on Valhalla - Claude ultimately recommended OSRM for its "simplicity" but again, I don't honestly know if that's true. Claude can definitely be credited with my decision to choose OSRM.

Hi all - author of Pike here. Happy to answer any questions.

Hi - author of Pike here. You have it right. I don't think the current UX is perfect though. Clearly it's confusing folks!

Hi all - just sharing my latest invention that was recently released to the iOS app store. If you'll be on the road any time soon, please give the app a try!

https://github.com/tldev/posturr

Posturr is a macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch. I’ve always had bad posture at my desk, so I wanted to figure out a way to check myself. This idea is not radically new, but the methods by which Posturr reminds, e.g. blurring screen, colored border, is unique and effective.

Recently released to the App Store at: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/posturr-posture-monitor/id6758...

You inspired me to release it to the app store: https://apple.co/4apwHBk

This should no longer be a problem. I am notarizing the app!

My first prompt was:

"Help me develop a MacOS app that blurs my screen the closer my mouse is to the top of the monitor"

That was my PoC to see if there's APIs Claude could find that would make this easy to do. Once I proved that worked, I asked it to instead help me devise a way to adjust that blur based on my posture. It suggested the vision framework and measuring head height.

Just kept iterating, one step at a time. Any toil I experienced, I asked it to remove or automate.

Posturr is now notarized!

Hi - thanks for the feedback. I've improved CPU usage with the latest release. I'll look into a kill switch.

I reduced the vision processing to about 10 fps as well as reduced camera resolution. I saw about an 80% reduction in CPU! Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks rdslw. I mentioned something similar on my blog post about this app here: https://tomjohnell.com/posturr-a-macos-app-that-blurs-your-s...

I love coming up with fun ideas and only having to worry about the fun part - not the toil. I would never have made this app without llm support.

I added compatibility mode that incorporates the public API. Give it a shot please. I welcome any feedback.

1.0.4 is release with better descriptions.

I've released 1.0.3 with compatibility mode to use public APIs. The blur isn't as good, but better than nothing!

Hi - this is the author. I can explain that, ha!

Right now I'm using a vision library to detect head height which was good enough. I went down a tangent where I hooked it up to my Claude Code instance to take a screen shot and have Claude Code assess how bad my slouch was. Claude would watch a folder for screen shots, read it in, and if it detected bad posture, write to a file the program was watching to adjust blur.

I did this weird work-around so I could use my Claude Code subscription as opposed to the API.

Anyways, it was too slow and Claude was a bad judge of slouchiness. Head height works well enough!

I'll clean this up.

Yes, it actually uses a private API: CGSSetWindowBackgroundBlurRadius. There's public APIs, but they do not provide as gentle of a blur as I was hoping to achieve. iTerm actually uses this same API: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/blob/master/sources/iTerm...

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