willmeyers

It's an interesting experiment and the results are surprising. I will say that if you're a musician I'd bet anything you can make a way cooler and better music video for $25 and 45 minutes with your friends.

I'm working on CT RailTime (https://ctrailtime.com), a better way to travel on CTrail. Their current eTix app is essentially broken and the CT government does not seem to care enough to fix it.

I had to sift through a bunch of different state agency websites before Covid for a job. Most of these websites are nightmares when trying to find information or fill out a form. I can't imagine trying to navigate these sites by yourself with a disability. Honestly, if you're hosting a website on a .gov domain, you should be required to use USWDS (https://designsystem.digital.gov) or something equivalent.

https://bubbles.town/ is fun.

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you.

Basically I extracted the emojis from my Mac's system font. From there I downscaled them to 64x64 pixels and made them grayscale.

With this set of images I experimented with a few different algorithms. I ended up settling for just a regular ordered dithering (Bayer). But! It still didn't look that good. So what I ended up doing was normalizing the darks and lights for each emoji. This was because some emojis are lighter and darker than others. I wanted to create a uniform appearance for all of them.

So the process was (1) get emojis. (2) downscale + grayscale. (3) normalize tone. (4) dither. (5) then upscale

I was inspired by this site to run emojis through a dithering algorithm (https://dither-emojis.pages.dev/)! Nothing beats hand drawn though.

What an incredible test against human capability and optimism to preserve them for so long in hopes that we would one day have to tech to read them without destroying them. Stories like these give me a lot of hope for the future.

People do all the time. On Instagram/TikTok/Facebook they've gotten pretty good at hiding whether something is an ad with videos plus very good content creation. Ads are not what they used to be 10 years ago. People not as adept to these shady tactics fall for it all the time.

You can download the original text here: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/16295/dot_16295_DS1.pdf

I guess this is no different than Google Summer of Code, Code for America, etc but with AI. If it actually helps these orgs and doesn't lock them into Anthropic pricing/models then sure, let it rip.

This is incredible. Thank you for sharing this. I played Orbit so much.

WebRTC is great and so is Pion, thanks for help making and maintaining it! I loved learning about WebRTC from WebRTC for the Curious!!!

I'd argue (and against something that I've believed for a long time) that online (I guess that includes AI now) anonymity is gone and probably something that never really existed. Maybe I'm naive to finally believe this...

We all exist in a physical space (like real communities and neighborhoods). We can wear masks, hats, fake glasses, try and hide your voice...whatever, but your neighbors are always going to know who you are. I'd say that's true for the virtual space now too.

The pseudonym you've used for x years or the VPN you've used doesn't suffice. It's just a costume at this point. Your ISP knows who you are. Your phone carrier knows who you are. Cloudflare and Google and Apple have a fingerprint specific enough to pick you out of a crowd of millions. Every potentially anonymous account is one subpoena or a data breach or one FOIL request away from unmasking it. You were never anonymous. Whatever is going on now is not built for your anonymity.

This is the most insightful comment in this thread. Unfortunately Oks decided to use a clickbait title that made people jump to conclusions.

I mean when you have Larry Ellison and other goons pledging investments in these major studios, it's no wonder people who actually enjoy watching movies don't want to give their money+time to watch some dumbed down bottom of the barrel slime that AI has decided people will sit through.

Thankfully, filmmaking is becoming more and more independent. It's never been easier and cheaper to make a movie and share it to millions of people on YouTube or Vimeo. Why go through Hollywood, investors, or give money to festivals for a chance at success when you can just upload the thing and see what happens?

Innocent people are going to get hurt. Not sure how yet, but, giving a company intimate details about your life never ends well.

For anyone curious, the source code: https://github.com/lelanthran/ZjsComponent/

I made a random number generator API that used a shared caps lock key as entropy (https://eieio.games/blog/the-global-capslock-key/). It didn't really work because bots made everything kind of deterministic. But it's kind of weird.

Code’s here: https://github.com/willmeyers/global-caps-lock-rng

When I visited London a few years ago I went to the British Library and stumbled into their collection (and it was incredibly impressive). I had no idea they had two original Magna Cartas. If you have a chance to see the document at Harvard, you should! It's really something.

impossible deadlines and lots of pressure at work

Freelancing/consulting has unfortunately a lot of this. It helps if you start within your existing network, but once you branch out it gets stressful trying to please your clients.

On using MCP servers with Claude: It's actually been kind of annoying. Sometimes I just need a quick script to copy/paste and it tries to connect to a GitHub repo or write to a local file even when I specify I don't want those things. Overall they're the behavior when using them is wildly inconsistent when I use them. It's annoying I have to manually shut off the MCP servers to get what I want.

I updated the catalogue of movies and added some internal tools to my movies released on YouTube website: We Love Free Movies (https://welovefreemovies.com/). It's hard to share it because it gets flagged because of the name... But yeah, planning to add search, design touch ups, more movies, etc. this year.

Also working out the logistics of offering a microgrant to award people who want to make movies like this!

Game jams might be interesting, especially 24-hour ones. Someone who uses an LLM to handle some coding tasks can focus on the art and mechanics. I think it would still challenging and fair with vibe coding.

I believe Kagi (https://kagi.com/) uses a lot of it.

I saw these guys at WordHack in NYC! Super cool project and incredibly nice people.

Read.cv was the only professional networking website that I enjoyed using (and many others too). It was authentic, unpretentious, and without gimmicks. If anyone wants to make something similar, look at what they did for inspiration.

I live in a relatively residential neighborhood in NYC next to a school (outside of the congestion zone). The morning dropoffs and afternoon pickups are insane. It literally causes a gridlock for a couple hours in a part of the neighborhood that has like 4 intersections. Somehow we have to get back to the days when parents trusted the community that their kid is going to get home safe, otherwise this nonsense is never going to end.

It works as a supplementary resource.

I think this article[1] explains how to use Duolingo effectively. Anyone who believes they can learn a language only spending 5min a day on the app will get frustrated and fail.

1: https://runwes.com/2020/02/11/howilearnedfrench.html

Finch helped me more than I thought it would. It's nice when I meet someone else who uses the app and I get to add them as a friend.

Maybe ten something years ago my dad got a free Ubuntu boot disk somewhere. Curious how he got it because he doesn't work with computers at all lol, but he's a personable person and he meets a lot of people. Knowing I was into computers and programming he gave me the disk. He told me how he loved what "ubuntu" meant: "I am because we are". Ubuntu was my first distro and I am grateful for that.