I went from OpenSCAD -> cadquery/build123d -> Zoo/KCL
It still is early days, and it needs some more helper functions but it's really nice having two-way capabilities (not just code -> model, but also the reverse).
Of course having Text-to-model as a first class citizen is also nice.
I have played with this but been underwhelmed. However I do think probably on the right track.
I know the ecosystem not-at-all (sum total knowledge of the CAD ecosystem is that my kids got a Bambu printer for Hanukkah) but it feels to me that current LLMs should be able to generate specs for something like https://partcad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, which can then be sliced etc.
Curious to know what others think? I come at this from the position of zero interest in developing the fine design skills needed to master but wanting to be able to build and tweak basic functional designs.
I want to like Zoo but the rendering engine is so buggy currently that it’s not really usable for more than simple shapes. The text-to-CAD feature they highlight is slow and error-prone, so much so that they explicitly use a “prebuilt” version in the tutorial, and each time I tried it, it gave tool errors or took so long I just did it manually.
Zed looks really cool and I would love to give it a try, but I am just too beholden to devcontainers. I know there are workarounds to use them with Zed but with many extra steps compared to VS Code and it's forks. I can't go back to not having a totally integrated container per repo.
Exactly what I was thinking. Wish I had the time and expertise to give adding support for this codec myself a go. Streaming Clair Obscure over my LAN via Sunshine / Moonlight is exactly my use-case and the latency could definitely be better.
Any chance it could use seamless transport switching? It would be so awesome if it could switch to cellular(if available) or wifi-direct as needed on the fly. I have been thinking about creating such an app but lacked the time.
I actually have this kind of working on a branch - really don't fancy hosting any infrastructure myself though - so I was intending it to be a Windows service or docker container you have to setup and pair with. Once you've done that - the endpoint is included in any group you create, and treated as an extra node in the graph. If available and lower latency than other routes, it'll be used.
Was trying to keep things simple though - the separate server seemed a step too far for most people I talked to about it.
This sounds perfect for my use case. I'm a mountain biker who doesn't mind setting up hosting infra. It's fairly common when mountain biking to unintentionally get separated by line-of-sight or more than 75M even among very similarly skilled riders. Even on straight easy trails, just the dust cloud generated by the rider ahead can cause you to back off significant distance if it's dusty.
I've used these[0] in the past and they worked ok. I lost the pair I bought when traveling and thought using the plethora of radios I have with me anyway on my phone with an earbud headphone would be much better replacement. Would be great for group rides to just send an app link instead of suggesting they all buy $100 hardware.
Honestly I think a well marketed and polished commercial app would have both Sena and Cardo[1] both quite existentially scared.
App will be held down by the hardware. Smartphones are not meant to transmit with the necessary power, and you also don't get direct access to the radio, so you can't run custom protocols like Sena/Cardo, but you must transmit over the actual bluetooth or actual WiFi.
I'd stayed away from WiFi Direct because Android and iOS don't play nicely with it - but looks like the EU has forced Apple to support WiFi Aware in iOS 26. It still looks like it would require A LOT of manual pairing through the system UI if you join a group with new people though. I really wanted to keep the single password (or qr code scan/NFC tap) to join.
Feels like swimming against the current tho. Said dev experience poorly emulates actual linux at best.
Also, I’d think twice before running custom windows isos or unvetted scripts.
I've been thinking along similar lines for a while now, among a lot of users there isn't a sense of security 'hygiene' and a lot of trust granted that doesn't have a foundation beyond looking legit (i.e. has a github). The main thing that seems to be stop it happening is a lack of returns compared to going after a corporation or social engineering/phishing to find someone who will give you money. What I do wonder about is supply chain attacks on something used by a lot of smaller projects, which would end up hitting more targets compared to compromising individual small projects.
Be wary, unknown actors are targeting devs. My email that is only exposed in github recieves targeted mails on the regular, maybe randomly or maybe because I released and contributed to several popular code bases.
Dev credentials tend to unlock more doors than hacking a soccer mom.
I think it might be brutal for more than junior people now. I thought I would be fine when my previous employer decided to offshore all of engineering and I was laid off as a result. I have been at an architect/lead/principal level for the last 7 years doing backend work with mostly state-of-the-art tech on AWS. 15 years experience total, and just getting no traction despite referrals. None of my jobs were at hyperscale FAANG types, or super sexy stuff. I'm not a thought leader with an influential blog nor have I built an open source library with 5k stars. Maybe that is what it takes to get a call back now? I'm a regular hacker who loves technology and never dreamed I would be struggling this badly.
I have 15 years of experience working on boring tech stacks, no social media presence at all, and I’m doing okay.
I’d suggest hitting up some tech recruiters and downgrading your past job titles. As far as your job search is concerned, you weren’t a “lead architect” using “state-of-the-art tech”, you were a Staff DevOps Engineer with experience in <insert AWS buzzwords here>. Etc etc.
Mindset. Be humble and open to learning, don’t be desperate. Explain that this is what you love to do. That you genuinely care about the product/mission/service and you’ll land something. If you go in “I need a paycheck, I can code”, that’s not very compelling. I can teach someone to code. What I can’t teach is for someone to be hungry to learn.
So be positive, be humble, be sharp, and be willing.
In terms of impact, LLMs might be the biggest leap forward in computing history, surpassing the internet and mobile computing. And we are just at the dawn of it. Even if not full AGI, computers can now understand humans and reason. The excitement is justified.
This is all devolving into layers of semantics, but, “…capable of knowingly lying,” is not the same as “knows when it’s lying,” and I think the latter is far more problematic.
Nonsense. I was a semi-technical writer who went from only making static websites to building fully interactive Javascript apps in a few weeks when I first got ChatGPT. I enjoyed it so much I'm now switching careers into software development.
GPT-4 is the best tutor and troubleshooter I've ever had. If it's not useful to you then I'm guessing you're either using it wrong or you're never trying anything new / challenging.
> If it's not useful to you then I'm guessing you're either using it wrong or you're never trying anything new / challenging.
That’s a bold statement coming from someone with (respectfully) not very much experience with programming. I’ve tried using GPT-4 for my work that involves firmware engineering, as well as some design questions regarding backend web services in Go, and it was pretty unhelpful in both cases (and at times dangerous in memory constrained environments). That being said, I’m not willing to write it off completely. I’m sure it’s useful for some like yourself and not useful for others like me. But ultimately the world of programming extends way beyond JavaScript apps. Especially when it comes to things that are new and challenging.
Smoothing over the first few hundred hours of the process but doing increasingly little over the next 20,000 is hardly revolutionary. LLMs are a useful documentation interface, but struggle to take even simple problems to the hole, let alone do something truly novel. There's no reason to believe they'll necessarily lead to AGI. This stuff may seem earth-shattering to the layman or paper pusher, but it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what even I (who I would consider to be of little talent or prowess) can do. It mostly just gums up the front page of HN.
>Smoothing over the first few hundred hours of the process but doing increasingly little over the next 20,000 is hardly revolutionary.
I disagree with this characterization, but even if it were true I believe it's still revolutionary.
A mentor that can competently get anyone hundreds of hours of individualized instruction in any new field is nearly priceless.
Do you remember what it feels like to try something completely new and challenging? Many people never even try because it's so daunting. Now you've got a coach that can talk you through it every step of the way, and is incredible at troubleshooting.
Is Lemmy the leading candidate for a viable reddit replacement? Are there any other serious efforts in this space?
HN has such an insane depth of talent that I am surprised I haven't seen a few ShowHN posts that read something like:
"Hi guys, I was bored last weekend so I thought it would be fun to build a reddit clone as a single Rust binary with an imbedded bespoke graph database. It uses a fine tuned LLaMA model for optional auto-moderation. So far it's handling sustained 1.6M / posts sec on my 2015 MacBook Pro. If I have some time this next week I will add distributed mode with Raft or CRDTs. Hope you guys like it."
Why would building it require running it? It's just software. There can be a separate installation of it per community. Like WordPress, or any old phpBB forum.
> The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.
The people who want to run something that's like Reddit.com, shouldn't, sure.
I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user expectations.
I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just StackExchange!)
Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"? That is, it was a single-subreddit fork — I believe the only one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture — of the proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream", so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit project.)
I think the "subreddit" form being the decentralized aspect to a greater hub would be a better format than lemmy, which is basically a whole reddit that can attach to other reddits. Want a community? Run an instance equivalent to a subreddit for your topics. Want an offtopic or a circle jerk sub? two more instances.
The only real censorship power the main hub would have would be a de-listing, but it wouldn't take down the instance entirely.
I don't know what you think of Reddit as, but I think of it as two things:
- a collection of independent niche communities that are just using Reddit for hosting, whose members don't think of themselves as visiting "Reddit" but rather as visiting those specific community forums. This is the valuable part of Reddit, that generates and gathers original content and novel discussions that can't be found anywhere else on the Internet. This is the part everyone's rushing to preserve/archive or migrate elsewhere.
- a Usenet-like set of generic default-subscribed "category" subreddits, that just act as content aggregators to bubble up the "least controversial" stuff in each category from across the Internet. Nobody cares much about this (other than Reddit's investors), since it's just another view on the same content that gets surfaced through every other social network one way or another.
If you think of Reddit as just the valuable part, and forget about the junk, then you can reinterpret the Reddit UX like so: Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts. But 1. this isn't crucial to how users engage with these communities; and 2. you could preserve this property anyway, by having a shared SSO system (like how WordPress.com works) and by making Reddit-the-software federate its posts through ActivityPub. Then a "Reddit client" would actually just be a fancier kind of RSS reader that also knows how to post to individual communities' servers. But each server would still be "sovereign" over its own administration, being able to ban or approval-queue users, etc.
> Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts.
I disagree with the "just happens to have" part of this. The single-pane view is the killer feature of Reddit for me. I've tried to engage in smaller forums before, and small, niche communities have valuable but infrequent content. Being able to see which of the small communities have fantastic posts today is valuable, and encourages me to participate in some of the less headlining posts.
For a good example, consider /r/ultralight, which is a backpacking community focused on keeping weight off your back. 90% of the posts are "Help me shave weight! (The 10 pound lead weight I carry is sentimental and non-negotiable.)" Slightly more interesting are new product reviews, and the best are overviews of product categories.
I would not visit a standalone forum for once-a-month interesting content. But I'll definitely follow the sub, which leads me to 1) see all of the most interesting posts, and 2) engage with newcomers occasionally when I'm on reddit and nothing else is catching my attention. ("You really don't need the lead weight - just carry a picture of it for sentimental value.")
Let me put it another way, by making an analogy to a service that (surprisingly) does this one thing correctly: Tumblr.
Tumblr "just happens to have" a dashboard, but that doesn't really matter, because each blog also has a web subdomain that serves both the blog's posts, and serves a (public, unauthenticated) RSS feed for said posts. Which means that I can just subscribe to all the Tumblr blogs I care about through my RSS feed reader of choice (which is a single-pane-of-glass I control, and one which muxes together many other posts-once-a-month sources as well) and forget that the Tumblr dashboard exists.
And the Tumblr dashboard itself also doesn't need to be operated by the same company that hosts Tumblr's blogs. It could just be a fancy RSS reader, that uses Tumblr's API only for posting. And so it could be a third-party app, without needing to make any (authenticated) API requests to Tumblr, when all a user is doing is consuming content.
A set of subreddits that people browsing casually.
I don't think that there are many communities that live only on Reddit. Most of subreddits are pretty casual. Even niche ones. Niche communities already have other places to have discussions. They aren't core audience of Reddit. The core audience browse a 'junk'.
> I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit"
I've been building a platform to target this specific thing. It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. In order for a creator to capitalize on this they currently tend to leverage a combination of different platforms like Patreon, Discord and Reddit with their community often times spread out amongst the different platforms. What we've done is combine everything into a singular place to allow them to offer their communities as a product alongside their content.
I would note that YouTube/Twitch content-creators create subreddits for a very specific reason: they ask their communities to share links to "relevant" content there, and to upvote the links that the community would most want the content-creator themselves to see. Then, when the content-creator feels too lazy to make real content, they instead start a screen-recording + video session, sort their subreddit by "top - this week", and start clicking through the posts and live-reacting to them.
It's in theory equivalent to a "share things for me to react to" Discord channel — but the fact that it's Reddit means that it has automatic chronologically-segmented userbase-wide voting rounds applied to the links, which makes it easy for the content-creator to react "blind" to a bunch of "interesting" things in a row, without needing to do any pre-filtering for things they haven't seen yet, or editing out boring things, or showing anything that would break content-guidelines on a livestream.
Does your software have an answer to this use-case?
So within a community on our platform the creator can create different discussion boards for all the relevant topics related to their niche. Within those discussion boards, posts can get "bumped" to increase their relevancy within the board. We have an aggregation feed as well which shows the most relevant posts across each board within the community. We are working on expanding the ways in which we aggregate the most topical posts across different time spans for the reasons you mentioned.
As far as content moderation, we are leaving it mainly up to each community to self moderate. We are also looking into leveraging AI to assist with flagging posts for the moderators to review to help improve their job.
People keep suggesting Lemmy but I think decentralized social media is preferred by technical people like us. But in real world only centralized social media seems to work. So why not adopt a model that will be good in the long run, how about something like Wikipedia non-profit Reddit alternative?
Someone already did this [1] as stackoverlflow alternative
I have a 1:1 clone of old.reddit in my PC already, I built it for fun a few months ago. It's a one week task for a senior web developer anyway. The thing is though, most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. It's just not worth the stress IMO.
> most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps.
Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that.
"Most people" will take notice when the people who made Reddit worth looking at leave. It might linger for a while, with rehashed posts from bots and the like, but it's walking dead right now.
Reddit was worth looking at because the creators were literally starting up fake accounts to ask/answer questions. This could probably be automated with GPT in today's age to make Lemmy or whatever a possible migration path.
Personally I think the best alternatives are what we’ve already been using: discourse, Matrix, Mastodon, Zulip, Github Issues, and community forums.
For finding new interesting content, I strongly believe that instead of creating a new platform someone should create a “hub”: a centralized aggregator which presents all of these platforms in a consistent format. A place where you can find various forums and Zulip / Mastodon instances, get a feed of their posts, and even create accounts and make posts/comments; but it doesn’t host the instances or posts themselves, it just uses their APIs. It can also host some of the archived / scraped data from SE and Reddit for consistency. The reasons being:
- The platforms I mention already exist for many communities, and there’s already a lot of difficulty in finding content. This has been a good idea way before platforms started closing off their content
- Creating a fully-centralized platform is actually way harder than creating a decentralized one. At the same time, it’s very important that whatever platform we use is easy for newcomers, easy to find content, and fast; all properties of centralized servers. Hence, the centralized entry-point and hub but decentralized instances works well.
- Mastodon has a centralized hub but tbh it sucks. Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, etc. have none. And of course there’s no hub which supports all of these platforms together.
- I’ve only heard bad things about Lemmy and the UI is crap.
I would absolutely love to help such a project but, like many unfortunately, don’t have the time or networking ability to start it myself. But if I see a Show HN or something similar which seems like it’s actually getting momentum I will try to contribute
Interesting idea. In a sense this is also kind of "decentralized" in terms of hosting because you are just using the APIs, and the service itself will just be provided via a client managing the credentials. But I don't quite understand how this will be so different from Matrix has been doing. Basically, the application is just a centralized hub with bridge to different communities. Wouldn't this just be a "yet another standard" situation?
What makes this approach really stand out is that, even if there are 5 different aggregators, it doesn't matter, because they're all aggregating the same data. And even if someone decides to use one of the existing platforms (e.g. discourse), posts/comments from this aggregator to the platform still show up. So this is actually a way to alleviate the "yet another standard" issue (though I acknowledge it won't be as good as a single common instance, due to different formats).
I think that you go to the site hub, you should immediately see a feed of curated popular posts and a "Create Account" form, similar to https://reddit.com/r/all, along with a search bar and list of filters. And when you create an account, you choose some suggestions and get presented with various communities, also like Reddit. Most people are barely even going to try your site, if you want them to join and put real effort into contributing you need to present good content as fast as possible.
Another issue with Matrix is that a lot of content just isn't on Matrix. As well as Reddit and other existing communities. For example, Rust has a subreddit, discourse, Matrix forum, and Zulip, and probably a discord somewhere too. There should really be a single platform where I can see posts from all of this, because I'm definitely not going to be checking each one individually.
I created a read-only version of something like this[1] to view discussions across subs/hn/lobsters/tildes/substack for any given link. I really like the idea of what you're suggesting.
"I hacked this together with the worst code you've ever seen and the server is crashing every 5 minutes, but a thousand people signed up today and usage is growing exponentially."
Hmm I assumed the opposite. The mass exodus of long time users who are pissed about the API changes won't happen until there is a destination that can handle the migration without servers going down. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Focusing on tech and scalability before getting users will just result in a well-engineered ghost-town. People would rather use something slow and buggy if that's where the activity is.
It's much more of a marketing and PR challenge than a tech challenge. Having a site that works well would be nice too, sure, but finding a way to get tons of users signed up (and keeping them engaged) is far more important.
Time will tell where majority groups migrate to, I'm mostly afraid it will be ever more fractured islands that slowly fade for a good long while before one dominant platform slowly gains traction again as was the case with Reddit.
Lemmy looks a little too technical for majority users to consider I'm afraid.
That's looking to be the case. Same thing happened with Usenet and the migration to web forums because Usenet became a complete mess.
Some are going to Tildes. Some are going to Lemmy, though the two most popular servers are dying right now. Enough went to kbin.social that they disabled registration. Then there's mentions of Raddle and Mainchan depending on your preference.
Discord servers with forums seem to be the big one from what my oldest was showing me. Seems that plus some additional web forums will end up filling in the gap.
Reddit will probably still last for a while as it bleeds out users. We'll have to see what replaces Reddit. Nothing proposed so far is going to be the new consolidated home.
I am the developer of HACK, hacker news app for iOS, android and MacOS, one of the top hacker news apps on the app stores. I have been working on a decentralized link + text sharing site called AvocadoReader for last few weeks. I describe it as a “Decentralized public community of communities for sharing links, text and media. “
I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. Here’s what I have so far. Got the post submissions and community creations working:
I read through those threads a bit, but I'm wondering if you can say a bit more about why you didn't use the nostr protocol as is? I'm not trying to pull for criticism, I'm curious about the tech choices and how some of these emerging options differ from one another (I think I've read about two other nostr forum ideas now?)
Nostr is pretty good and I was inspired by its idea. However, I didn’t like a few things and that’s why I decided to build my own protocol.
1. Nostr relies on Schnorr scheme for signing the data. While from my research, the patent on it has expired, I also read some other details on how there’s other pieces of it which are still patented. I am not a legal expert, so my understanding on this might be wrong and it might be in the clear.
2. Schnorr is fairly new and not used widely yet. It’s not even built natively in Crypto Subtle which comes built-in in all browsers.
Based on this alone, I couldn’t use Nostr. My implementation uses ECDSA P-384 keys which can be generated using the browser built in crypto subtle library:
So this allows one less third party library to rely on the client side.
3. The 3rd reason (and this was one of my biggest reasons) was that Nostr runs on websockets. I didn’t like that at all. Servers are already limited on the number of sockets they can handle. Plus it seemed like unnecessary complexity when vast majority of the developers already know how to use REST api.
So instead of websockets, mine uses a simple REST api with only 2 endpoints: one for creation of records and other for searching for records based on filters. I shared more details here:
But what is the value of reddit anymore? I have one of the oldest accounts, and I loved it.
Last time I logged in (not a joke) it told me I had a new free avatar that was a girl? That I’m stuck with? And I had to pay money to make myself look like a dude?
I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform and have been specifically targeting content creators to get them to offer their communities as a product alongside their content.
The communities that form around content creators tend to be high in engagement and are a sort of naturally occurring beacon for connecting like minded people together online. That is the core of social networking after all.
There have been and will continue to be numerous alternatives created all the time. The problem is creating a clone of X is rarely ever going to succeed, simply because cloning products doesn't create a compelling reason to leave the original (unless you have the resources/network effects of e.g. Meta). You can check r/redditalternatives for a constant stream of projects.
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