diggum

Very cool. I developed something in a similar vein as a way to teach myself web programming 15 years ago or so. Https://dirtywalls.com is location-based message boards. You can create or join ones close to your location. Reminds me that I need to try to tell people about it since it’s mostly just me checking in to my local bars and shops.

Curious if you got a response as I'd love a parameterized version of this design. I have the original Overwork+Scott version on my bedside, but I'd much prefer a storage space than a charger there.

A relatively small ongoing investment in a phone with which they earned billions of dollars in profit. Doesn't necessarily require new feature updates, but security updates should be available for a far more significant length of time than the single-digit years the have self-regulated themselves. As an alternative, perhaps these companies should be held responsible for the e-waste of their prematurely expired hardware...

Not a SDE, but I’m actually doing more of that than ever before. 2 years ago, was given the choice to interview for new internal roles or walk away with a severance package after almost two decades in QE and PM for a large, design tools company. Having witnessed the transition from developer-led (“hey, I just invented this cool thing. Let’s give it to users and see if there’s something there?”) to product-led (“hey, let’s keep making our awesome products better for customers!”) to ultimately marketing-led (“hey, McKinsey taught us this method to circle the wagons and protect our brand to the detriment of paying customers!”), I chose to walk away.

I had a bit of cushion, sold some early-purchased crypto and spent most of my savings, to build my skills in launching a startup and writing code. I interviewed with plenty of companies, but felt the same McKinsey cringe from the big FAANG’s, couldn’t believe the skeeviness of the crypto startups, and went pretty far but not far enough with some of the smaller but more interesting companies. My startup got some interest but ultimately, did not hit hard enough to break gravity.

But, it kept me on the radar for some old contacts and when they wanted to explore the areas I had expertise in, reached out. I did some contract work, ultimately building and launching a major new product on their platform which led to getting brought on full time at the beginning of the year.

I love what I’m doing now. I get to play PM and R&D and Developer roles building things now. The things I build directly impact real people and I can experience the results within days, and I have flexibility to decide what I think is important or interesting.

Oo! An opp to share a project I built! Please check out ottomusic.ai or the original demo I built at demo.ottmomusic.ai. We were one of the first AI-powered, prompt-based music recommendation service, and I still think far better than Spotify or Amazon’s recent drops.

(For users of the demo site, you can get a Spotify link to the generated playlist in the console. Shhh.)

How odd. My 3rd click, it brought me to news.ycombinator.com - exactly what brought me there in the first place and open in another tab. I was very confused as I assumed the tab had closed but no, it just appeared to be luck of the surprise.

One day mid-1995 (just looked it up and it would have been May 20, 1995) Sonic Youth was playing with REM at the Gorge in Washington. He and the drummer had a side project that came to the little record store in Ellensburg (Rodeo Records, owned by Mark Pickerel of Screaming Trees fame) for a secret daytime gig. I lived half a block away and was tipped off by a friend who worked there. Went and drank with them all after the gig. Class acts all the way

Any eye toward allowing users to train their own voices? The only reason I’m using Elevenlabs is because I can train a suite of voices on my (legit, legal) archival content. It’s not a perfect replication of the original voice, usually, but for my purposes, this isn’t a requirement. What it does get is the artifacts, recording environment, and a large swath of the prosony and other voice elements that make it sound real and not AI

Recently my son and I were at the mall and decided to grab dinner at a popular ramen spot. They had replaced the hostess with an iPad and a waitlist app. Ugh, I thought, but fine. I can type my name and the number 2 on an app just as easily as letting someone write it down.

Except it wasn't as easy. The iPad first demanded that I make an account with the waitlist app service. I could do it on their iPad but it encouraged me to download an app on my own device instead. There was no “no thank you, just get me a table please” option.

We noped out of there pretty quick and even avoided it the next visit to the mall. I don’t know what kind of money they’re saving by switching to this system, but they’ve definitely lost a $60/visit customer who would probably stop in 3-4x per year.

And I just realized you acknowledged it at the bottom of the page! ;)

I was fortunate to help bring similar tech to life as a PM for Adobe Audition and Premiere Pro in a feature dubbed Remix. Since we were designing to help music fit the duration of a scene or video project, our goals resulted in a slightly different experience from those of music fans wanting to recut a song for general purpose listening, but it worked like magic for most tracks. Still one of my favorite projects that I worked on.

I relied upon ChatGPT to build this as my development experience is pretty light. What I found was it's not perfect, but because I know enough Python to troubleshoot, I was able to either fix issues myself or understand the right way to frame the next prompt to improve or resolve any problems I ran into.

I started a new chat and explained that we would be working together to build a web app that would take a user's input and use the chatGPT API generate a unique music playlist, taking into account every mood, activity, emotion, attitude, era, and artist that the user mentioned. The results would be displayed in a table with the album thumbnail, artist and song information, and an audio preview. The user should also be able to open the full playlist in Spotify.

It recommended we create a Flask app in Python and immediately generated some code and instructions. It took a bit of finessing to get the right libraries installed and setup the environment variables correctly, but I had something working within about an hour. It was ugly, it was slow, but it was functional.

After several queries, it's recommendations no longer seemed to be talking about the same code we'd written. It would reference functions that didn't exist or weren't named the same. For awhile, I could reset it by simply saying, "Here is the current version of the code" and paste the source in, but eventually, it got too large. I refactored both the python file and the html templates so that they were more manageable sizes, and that helped. I found I could also simply paste a function or section of code I was having trouble with and usually get usable feedback.

I had avoided using frameworks like Bootstrap before because there seemed to be a learning curve that I just didn't have time or need to dive into. However, because it designed the app around those frameworks, I had the luxury of just seeing the results and how they were achieved. I won't pretend I'm an expert, but I do feel far more confident if I needed to start from scratch.

By the evening, around 6 hours after I'd started, I had an incredibly usable web app. It was clear enough that I could continue to iterate on my own, occasionally asking chatGPT for assistance when I wanted to make a larger change. Over the next few days, I worked with some partners to fix up the design and hosted it on a server that wasn't my dev computer.

About a week before we launched, I ran into a bug. Two queries ran very close together and the first user got the second users results. Oh no! I realized I'd need some sort of user session management on the server, but didn't really know where to begin. I pasted some of the API functions to chatGPT and explained what happened and what I thought needed to be done. Within 15 minutes, I now had server-side session management. But now I was running into openAI rate limits! It took a little longer to get that all working, but within an hour or two, I now had a working queueing system.

I was then able to very quickly add little bits and pieces: a button to use speech recognition to submit your request instead of typing, the ability to share your playlist via SMS or notes, and an option to extend your playlist if you wanted more songs.

I feel like I've learned more in the past 3 weeks than I have over most of my technical career - I was certainly able to achieve success much more quickly which kept me motivated through the more difficult or confusing periods. The response today has been fantastic, and I'm really proud of what I created.

If you haven’t made your own butter at home, you’re missing out. It literally takes 10 minutes and the blender does most of that work.

Pour a cup or two of heavy cream in the blender. Add a tspn or so of salt, and blend it on med. it’ll turn to whipped cream and then chunk into butter. Let it run for a minute or two more as the liquid co to yes to separate from the butter.

Scoop the butter into a non fuzzy towel or a few layers of cheesecloth and squeeze the remaining liquid out. Spread on hot bread or grab a spoon.

A short seller borrows shares from a shareholder - a bank, institutional investment group, or an individual who makes them available in return for interest payments - and sells them on the market at the current price. They hope to return the shares by buying them back at a lower price later and pocketing the difference.