thebricklayr

Black holes don’t live forever. In principle, an external observer could watch you until the black hole evaporates. As mentioned above, if they never saw you fall in, then you never fell in. GR allows for disagreement on durations of events but not the events themselves.

For a region of space with time dilation approaching infinity, red shift to temperatures below even the microwave background would be nothing.

Agreed. Couldn’t black holes warp spacetime to the extent that there is no such place as “inside”? Time dilation is infinite at the event horizon, after all.

As you approach the event horizon, your frame of reference slows asymptotically to match that of the black hole while the universe around you fast-forwards toward heat death. I’d expect the hawking radiation coming out at you to blue shift the closer you got until it was so bright as to be indistinguishable from a white hole. You’d never cross the event horizon; you’d be disintegrated and blasted outward into the distant future as part of that hawking radiation.

> I have a boatload of feature creep ideas for you to reject... Shall I post them here, or DM you?

Ha! Either, or feel free to email me at [email protected].

> Take a pic of a recipe, OCR if can

The app actually has an OCR recipe importer (tap "Add Recipe" > "Scan Recipe"). It uses Apple's native iOS OCR library, which inserts text directly from the camera.

It doesn't support importing from an existing photo yet though -- that's high up on my list to build (after Android).

> else host the pic?

You can upload photos for recipes!

> However, an interesting aspect of the "recipe" app logic is that it can apply to, say, mechanics

That's a really good point. I bet much of the underlying functionality could be re-used in a completely different app focused on something like mechanics. Another example I've thought about is a separate app specific to cocktail recipes, with features tailored around mixology and bar management.

Ironically, this is a great way to build actual products (if you’re open to letting them grow).

Three years ago I created a simple app for my family and friends to share recipes together. I kept adding features they requested, and after about two years, the app was apparently good enough that people started sharing it by word of mouth.

By October, the app had grown big enough that I had to start charging new users to cover server costs. I’m now contemplating a future where I work on it full-time.

I like to ask people _how_ non-deterministic laws of nature would give rise to free will, and listen as they stumble toward the realization that determinism is orthogonal to the subject.

> does the server fetch the html itself?

Yep, the client just sends the recipe URL and then the server fetches the HTML. Agreed, it would be better to have the client send the HTML for paywalled sites, which is another reason I just want to do it all on the client.

> I spent quite some time on ingredient labelling (what’s a unit, quantity etc.)

I can relate to you there. It was a long process of trial and error for me to get right, and there are still plenty of edge cases left to handle. Long-term I think AI + NLP will make this kind of thing easier, but for me it wasn't fast, reliable, cheap, or portable enough to run in an iOS app in real time quite yet.