Ask HN: What software do you need, that doesn't exist? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What software do you need, that doesn't exist?

11 pointsmbm26 comments

I want a cross platform file manager with a list view or nested list view that supports sorting by meta data, APFS' xattr and NTFS' ADS, etc.

I take voice notes. I would really like a way for voice notes to be transcribed with timestamps. There are SaaS services that let you do that but they are for professionals and too expensive for stream of conscious personal notes.

A while ago, I did find a tutorial that would do this in Python but never got around to it.

I use https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper for this (no affiliation, just saw on HN before). IIRC there are also some open source solutions in the space compatible with Linux/win but I haven't tried them.

Thank you, looks perfect for my use case. I will check it out later today.

A Grafana alternative with an MIT (or similar) license.

I'm shocked that Grafana is really the only OSS game in town for user-customizable realtime visualization.

p.s. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong.

Out of interest, what exactly do people use Grafana for? Is it always monitoring infrastructure/ systems or is it more general purpose than that? What is special about it?

I come previously ran an analytics team and I work on an open source BI tool (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence) but I have never actually used grafana or come across it when talking to other "business analytics" folks. Everyone in my world is just using tableau or looker or jupyter notebooks.

Easy to configure, good looking dashboards with a lot of different integrations.

Meaning pretty much any team with basic know-how can get a monitoring dashboard going, or several for different resources and cases. It's main focus is monitoring.

I used it in various projects, from monitoring infrastructure to storing custom events and generating graphs/visualizations.

Once you have your data sources connected, it's easy to create all kind of graphs and alerts.

An open-source alternative to Adobe DTP software, especially a scripting friendly version of InDesign yet suitable for professionals?

That also runs on Linux.

Hell yes, I would definitely switch to Linux (and engage my students to do so) if serious alternatives to Adobe were available.

+ real-time collaborative version

This

A general purpose, open source, capabilities based operating system for the desktop.

Genode and Hurd aren't ready yet.

Fast and featureful collection/file/library management tools. If I never have to write nested loops to rename a bunch of files ever again I would be very happy.

An app on the phone that makes it tap on the windscreen when it's been left in the car.

"Hey, don't forget me!" (displays sad_puppy_eyes.jpg)

- my wife.

My car reminds me when I shut down the engine to not forget my phone on the display.

So we need a new car, then. Ta. Can I download one from the App Store?

Yes they do

My Polestar won't let me lock the car if the phone is left inside

A very simple cross platform podcast listening app that maintains good playlists

We unfortunately do live in a post-post privacy world now: so LLMs (and personal assistants based on them) with higher-than GPT-4 levels of quality that are so efficient to train and use that we can target the next generation of state-of-the-art personal computing devices. All-in on on-the-edge and power efficiency (data center energy consumption will increasingly become ridiculous; as will Nvidia’s power…).

Why does a child need so much less data for “training” to reach “adult brain”?

Apple can’t be our only hope in this regard, can it?

Do they even employ anyone who could substantially push the envelope on the software side there? I would guess they would need to headhunt people from Google and OpenAI and at completely outlandish terms (less of an issue for them; rather than convincing to leave respective AAA “AI” teams). Academia probably the only hope, I’d straight go there if I’d be Apple. It will probably need a complete overhaul of the concepts / architecture of current ways to go about LLMs. Or maybe not, maybe just needs a “small fix”? I for sure don’t know.

I’ve got two downvotes here, really curious on the why? It’s clearly not only the hardware that is “still too slow” at this point? Again just for training then, why does a LLM basically need the whole internet and then some to arrive at “uncanny valley intelligence” at best?

I didn't downvote but I imagine they came from either (a) asking for what amounts to a personalized AGI on a phone, which doesn't seem to fit the spirit of the question or (b) talking about Apple like they're significantly related to (a).

The question is: "what software do you need that doesn't exist?".

Your reply contains a lot of things, except an answer.

I’ll summarize then: “A GPT-4+ like and OSS LLM based personal assistant that can be trained and run on soon-to-be common personal computing devices.”

Lots of people are probably already working on that but it doesn’t exist yet.

> Why does a child need so much less data for “training” to reach “adult brain”?

If we count all sensory input for years I do not think a child needs less data, but more.

If, in addition, we consider that the child gets new data (decides new interactions) based on past data, there is an optimization in the child that the LLM lacks: the LLM cannot just decide to get some new data based on the data it just saw. It is stuck with the data fed to it for training.

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