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genmonon Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age

It's gone full circle. People here are commenting that the multiplayer cursors are user hostile. tbh I agree... I need to build an off switch, or at least a volume dial...

Meanwhile folks on the blog have discovered the cursor chat Easter Egg: you can hit "/" on desktop to start chatting with everyone else there.

I just screen grabbed two cursors saying the opposite to the original opinion:

> article is distracting lol

> just use inspector 2 delete article

This is hilarious chaos.

genmonon Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age

that is exactly it! when you spend time on the web, there is zero way to know that the site you're on is being mobbed right now. it's so socially impoverished

I know that multiplayer cursors aren't the best way to show that, but it's a start!

genmonon Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age

Author here

Good find! That's a slightly older version that I'm moving. Here's a better version, complete with instructions on how to embed it in your own site

https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party

It's a fork of the upstream PartyKit versions (I've added shared text highlights)

https://github.com/partykit/cursor-party

PartyKit is genuinely the best way to build real-time super scalable apps in very little code, multiplayer included. I have a contract here rn but I was a fan and user first. It's my go-to for most projects now:

https://www.partykit.io

genmonon Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age

I love that project! And also that they did so well.

genmonon Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age

Blog author here. Here's the Markdown.

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/15/galactic-compass....

Sorry for all the noise! It's kinda fun with 2 or 3 simultaneous readers. With 500... well, I'll be building an off switch next.

genmonon Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age

(Blog author here) I mean, I'm making a clock that tells the time with rhyming couplets haha* -- I'll do my best to get it into Best Buy, and work on the mirror next!

But you are absolutely right. We should be having way more fun with our technology!

* obligatory plug, here's the clock: https://poem.town/ks

genmonon Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age

Blog author here

The multiplayer cursors are an experiment in ambient togetherness on the web...

...and what I'm learning is that ambient togetherness really doesn't scale to 500 simultaneous readers!

Please use Reader Mode for calmness, and apologies for the noise. I'll work on adding a toggle to turn them off.

btw you may be interested in the code, which you can use/fork:

https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party

My blog is a static site, and real-time multiplayer is handled by a small app written with PartyKit (which I am super into).

genmonon Show HN: Galactic Compass – an app that points to the galactic center

That's it exactly. You need the lat/long, time+date, and device orientation in order to float the arrow

genmonon Show HN: Galactic Compass – an app that points to the galactic center

I can't see the Milky Way here in London. I would love love love a pic of the Galactic Compass app pointing at the Milky Way hanging in the sky! I'm not sure whether it would be possible to balance the camera exposure to take a pic of both simultaneously, but if you're up for a challenge next time you're hiking, well please take this as a request!!

genmonon Show HN: Galactic Compass – an app that points to the galactic center

I built up the intuition 10 years before the 2021 post -- it's a while back so my memory is fuzzy. But once you've got the ecliptic, you're most of the way there: you can visualise where the Earth is in its orbit based on the time of year, and Sgr A* is in a fixed direction relative to the Solar System.

Build up to it, a few minutes waiting for the bus every day, checking your sense with an app like Star Walk... it's relatively straightforward. I've learnt harder things I'm sure.

genmonon Show HN: Galactic Compass – an app that points to the galactic center

Hm okay, thank you that’s a good observation.

I need to find someone more familiar than I am with combining quaternions and reference frames to lend a hand!

genmonon Show HN: Galactic Compass – an app that points to the galactic center

That’s so kind!

I love the web, it has been very good to me. The web of people making and sharing is out there and thriving! For whoever was lamenting the loss, the best way to find that scene is to start making and sharing yourself, you somehow get in touch.

genmonon Show HN: Galactic Compass – an app that points to the galactic center

I feel like there is a knack to using ChatGPT for bigger tasks and it is non-obvious to most folks. That’s why I wanted to share.

The problem is the hype around AI which is supposed to be all-powerful. So people ask it to do too much, and then it gets lost and now you’re both confused. Instead people need to see, well, it’s about the same “intelligence” (ugh) as you, so here’s how to pair effectively.

genmonon Show HN: Galactic Compass – an app that points to the galactic center

Haha thank you. Couple Easter eggs… open two browser windows to the same URL (on interconnected.org) so you can see cursors. Then…

- select text — text highlights are shared in real-time - type “/“ — there’s built-in cursor chat!

Both ephemeral with no data recorded.

I like to hang out on pages if they have a moment of popularity and surprise people by talking to them

I haven’t written this up! I probably should.

But the code is open and it works even with entirely static sites:

https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party

genmonon Show HN: Galactic Compass – an app that points to the galactic center

Good guess! I can only find deviceHeading as is a projection of the north vector onto the long axis of the device. When the phone is orthogonal to north, that becomes unreliable. What I really need is the north vector, real-time updated, relative to the device itself, no projection. I might be missing this? The iOS SDK is big and this is my first app, so pointers very welcome.

genmonon Show HN: Galactic Compass – an app that points to the galactic center

So kind, thank you!

The reason for the phone being flat is perhaps a limitation in iOS or perhaps a limitation of mine — I don’t know which! Basically you can access deviceHeading which is a projection of the north vector onto the long axis of the device. When the phone is orthogonal to north, that becomes unreliable, so the floating arrow breaks. What I really need is the north vector, real-time updated, relative to the device itself, no projection. But it seems like that isn’t available.

genmonon Mourning Google

you're saying that dinosaurs were a zero interest rate phenomenon?

ok ok flippant but maybe not entirely flippant... I'm used to conceiving of fitness as in fitness for a niche. But I hadn't grasped the idea of "meta-fitness" being the ability to adapt to a highly dynamic niche. there must be a term in evolutionary theory for this.

genmonon Foundations (1997-2000)

Some of Egan's shorts are the most haunting explorations of what it means to be human that I've read -- maybe try those.

But yes, Egan's philosophy is that sci-fi can be about the human story OR about the science. Both are valid.

From this long interview:

> I’m interested in science as a subject in its own right, just as much as I’m interested in the effects of technology on the human condition. In many things I write the two will be combined, but even then it’s important to try to describe the science accurately. In a novel such as Incandescence, though, the entire point is understanding the science, and it really doesn’t bother me in the least that it’s not an exploration of the human condition.

> There are times when it’s worth putting aside the endless myopic navel-gazing that occupies so much literature, in order to look out at the universe itself and value it for what it is.

From http://rlemay.com.au/greg-egan-the-big-interview/

genmonon History-making SpaceX booster mostly destroyed in post-flight topple

Learnings is fine. It’s a fairly typical business-speak word, I hear it a bunch.

genmonon When tech says ‘no’

I guess the distinction comes from the type of underlying 'no'.

These cases in the UK are a decided response to no-type-3: "we actually can’t do that".

Whereas Meta disallowing news links in Canada (another enough-is-enough response) is because of a no-type-2: "that’s a really bad idea".

Useful to have Evans' typology to distinguish those two cases.

(As a counterfactual in the UK, the decided response _could_ have been, "we actually can't do that technically, but ok we'll change the architecture, destroy our brand promise and increase the attack surface, and put the back doors in anyway.")

genmonon Pixar was never a masterpiece factory

I wouldn't agree that Disney is in a slump at all -- and it's possibly their lack of slump that makes it easier to level shots at Pixar.

Frozen (2013) just gets in your decade window. Then there's Moana (2016) and Encanto (2021). All three have been hits with great songs, values and storytelling.

genmonon Apple brings Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to iPad

Working Copy on iOS does this _brilliantly._

> The features you unlock are permanently available and any other pro features added the next 12 months after purchase are also permanently available. After one year new pro features introduced will be locked until you purchase a upgrade. Even if you do not purchase a new unlock after 12 months, the app will still be updated with improvements and bug-fixes.

https://workingcopy.app/manual/purchase

genmonon Experimental library for scraping websites using OpenAI's GPT API

This looks both high utility and well thought-through.

Scraping to JSON is how my unofficial BBC “In Our Time” site works (discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073603) so I’ve used this approach before.

The post-processing steps are particularly vital (I found that GPT-3 sometimes trips up on escaping quotes in JSON) — and the hallucination check is clever.

This kind of programmatic AI is the big shift iho. I love seeing LLMs get deeper into languages.

genmonon Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

The general rule is: be minimally liberal in what I receive :)

A parse error kicks off a recovery process where, in theory, we could run any number of rules. In practice the only problems are unescaped quotes in strings, or mismatched quotes (start with `"` and terminate with `'`)

genmonon Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

I extract the main content div, which includes various other divs and assorted HTML cruft from 25 years of content management systems.

Then convert that to Markdown, which GPT groks happily, and it preserves the right balance of discarding meaningless structure but preserving some semantics (italics, headings, etc).

The best tool I've found for that process is aaronsw's html2text, amazing that it's still so valuable after all these years.

genmonon Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

Shared in this comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073824

genmonon Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

I found that Dewey was borderline acceptable — more categories seemed to degrade it, though admittedly I didn’t spend much time prompt tuning. I also tried tags and these weren’t reliable (not at a consistent “scale” from episode to episode).

I suspect I’ll need a more mechanical approach, long term.

genmonon Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

The BBC is pushing its Sounds app by lagging the podcast. Disappointing but understandable I guess given they want the opportunity to suggest other programmes.

genmonon Show HN: BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT

I think Angie Hobbs will take it! Looks like she is referred to with a few different names in the episode notes and I’ll need to merge them manually (will be 25 appearances)

(btw thanks for datasette. I use SQLite as an intermediary db and datasette was invaluable for exploring and refining queries.)