genmon

Every webpage deserves to be a place! It’s open source — and do check out the cursor chat too

(Quiet Mode kicks in with >10 concurrent visitors.)

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party

I have regularly done just that! a projector on a big wall, and a portal to the namib desert... 100% recommend

see my other post with the full-viewport waterhole, that was what I used to get rid of YouTube chrome.

Fellow fan of the Namid Desert waterhole here!

As it happens, I made this wrapper for it

https://waterhole.genmon.partykit.dev

This single-serving waterhole:

- makes the YouTube stream fill the browser for an Immersive Experience(TM)

- shows how many people are watching in real-time

- provides ephemeral chat with other people present

I know at least one team at an unnamed big tech co who would all have it open on their second screens for shared ambience + chat...

(If anybody from YouTube is reading, I have a ton of idea about how ambient live steams are the Next Big Thing and how to lean into that.)

there's a Quiet Mode toggle in the corner of the screen for that purpose

yeah this is definitely over the edge -- signal is lost in the noise

my main enjoyment has been to hang out on my own blog (which it generally pretty quiet) and say hi to people as they drop by. I've had a few pleasant interactions that way, and a couple people said hi in Unoffice Hours (link in the left column) or on the socials after

but generally I feel like "ambient togetherness" is just the beginning of something, and it needs to be paired with something more persistent to be useful (like a discord only open to subscribers, that kind of thing), and I haven't gotten around to building that side of it yet.

(blog author here)

If you're interested in the multiplayer cursors + cursor chat, my philosophy is that every web page deserves to be a place, and pages should feel busy if lots of people are there

plus you can grab the code. here's the write-up:

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party

The reason I ask: there's a story about a physicist who was so kinaesthetic in his thinking that somebody walked into his office to find him rolling around on the floor, trying to embody rotations from the point of view of a particular system or something...

I can't say that my own subjective feelings while coding are so useful! But I like to imagine that they're a meaningful contributor to my "taste" of what good/bad looks like

(Wish I could track down the reference)

(blog post author here) I added Quiet Mode because of the feedback last time one of my posts hit HN, it was chaos haha

(btw you can hit / to enter cursor chat, it's fun if a bit distracting)

Fascinating! Is the mental picture a side effect, or do you feel like it helps you reason about/manipulate the shape of the code?

Great observation. Definitely something about those square brackets which puts my right hand in tension

Here's a t-SNE map of all 1,000+ episodes:

https://www.braggoscope.com/explore

(Outside the UK, the "Listen" link doesn't work except for the most recent ~350 episodes. You'll need to get the program page link instead which is in the footer.)

My assumption is that models are getting cheaper, fast. So you can build now with OpenAI/Anthropic/etc and swap it out for a local or hosted model in a year.

This doesn't work for all use cases but data extraction is pretty safe. Treat it like a database query -- a slow but high availability and relatively cheap call.

For Brits, Foundations is a must-read report.

Any policy suggestions need to show how they'll urgently remedy the serious issues with energy, housing, and infrastructure detailed in the report -- or make the case that this issues don't matter.

Here's the direct link:

https://ukfoundations.co

now hit / to activate cursor chat...

my absolute top tip would be to find your super low-friction way to capture ideas about what to write, wherever you are, the very second the idea occurs to you

idea capture is upstream of everything else. you can do drafting or editing a month later or a year later, when the mood comes

I wrote a Colophon recently about my blog tech stack. it includes a "Writing" section which touches on how I start with idea capture (and also the psychological blockers about doing everything else)

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/10/28/colophon

It's super handy to have a place to put everything. So I can make a dumb iOS app and just announce it on my blog, without having to think about landing pages, hosting etc etc. Just lowers the barrier

I started blogging in February 2000 (it was social like Twitter back then). 5 years ago, I ramped up my writing again: I've been posted at least weekly for 256 weeks.

I've learnt that blogging is a necessary part of my practice for finding and exploring new ideas. It's brought me work and friends. And there's especially a place for blogging today: no platform will value your words like you will yourself.

That was my first thought too, strong Battle Chess vibes!

For those who never played it, Battle Chess was a chess game from 1988. It had one different: when a piece took another piece, it would play a canned animation (gruesome, funny)

Wildly popular at the time. Some screenshots:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1950/battle-chess/screenshots...

So happy that our chat still sits with you!

It has been truly amazing.

There have been some really unusual moments -- like reviewing the pitch deck of a monk, or being suddenly involved in a design crit for a class of masters students.

And some are extraordinary. Last week I spoke with a hugely successful children's book author who has just opened a kids' playground that builds familiarity with the fundamentals of computing!

Sometimes I feel like I'm able to help. By being a second pair of eyes on what the other person sees as ordinary, or even tangled and overwhelming, we can identify a way forward or point of focus for a project or artistic practice.

But my favourites are the everyday conversations where we find common ground, and I learn something and they learn something too in the exchange.

I find that when I'm required to explain an opinion or some knowledge that I take for granted, the act of verbalising it illuminates new ideas, and talking to somebody else about it helps me find new perspectives.

It's the highlight of my week, and has been for 4 years now!

There's a Quiet Mode toggle in the top right

Here's a post about the Cursor Party code (it's open):

"Every webpage deserves to be a place"

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party

If anyone's thinking of starting their own Unoffice Hours, someone started a webring with a good domain. It's semi dormant right now, but the site accepts pull requests and it would be a good place to start building community

https://unofficehours.com

Could a skill swap work? Like, a website that says something like "I can teach you about linear algebra if you can teach me about CAD software" -- or would the marketplace be too sparse?

Hi all — Unoffice Hours host here! This has been a wildly successful experiment for me. ~360 calls booked since I made that post, about 300 calls. I’ve reviewed pitch decks, given design feedback, met monks, discussed work and careers with students, and chewed the fat with like minded people who I never would have met otherwise.

Sorry you can’t find a slot! It’s already booked up for the next 60 days and I use Calendly to keep a rolling availability window. I've just opened a handful of extra times in October and November.

I highly recommend making this part of your weekly rhythm too — it’s a big part of how I find new ideas, and it helps get me out of my bubble.

Yes, I'm grasping at straws... just trying to think of some possible precipitating event.

I feel like I missed the entire back story to all of this. There was a cryptic post about private equity a week ago

https://ma.tt/2024/09/are-investors-bad/

and then Mullenweg's attack on WPEngine (and their PE owners) ramped up 0-60 in no time at all.

Like, is this just about support for the OSS project, and is there a conversation on the dev lists I've missed? Why now -- did WPEngine make a threat to fork the project? Is there a dispute around data access, now training data for AI is suddenly valuable? Etc.

All seems so sudden and disproportionate.

My take is that this is an opportunity to re-think what chores are, and what white goods are for

Like -- let's say you rent (as we all do, increasingly). Instead of buying different special purpose kitchen gadgets, white goods, and cleaning equipment to haul around with you, why not a general purpose robot that does the easy 80% of all chores?

Post author here

Somebody please build me that home defrag robot!

Here's the iCloud Passwords extension for Chrome -- works on my Mac happily, and also with Arc (which means I now get to use it just as much as Safari)

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pejdijmoenmkgeppbfl...

thanks for sharing! I also run https://www.aboutfeeds.com which is a simple "explainer" for those new to RSS

the limitation of feed styling is that it requires custom http headers:

  Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8  # not application/rss+xml
  x-content-type-options: nosniff

and so it doesn't work on GitHub Pages, which is otherwise my go-to for building + hosting static sites.

so... if anyone from GitHub is reading this, please make it possible to tweak the page headers! (and if you know anyone there, please pass on this request :)