greggman65

It's great to love programming. I started in the late 70s.

That said, I'm also fully enjoying letting AI help me solve problems.

Here's one: I study Japanese. I used jisho.org for years (A Japanese/English dictionary). I ran into a problem ~2 weeks ago where I needed to look up a word and used their handwriting recognition to sketch a kanji. I got a single stroke wrong and it gave no matches. I checked if it was open source. No

So, I asked AI (Claude) to make something similar. I asked it to shard the dictionary so I wouldn't need a database and I could serve it from github pages. Less than 2 hours later it was done and useful.

Since then I had it add camera support, FSRS flashcard support, and online syncing so I can add and practice from any of the 5-6 machines I touch every day

You can use it if you want here: https://g-sho.org

That said, the bigger takeaway IMO is you can have LLMs make most solutions you need in just a couple of hours. If there is some app / service you use that you wish was different, ask for it and you'll have it.

I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy programming. I'm just saying I also enjoy this new activity of making solutions quickly. Kind of like making before 3d printers and laser cutters vs after. So many things got easier.

As another example, I needed to capture audio from my Mac's system which Apple's built in capture does not support. OBS was recommended but OBS has a difficult UX. Kap was recommended but it was sus AF. So I asked Claude to build what I needed. 4 minutes later I had a native app that did exactly what I needed (https://github.com/greggman/g-cap). Not saying you should use it. Just showing it as an example of "ask for what you need and get it"

A non-live map for trains in Tokyo

https://greggman.github.io/tokyo-trains

I think the live map is cool but (1) I don't know where to get that data and (2) seeing things at 100x speed is, IMO, more interesting as a visual

It's based off schedules but only Toei's schedules are easy to get (AFAICT). I got permission for the most of the others, but I thought the visual was good as is ... mostly. Maube I'll revisit.

I can certainly imagine one that's better. One that catelogs all the images using better AI that apples and lets me do complex searches "Dog at beach", "Joey in red shirt with Jane"

The Photos app does not need permission any more than any other Photos app. It can ask "Photos app wants to access your photos" and you can click "Always", "Selected Photos", "No" and download some other app to access your photos. That would be the "equal" thing to do. Let the user pick what app they want to access their photos with.

Same with the Camera App. It can ask "Camera App wants to access your Camera" and you can say "No" and then download some other camera app and make that your default and grant it camera permission.

In Japan (not sure in other countries), I went to the Apple Store. They said to complete the purchase, use the Apple Store app and scan this QR code on their device. I did and it immediately wanted me to share a ton of info with the main highlighed button "Share Now" and in small lettering below that "customize and share", where in you can see all the stuff they were going to take.

Apple, That's Privacy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9vJq4gQOw

I wrote this one, a year after that video, inspired by it

https://greggman.github.io/doodles/sort

Browsers (and machines) were slower then so it didn't finish as fast as it does today. Also, it's hard to decide what steps to illustrate/count. Is a swap 1 step (swap) or 4 (load slot N to R1, load slot M to R2, store R1 in M, store R2 in N) etc...

I depends on your definition of "working on" :p

A worked on a 3d asset generator with nodes (like Blender/Houdini)

https://greggman.github.io/sedon/

I worked on a couple of design generators

https://github.com/greggman/design-new-tab-page/

https://github.com/greggman/gdp-gen/

I don't know if this was my "Oh Shit" moment but 4 weeks ago I thought'd I'd try vibe coding a WebGPU 3D Node Based Editor.

https://github.com/greggman/sedon

It was just an experiment and I probably won't work on it more but still, I was blown away with how far we got. There's a quite a bit we worked through even though it was only part time of those 4 weeks.

> Quake made PVS famous. It’s still useful in some indoor games where the scene geometry is static and bake time is acceptable.

It was used extensively in outdoor games like Jak and Daxter.

It’s a WebGL issue, fixed in WebGPU.

Browsers generally only allow a fixed number of WebGL contexts per page. So a generic element effect library has the issue that too many elements some will start losing contexts. The workaround is to just make one large screen size canvas and then figure out where the elements are you need to draw an effect for. now you only have one context drawing all the elements. But, you can’t know where to draw until the browser scrolls and renders so you’re always one frame behind.

https://webgl2fundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-multiple-...

WebGPU doesn’t have this issue. You can use the same device with multiple canvases

https://webgpufundamentals.org/webgpu/lessons/webgpu-multipl...

I think this is a good example of something you can vibe-code today. (though maybe not as good)

I went to gemini, picked "cavnas". used this prompt

> There's a famous CG scene in the movie Hackers where they "Hack the Gibson". It shows a bunch of translucnt cubes with glowing edges. The textures on the cubes are live computer text. The camera slowly flyies between the cubes tilting gracfully and it searches for the main one.

> Reproduce this scene in Javascript. Be sure to include each of those features

> 1. live computer text which you can simulate by drawing to a canvas offscreen and uploading to a texture, adding more output as it goes. You can even use "function.toString()" of the code you write as input

> 2. a post processing step so we get a glow

> You can probably use three.js for this

Here's the result.

https://codepen.io/greggman/pen/XJKPBZW

No, it's not as good as the site linked above and it's unlikely it would be. On other hand, it got this far on the first try. Maybe a few more iterations and it could get the stuff you want.

I didn’t put nearly as much effort as this post into shape matching but I did try a few other things like

Non-ascii, I tried various subsets of Unicode. There’s the geometric shape area, CJK, dingbats, lots of others

Different fonts - there are lots of different monospace fonts. I even tried non-monospaced fonts tho still drawn in grid

ANSI color style https://16colo.rs/

My results weren’t nearly as good as the ones in this article but just suggesting more ways of exploration

https://greggman.github.io/doodles/textme10.html

Note: options are buried in the menu. Best to pick a scene other than the default

this is why when I my sister wanted a website I just pointed her at substack. She was posting immediately

No. Just like Owl City isn't his real voice. If the song is good I don't personally care.

Most of the music I like is loops pasted together in some DAW. Sure, it requires taste to make a good song but if AI figure out how to replicate that taste can crank out catchy tunes I wouldn't have a problem with it. I can only guess though that too much of a good thing will lead to be getting bored with it ... maybe.

It's not like most pop music isn't formulaic. I enjoy the currently popular songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters but they're so cliche, if they turned out to be AI generated I wouldn't be surprised :P

I've never made one of these so I have no idea what all the issues are but I feel like I want it to act like presentation software. I want to be able to connect boxes with lines/arrows, then drag the boxes and have the lines stay connected to the boxes. I probably also want group things like I can in most structured drawing programs. Maybe that doesn't work well with ASCII

Like a simple example, I expect if have a object selected and press Cmd/Ctrl-C, Cmd/Ctrl-V I get a duplicate.

These interactions seem like basic table stakes

maybe there is more going on here but it's relatively easy to make a text post processing shader and apply it to anything, 3d scene, a video, etc...

https://post-processing.tresjs.org/guide/pmndrs/ascii

https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/ascii-shader-using-glsl-postpr...

https://threejs.org/examples/?q=ascii#webgl_effects_ascii

https://fwdapps.net/l/asci/

https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/ascii-postprocessing-n628p8...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxeRcnLr0ko

Rust and Python appear to still long lived ones so it's only a matter of time until they get the same issues it would seem?

There's several of these on shadertoy

https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=crt

I made a Pico-8 post processing script using a few

https://greggman.github.io/pico-8-post-processing/nano-villa...

also an article on starting one on WebGPU here

https://webgpufundamentals.org/webgpu/lessons/webgpu-post-pr...

I have something tangentially similar here: https://jsgist.org

If you click save you get the option to use a URL.

The problem with a URL every edit is a new URL. So you send the URL to a friend, then fix a typo, they need a new URL.

The other problem is of course the space limit.

This seems tangentially related?

https://github.com/google/toucan

Those have nothing to do with "what the browser exposes". They are exposed regardless of what you use to connect.

that site is just as bad at giving probably false numbers that are several orders of magnitude off

that site has the same issue. It will give ridiculous and easily provably false results for iPhones.

There are ~40 million in the PST time-zone. Some percent have smartphones (80%+), ~50% of those are iPhones (16 million). Of those, the majority are set it English (80%+), and are divided into screen sizes. But basically, if you have an iPhone, you have the same fingerprint has at least a million other other people in the PST time size. You are at best, 1 of 100, not 1 of x,xxx,xxx,xxx.

You might be x,xxx,xxx,xxx of people who visited that unpopular site but no one needs tracking on an unpopular site. On a popular site you will not have a unique finger print.

There's a mis-understanding of at least the Graphics part. For example WebGPU features. It looks like lots of info

https://webgpureport.org/

But, they are bucketed

https://www.w3.org/TR/webgpu/#privacy-considerations

It's not zero pieces of info but it's also not close to as bad as it looks. Effectively, everyone who has, say an NVidia GPU, will likely have the same list of features and limits.

As a more general example: The number is just a flat out wrong

> Unique to 1 in 2,147,483,648+ devices.

No, I have an iPhone Pro and am in the PST time zone, set to English. It has the exact same finger print as millions of other devices among the 40 million people in the PST time zone. In general, The only things different between 2 iPhones of the same model are time-zone, laguange setting, and font size.

Please STOP EXAGGERATING!

I wish you luck!!!

I tried this in 2014 with happyfuntimes

https://docs.happyfuntimes.net/

My conclusion was, past a certain number of people no one wants to game

Around the same time was AirConsole and still available

https://www.airconsole.com/

Not all suits but threatened suits. Nintendo claimed ownership of world maps in platform games ala Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World. If you were making a game that had one in the early 90s and you were shipping in Nintendo you got a letter that in so many words said, "Change your game or get sued AND lose your permission to publish on NES/SNES/Gameboy"

Nintendo also claimed a patent on showing a ghost image of your previous race (the ghost car in Mario Kart)

I did something along these lines 12 years ago. For me it was a backpack and a suitcase but still. I traveled hotels and airbnb's for several years. I'm not unhappy I did it but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

Things you can't do traveling long term.

● for many it means no hangout friends. Because you're not there. You move on in 1 to 8 weeks

● no shopping. Yea, I know, some people are doing it precisely because they want to avoid consumerism. But, most people are used to traveling for a few days to 1-2 weeks max, then coming home. For most of those people, shopping for trickets, clothing, in this far away place is a joy. But, that joy is much harder to come by when you can't go back and stash your loot. All you can do is replace something you have. Buy new shoes and throw away the old ones, etc..

● no crafting / diy / maker stuff - If you're into making things you need tools and storage for materials. Not going to have those living out of a backpack/suitcase. Even little things. In my apartment I have a shelf full of stationary stuff, paper clips, push pins, rubber bands, cellophane tape, masking tap, markers, glues of various kidns. All that is not something you can travel with so if that's your hobby or if inspiration strikes while living that way you're kind of out of luck. If all you make is digital and so all you need is a notebook/tablet/phone then this is less of a problem.

● no stability - it was strange knowing I'd be homeless if I didn't start planning something before the current rentle period was up. I'd arrive somewhere and immediately have to start looking for new hotels/airbnbs for the next stop or two.

It also got somewhat tiring to arrive, look up the sights, and find that to some degree they start to get too similar. Going to an art museum 2-3 times a year is fun. Going to one every week and, at least for me, it started to get repetative. Same with visiting yet another old building. They are all great. But, they're great twice a year, not twice a week.

It's definitely gotten easier though. 12 years ago I had to buy a sim in each location. They sucked and didn't have much data. That's much better today. Free-ish wifi is more ubiquitous than it was then too.

Personally I'd just recommend traveling more often but keeping a home base. I also found that throwing away all my stuff I think was a mistake. Those things I got rid of because they were on my shelves but I never picked them up, I only realized after I got rid of them was that their point was not to be used, their point was to remind me of times, places, and people at the point in my life when I acquired each one. With them gone there is nothing to trigger those memories.

What makes you think there wouldn't be a translation step? The majority of the world is on DirectX and Metal, so even if it turn in SPIR-V there would be translation step.

If you just want it to work, stick this script on your page

https://github.com/greggman/virtual-webgl

If you want to make your own solution there's one listed here about 1/2 way down the page

https://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-multiple-v...

As an aside, WebGPU doesn't have this issue or at least has it less. For one, WebGPU can use a single device to render to multiple canvases, something WebGL can't. Another is that WebGPU is mostly stateless making it easier for both the user and the browser.

people are different people at different times in their live as well.

In my mid 20s I saw Casablanca and was not impressed.

In my mid 50s I saw it again and cried until I trembled. The 20 something me didn't get what the 2 main characters were giving up. The 50 something me with life experience of loves lost by choice and circumstance had a very different reaction.