rikroots

I assume they mean "more habitable for humans". We're currently adapted for ice caps, abundant liquid fresh water, protective ozone layer and 21% oxygen levels, which is one moment in a 4 billion year history for this planet.

We also need tectonics, vulcanism and erosion. Just "not where I live, thank you" tectonics.

I made a web-based multi-target screen recorder with talking head and teleprompt functionality because I fancied making an obscure tool to prove that I could. Maybe if I marketed it harder more people would know about it, but I'm not that guy.

I also made a image filter builder, hosted on the web so it runs locally, even though I knew that it was an over-saturated market. I saw those apps and decided to do better. It scratched an itch. Do people use it, or talk about it? Of course not - see above.

For both tools I did the initial coding myself, then let LLMs look at (but not change) the code so they could suggest areas for improvements. Engaging LLMs at that point, in that way, is fun work for me.

Just because things can do things faster, sometimes better, than me doesn't mean I should stop doing themselves myself. That's not a fun approach to life, for me.

It's not enough to invent (and patent) something. You also need to document it in various ways - so people know the invented thing exists, what it's for, how to use it, how to fix it, etc.

> poor people couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of books. And neither did they write them.

Thus the rise of circulating libraries in the 18th century, and the public (lending) library system in the 19th century. Especially after the establishment of mandatory education for children.

Agreed. While copyright timescales are currently over-extended, copyright was introduced for a very practical reason: "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned"[1].

Personally, I Copyleft my poetry, and make it available to others to use, even for commercial purposes, from 15 years after the poem's publication. I see no reason to keep them locked in a cage long after I'm done with them.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

Oh, it's about avoiding LLM-generated slop. I was hoping it would be about the increasing trend over the past 20 years for writers to stop trusting their readers, and instead insist on telling the readers how they should read and interpret a piece of writing, as the reader is reading that work. Framing and triggers and stuff. Which I find really, really annoying, and leads - in my view - to safe, unadventurous and, yes, boring writing.

Of course I wrote an essay about this[1]. Here it is: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/how-not-to-train-you...

[1] - Trigger warnings: discusses poetry; touches on using LLMs in the research phase of essay writing and poetry review.

Late to the thread, but I agree with everything in this comment. The best way to build a website (especially any sort of transaction and/or form) is with the standard tools: HTML, CSS, the smallest amount of JS necessary.

I've been working for a number of years to make the HTML canvas element more accessible for those situations where using a canvas element makes better sense (allegedly) than using standard tools - because there's always those special edge cases, and if people are going to use canvas elements then I want them to build them in the most accessible and responsive way possible.

I'll not spam my product, but as part of my work I have produced a webpage where I try to list the things a HTML canvas element needs to do to meet WCAG requirements. These are my own, personal views so challenging my claims is entirely justifiable, and correct!

https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/docs/reference/sc-accessibil...

Oh, excellent! I thought I was the only author (idiotic enough) to give away my books for free. I choose to call it altruism, but the truth is that I got sick of the whole marketing-and-promotion meat grinder a long while back and decided I wanted to write books I wanted to read, rather than writing what someone else thought they could sell. I am now proud to call myself a Hobbyist Indie Author. Perhaps we could start an insurgency together?

It turns out that adding noise to gradients is a really useful thing to do - so many new effects can be created with just a few additional parameters. Sadly, CSS and Canvas API gradients (linear, radial, conic) are very basic implementations (and SVG is not much more advanced).

Recently I did some work to add software gradient enhancements to my canvas library. Because these run on the CPU rather than GPU they're computationally intense, but still worth the effort just to see what can be done with different spreads (pad, repeat, reflect, transparent) and noise engine operations inserted while calculating stuff like gradient color selection, and pixel positioning.

Linear gradient demo test - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/canvas-003.html

I learned last year that "translation" can be a very tricky thing. Because there's never a one-to-one correlation between one language's words, phrases, structures and metaphors, and another language's equivalent stuff. And LLM translations may not be the actual translation you want, or need.

I wrote up my experiences of translating Lorca and Cavafy poems here[1]. tl;dr: I have developed a massive new respect for translators; however much they're being paid, they probably need to be paid more!

[1] - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/adventures-in-poetry...

I give my side projects away for free because I have a $job to pay for the roof over my head, food, etc. and don't feel the need to make more money from my hobby work.

I create my side projects in the first place because I like to prove to myself that it is possible to do mad stuff in the browser - like a screen recorder with canvas composition, teleprompter, live annotations and talking-head overlay[1]. Or an SVG-inspired image filter builder for local batch application to images (still a WIP but almost there)[2].

It doesn't cost me any money to host the results, so: why not?

[1] - https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-screen-recorder/

[2] - https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-filter-builder/

> when it's much easier to just build a nice website using JavaScript

I'm currently building a web-based tool that uses dynamic forms for UI, without the help of of a framework (yeah I know; I have reasons). This is the result: https://github.com/KaliedaRik/sc-filter-builder/blob/main/js...

It's not "easier" using Javascript; raw Javascript websites are a nightmare to build, maintain and reason about. It is "easier" with Javascript + current-favourite-framework-of-the-day.

Also: accessibility, SEO, the all-new Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) thing, etc.

Last year I made the mistake of asking ChatGPT what the world would look like if `∞ === -∞` and it took me seriously (I think) and led me on an hours-long dance where in the end it had me trying to prove, mathematically, that `2 > 1` ... and it was at that point I realised that I'm not cut out to think in numbers and maybe it was for the best that I failed my end-of-school Maths exam

I'm building a client-side-only web page that will (eventually) allow users to build their own image filter and batch-apply it to a bunch of images.

https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-filter-builder/

No idea if anyone will be interested in using such a (free, MIT) web tool, but I'm having lots of fun putting my canvas library's filter engine (which is inspired by SVG chainable filters) through its paces.

> I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle.

I wrote a JS canvas library[1] partly because existing libraries of the time (2013) didn't do what I wanted a canvas library to do. Things like animated gradients and patterns, etc. I'm still working on the library today - so thats 12+ years of my spare time gone!

Generative art - such as challenges like Genuary[2] - is a key tool for giving me ideas on how to develop the library further. I keep CodePens of some of my better efforts[3] around as a set of extra tests to check for breaking changes as I fiddle with the library.

[1] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas

[2] - https://genuary.art/

[3] - https://codepen.io/collection/RzzMjw

No install, no backend, no fees. MIT licensed for hacking and local use.

Link to tool: https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-screen-recorder/

> the wheel template can have some letter parts like the top of L or d extend beyond the wheel

Yeah - I use the template (in that case, a circle) to calculate line lengths, then I run 2d text along the 1d lines. Even if I tried to keep all of the glyphs inside the wheel I'd fail - because some fonts lie about how tall they are. Fonts are, basically, criminals.

> This thing is very impressive.

Agreed! Text layout engines are stupidly hard. You start out thinking "It's a hard task, but I can do it" and then 3 months later you find yourself in a corner screaming "Why, Chinese? Why do you need to rotate your punctuation differently when you render in columns??"

This effort feeds back to the DOM, making it far more useful than my efforts which are confined to rendering multiline text on a canvas - for example: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/canvas-206.html

My tool uses the browser's built in encoders (which vary by browser, but whatever). I did use wasm though, for the MediaPipe background removal stuff.

https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-screen-recorder/

Browser screen recorder with canvas composition, teleprompter, live annotations and talking-head overlay.

For me it's a case of, I have to expose my canvas library documentation for the training data bots to find and (hopefully) include in the LLM training data because it's the only way I'll ever get LLMs to:

A) accept that my library exists, and has its uses (it's a tough world out there for canvas-focussed JS libraries that aren't Fabric.js, Konva.js or Pixi.js)

B) learn how to write code using my library in the best way possible (because the vibes ain't going away, so may as well teach the Agents how to do the work correctly)

Plus, writing the documentation[1] for a library I've been developing for over 10 years has turned into a useful brain-dumping activity to help justify all the decisions I've made along the way (such as my approach to the scene graph). I'm not going to be here forever, so might as well document as much as I can remember now.

[1] - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/docs/reference/index.html

I've got a rotating tesseract demo up on CodePen[1]. At least, I think its a rotating tesseract - I have no idea if it's an accurate representation because tesseracts lead me into thinking about quaternions and then my brain shuts down.

[1] - https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/pen/yLbQpKq

Well I do seem to spent a fair amount of my developer time swearing at my laptop screen. And then there's that time I spend just prior to writing code just staring at the wall while I figure out what sort of code I want to write - if I can repackage that wall-staring time into "time spent consulting with AI about approaches and architecture decisions" I'm sure my engineering manager will think more kindly of me ...

Because corruption is a thing. Also: any government contract can be audited at any time by the National Audit Office, who have criminal prosecution powers if they find malfeasance in the procurement process. Also: being hauled in front of a Select Committee to answer questions about a given procurement is not fun. Also: politicians are always looking to ask questions that get their names in the paper.

Follow the processes. Document everything. Make certain the winning bidder has all the relevant certificates and insurance covers in place before agreeing to anything.

Leaving the Civil Service was one of the best work decisions I ever took.

> he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles

I miss the morning delivery of milk to the doorstep. And the milk carts that used to deliver it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float

The agent that generated the email didn't get another agent to proofread it? Failing to add a space between the full stop and the next letter is one of those things that triggers the proofreader chip in my skull.

I used to think that blogging was a way to help me build a platform, get my name out there. Nowadays ... I don't know. Sometimes I have thoughts that interest me - but probably nobody else - so I'll craft a post around them and put the results online. Sharing my creations makes me feel happy. I'll spam a link to the post on Facebook in case any of my friends might be interested in reading it. Lately I've been spamming links to HN, Bluesky, etc because: why not?

It's too accurate for my tastes. Needs more snark.

I'm wary about using AI models to generate stuff for me - I still bristle from the time a model told me that "JS Sets are faster than Arrays" and I believed it, until I discovered that it forgot to add the important piece of information: for Arrays containing tens of thousands of elements. Which made me feel stupid.

Still, I find the models to be excellent synthesisers of vast quantities of data on subjects in which I have minimal prior knowledge. For instance, when I wanted to translate some Lorca and Cavafy poems into English I discovered that ChatGPT had excellent knowledge of the poems in their native languages, and the difficulties translators faced when rendering them into English. Once I was able to harness the models to assist me translate a poem, rather than generate a translation for me (every LLM is convinced it's a Poet), I managed to write some reasonable poems that met my personal requirements.

I wrote about the experience here: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/adventures-in-poetry...

I'm working on my writing, of course. In the latest episode of my life, my mother surprised me with fresh news about the origin of my name: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/poem/names