James' Audiolog: Indie.am: Recent Episodes
Indie.am
Hey, I'm James, and welcome to my personal Audiolog. I mostly use this to share personal updates, via Indie.am. DM me for an invite!
So I've been playing with sql.jSHTtPvfs for a few months now. Basically, what this is is it's a sequel light worker compiled in web ASM and it runs against the remote database now the interesting that is the implements, implements a virtual file system and arrange requests. So say you have a gigabyte SQL database somewhere in the cloud. As long as you have a FASTSIGNS support range requests, then this is just grabbing data, one kilobyte at a time. Similarly, to how a sequel, I would read a local database from the file system if it was configured to page with file, reads of 1024 bias anyway, that's the interesting part. So what makes it interesting is, if you indexed an organize your data, in a way that a request would be fast from a local SQL database, then in theory, you could perform the same requests remotely from the browser to that SQL database on a CDN, but you're Back in the server would not be running a database senses and in theory, if you optimize those they would be, they have some overhead for every request. But in theory it's not horrible, but maybe your hundred millisecond request becomes her 900 and the second request, something like that. So I was thinking about it and in August I wrote a possible analytics clone in a couple weekends that used sequel to JSHTTPVFS end. It was interesting, but it was not interesting to me as I just very Leslie implemented it. It cleared a lot of data, it might as well just download the entire database because it didn't really taste the idea out too thoroughly, but give me a chance to play around with it. And it was a nice proof of concept fast forward to December, and I rewrote this at to start off with in injects walk parser, so that I will have a pretty large status at minded up with a 300 MB log file, which I parsed turns into a Roughly 300 MB equal a database, and that gave me a large enough database to play around with him. It was large enough that I had to optimize long, parsing and inserts so that it didn't take an incredibly long mountain time to parse over. I think 1.3 million rose. I got it down to about 57 seconds and then includes a bunch of like I Peed, a country, look at parsing, URLs person, user agents, things like that, nothing that requires a web request, just things that can be done locally and I know it's all stored in Sql light which brought me to actually querying the database running it locally or indexed that size Deezer about 13. Second, queries to just group by pathname to do like top 25 requested pages and then count of requests for that page, not ideal and for the server that I was looking at. I actually only loaded like eight hours of data, so it would be a much larger data set in production. So obviously that's not gon na work, even if it run locally. So I would never have a whole of adding a few indexes and immediately you know that clears up the problem that becomes like 100 and 300 millisecond. Where is than when you get to the end of all this and get it working, and you know I'm just about to implement the web assembly module and do it all remotely when it occurs to me, why why? What does it get you to get you like? A little bit of scaling, you know say that there's no overhead, it just means you can scale. The number of reads infinitely doesn't really make a lot of sense. It'S like now that I reduce this to like the eight or so columns that I want to index. I'Ve basically written out the only eight SQL queries in a run against this. I might as well pre-computer or from the sky surfer, because it's it's kind of pointless to do this over 80 TTPVFS unless you're talking about sticking it on a CDN and then, like millions of people, view those charts and you just can't be bothered to pre-compute the Data, this is like the most interesting little thing I've played around with in a while. I got to the end of it, and it's just like wait as fun as this is like. This is not a compelling use case for the virtual file system that works over HTTPit's like really interesting, and it blew my mind. I saw that technique for months back and I want to build something with it, but once I got to the end of this thread that I've been pulling on for the past few months, I just realize there's nothing there like. I can't understand, unless, like it was, you were building some kind of. I don't know something like mix or something like that where you couldn't pre-compute the data or it would be kind of ridiculous, the pre-computer data, maybe something like that, would be a very used case. I don't know, but with all – four adult shows: U how many people visited website type URLs they had and what countries R from what browsers R using like. I was really easy to build, but it's not a compelling enough used case and then post once you index. Everything C quite literally doubles in size anyway. Anyway, that's it.
Airpods max day, one review so a little bit of that ground. I don't the AirPods pro pretty much since they came out. It'S probably my favorite pair of headphones. Ever I've tried it starts higher quality headphones as soon as there make some nice open backs. I can appreciate it for like short sessions of listening an hour or less. I try not a couple times and if, like headphone jacks and wired headphones were still a realistic option, I would consider just trying to max out absolutely best audio quality possible. Investing in a nice set of headphones but AirPods Pro have a great next features: fast: wireless pairing, decent battery life, durability, portability, wireless charging, really great noise cancellation and perfect ergonomics around the touch controls. It'S like, I said the my favorite pair of headphones. I'Ve ever owned. Even though I'd say there's a little bit to be desired in audio quality and if I'm being honest you you compare it to any of that over your headphones back to back you're gon na notice, the difference. So I tested the AirPods Max a few times. A short like 10 minute sessions - I wasn't as impressed as I hoped I would be either time like, maybe after this four times up, but they do deliver a better range and then the pro special overtime I like low and high that's pretty much nonexistent on the Pros the trouble is after using these for a day, the economics are just trash, comparing to the pros like the overall experience of using the pros is 10 out of 10, but the max is like: let's eat cow 30 %, higher quality audio, but you're gon na Lose a lot. This is gutless like OK, so stupid. He probably heard that before and the buttons are in a weird place, the headphones don't really fit had. It will stay on as I'm perfectly still sitting down and even if I'm perfectly still sitting down like working on the move, my glasses around the current I saw they move around the point where, like I have to remove the headphones, adjust my glasses, replace them, adjust Them again, oh that's kind of annoying. My ears get hot and sweaty after an hour, so last night I have to take them off. For some reason, noise cancellation is turned back on every time. I start listening session and I can't really find an option and fix that. I guess that's a minor issue, though I am I don't know thing is like you. I definitely feel like a dinosaur charge in the sense of the lightning cable and like just sitting them down like you, turn the headphones to lay flat. They like that and the metal bits bang up against each other or you have to kind of like sit them down askew and we are away it's it's kind of odd feeling, but you know maybe that can be solved with a stand or something like that trouble Is the sound quality is way better and I could appreciate that and stay like a nice set of wired open boxer, maybe 20 % better than us. I'D still rather sacrifice that 20 % for serve wireless headphones, but the entire experience of owning and using these headphones. Just doesn't feel as polished as the AirPods Pro I'm gon na give it a few more days, but I don't think this is going to work out.
I broke my Amazon account by having a separate address that I live in versus one that I received packages at. Let me explain our apartment building uses a service called fetch which receives our packages on our behalf and hand, delivers them toward door. It alleviates the needed for package lockers a mail room or dedicated staff. It works pretty well, but we have to use an alternative dress downtown for packages. They basically get shipped to the fetch warehouse and then re-ship 34 times a day to our apartment building, and then somebody comes through and hand delivers them, usually from a van or something like that anyway, that usually works pretty well. However, what it creates is the need for some of my packages to be delivered to my actual address and some of them to be routed to this fetch address and this broke. My Amazon account. I had to get on customer support for about 45 minutes to get it resolved, but basically Amazon behind the scenes stores a separate default shipping address for each of the services you use fresh prime subscribe and save probably more. I just don't use other ones. However, when you go to the addresses tab, it only gives you the ability to change your default address for Amazon. Prime now it'll show you that your addresses are being used for subscribe and save or fresh, but it won't actually let you change the default. So when is it having to do something kind of funky where we created some duplicate, addresses and Gullum all three on the separate addresses that were all the same address and then edited the addresses to be the ones we wanted to be, which is kind of funny. But I am wind up fixing it after about 45 minutes or so, but for a while, my Amazon fresh on my Amazon account was completely broken and Amazon fresh delivery's were going to the wrong address.
Myocart live home circuit, it's easily one of the most delightful and creative products, creating the last two years. What it is it's a real life, Marioc cart with the camera stuck to it, so it does AR on the Nintendo switch it's a little bit overpriced. I think it MRRP peas about $ 130, something like that. So half the price of the Nintendo console bundled with Marioccart eight, the latest version of Mario kart, but it's such a delightful concept and play around with the flash few days I and I'm getting a super slick Black Friday deal. I got it down to like $ 20 after buying a bunch of Apple gift cards for something else. I was gon na purchase anyway, but it is just polished every last detail. This is polished. It works very well, there really limited shelflife. Are you know it drives around in circles around the kitchen island and their living room? We don't really have enough space to create very many creative circuits, although it's super quick and easy to get started with the light cardboard cut out gates that come included with the game and if you're very realistic like it is, the exact same experience is playing Mario Kart, the video game, it's a lot! It'S it's such a unique and awesome product, even though it's something that you only get to experience a couple times before you come down with it um yeah. This is really interesting to think about. It'S really interesting to think about companies, green lighting products, which will probably not be profitable. I suppose you can do a limited run, but you know this is not a project that you greenlight, because it's going to become a cash cow. That'S like a project. You greenlight, because it's probably the most innovative, interesting thing Nintendo is done as a company since the launch of the switch him. You know they basically replicate the Mario kart experience on 1/25 scale on like a little car, you can race around your house um, it's crazy! You get two players and two switches and you can remote control. Two of these I mean it's just it's a really polished product. It'S the one I think of now, when I think of a delightful user experience or first experience, it just blows my mind that a game company created today, that's it
Should Reddit clone clubhouse? That'S the question: what's a bad question: they are, they will it's gon na ship inside the Reddit Mall app they're, hoping it will increase retention usage of the mobile app and who knows maybe well maybe it won't. Here is the pro argument why they should clone it. It'S a new format. They should get ahead of it, get ahead of it before red user is jump for alternatives, since there are so many alternatives out their own competing platforms. The format works really well with large audiences, most umbrellas have a large audience and you could introduce a new type of interaction. Behavior in those audiences were already organized. Around topic. Theory have a discovery mechanism, there's a ton of value you can get in by launching that app. Now here's the counter argument, there's no real indication that Reddit users actually want to use clubhouse. Here'S why Reddit users are probably the quickest to adopt new contact new forms? A contact, and typically they beat read it by month, three years at addressing those short comings and the Reddit platform, when Reddit users wanted images, they created Imgur, probably five years for Reddit images to come out same with video contact, same of chat, counter and discord. It just the list goes on and on and on - and here is, the big issue is that almost all Reddit contact is asynchronous is consumed in a feed at your own pace and whatever time zone you're in and it doesn't matter whether you login at the same Time as a contact creator or not, however, clubhouse counter is very, very synchronous, or at least the creation aspect involves a community creating's contact synchronously in the same time zone in a way that just doesn't happen on Reddit organically. The other side of the same coin is Reddit. Moderators are incredibly resourceful if they wanted to host clubhouse meet ups for their communities. They already be doing it they've, never taken more than a few weeks to figure out the tools in the process to introducing new Contin typed their community if they're not already adopting another tool. That means there's no organic desire in any sub Reddit for clubhouse, like interaction and really, if you think about the way the clubhouse room operates, really there's only one sub. The operates like that, it's AMA is the same as that is the only sub Reddit, where users create contact in the clubhouse format. Today now granted ANA is on Reddit and Reddit mobile app with clubhouse style content creation. It be in the really fun to play with it's a great idea, but it's really hard to ignore the contrarian viewpoint that Reddit users and Reddit moderators always find their own tools. Very quickly to fill to fulfill their desire to create contact in a specific format, and it really seems like if Reddit users wanted to share contact with other Redditors in the clubhouse format. They would B posting all across popular sub Reddit's, with links to upcoming clubhouse rooms. R upcoming quick tour spaces, and that's just not something you say today -
So Pokémon, brilliant diamond shining pearl, it's pretty well ported, it isn't super buggy. It'S pretty smooth to play. I'D say the biggest problems are that it feels like too faithful of a port from a handheld console to the TV. What is the biggest problems or any Pokémon game? It'S too easy, but realistically this one specifically there was just way too many times. You have to press the confirmation button. It'S it's pretty pretty slow, like the Oregon helmet for this game are pretty poor. I would say over everything else like gym, design is kind of boring stories, boring it's not super exciting of a game, but as far as just like a call you a poor like the biggest thing, that's really probably bugging me is that it's not super smooth. Just going through like menus and dialogue in the battle, there's like it is a AAA AAA, you're spamming, a and B as quickly as you can to try to get through this slow menus and loading screens and battle intros, and all that it's just super time consuming. It feels really like I said it feels really lacking in the economics department.
Stadi is really interesting and really disappointing from product perspective. I'Ve been playing around with it on a free trial and the performances really great 4K varial input lag, it all works really. Well, I get it. They have data centers in Seattle. It'S not crazy. Sorry, I think Kirkland anyway, the fact that it works like if you think about it a little bit. They could pitch this as the next generation of gaming right. They can pitch this as it's an infinitely powerful game console power more powerful than the PS five more powerful than a whole box, full of PS, fives more powerful than like a truckload of Xbox ones that you can't get because they're out of stock everywhere instantly available And free to use - but I don't there - they are currently marketing this as take the existing items that you own and re-purposed them for gaming, which is it's kind of crazy. It'S kind of disappointing from a product perspective because they're not really highlighting any of the value or benefits of the product. They just kind of like oh yeah, we're going to we're gon na make our own game pass. We'Re gon na make our own GeForce. Now, I guess from that perspective, the marketing problem and the positioning problem isn't just stadia all three of these services have all that sort of positioning issue, although you could argue, Microsoft is not about undercut sales of the Xbox and Nvidia stands to gain from when he Can'T they stay in the game, basically from creating a like selling hardware hardware sales, so that makes sense what I'm looking at right now, incognito incognito, here's their exact copy on their homepage. You have what it takes stadia turns the things you already own in the portals to the biggest games. Try stadia pro free for one month, 999, a month after trial cancel any time. So what is the value here? It isn't telling me that I can play games like what is that game like I can play cyberpunk at higher quality settings on stadia, then I can on any computer I own then I can, on I don't know, play PS five PS4 Xbox one, but it's not Telling me that it's telling me oh yeah, you got a TV, will send you a Chromecast and you can play games on it like this is such a waste. The other thing is it's creating confusion and that the entire page neglected to mention that they have a free tier and that you can use stadia without paying a monthly fee, and you can use stadia without buying additional hardware. No, I said it's crazy. I guess the last thing that occurred to me as this would be such a cash cow of a business too. If you think the business model of like Consul hardware vendors, they lose money on every unit, a hardware they sell, they get a market share and then they recoup 3040 % fees for every title sold produced by a third-party. The same model could be adopted if google treated stadia as a consul. If they they control the marketplace, they already do if they can get third parties to put games on it, which I mean it's a PC game. It runs in the cloud like I assume it's dead, simple, to export a game from unity. They probably make you build it for lunch or something you're, not paying windows, licensing fees but anyway anyway, it's probably very easy to develop a game for stadia compared to. I don't know PS five dedicate something like that. They could give this away. Let you use whatever controller you want with whatever hardware you want. Simran game pass ultimate works and make more money off of software sales. Then is 995 a month per pro user. Is this ridiculous? The pricing model? I guess I guess that's where that leaves me as my game pass ultimate. Is the Xbox one killer like? If Microsoft decides, they can't really compete with Xbox? Is they just and they don't have a driver TV? Stick though, they do a partnership with Apple, maybe something like that and get game pass ultimate on Apple TV yeah. That would probably be very perform at a very smooth experience. When you go after google TV fire stick yeah, it seems like it seems like this. Is Microsoft game to win? They just have to sacrifice. There'S this is a Google is the only one who is earning new market share anybody else. Who'S competing for market share, like Nvidia, is not selling any titles when they get a GeForce now subscriber. So they have to make the unit economics of our spare on the server they have to make that work, that that may never work out to be positive for cutting edge, Nvidia hardware. Now the sound of data centers: it's not really a great business, Microsoft, coach sales from steam to their own store Microsoft. So I guess that's what the Xbox store! I don't know her game Center sometime app and they could capture a larger portion of the PC game. Sales are currently happening on steam and epic and other platforms, but Google is such a massive opportunity and it's a pain position, so horribly is painful anyway. This is me posting an audio logs. I haven't posted in a while cheers.
My TVs a day late because it arrived in Portland a day early and then the status and FedEx got all messed up and it didn't make it onto a truck this morning, although it was already in Washington, and so it's not out for delivery. Today and it'll be delayed another day, not a big deal. It was just really interesting. First, when I saw the update it said, projected delivery will be yesterday, which was a day in the past which didn't make sense because it was already the third and it said, project delivery is now updated from the fourth to the second and then once it figured Things out it just got stuck in a pending state. It won't project when the delivery will be, but it doesn't look like it's going to be on time because it doesn't look like it got onto a truck
Shameless copying first, I guess it was stories. Then it was clubhouse. Now it seems to be Microsoft. Clone of notion named loop. It'S interesting it's one of those things that I'm sure is technically legal or legally defensible by a big company like this, but it's something that didn't used to happen at all. The cloning of an entire product, like I'm not talking about just like copying, features like the other shameless copying of a product right down to font sizes and button placement and color schemes like this type of cloning. It'S easy to say it's kind of poor taste. It feels really dirty as a designer, but I'm sure it's legally defensible. I am, I am sure that the appropriate teams have vetted their ability to get away with it. I'M sure that it doesn't breeds any monopoly issues. It just feels very wrong and it's a very weird time to be a designer. If this becomes the norm like can you imagine being on a team task to clone a product? I just kind of crazy
On September 11, 2001 at 8 AM United Airlines Flight 93 is scheduled to depart from Newark international airport, but it doesn't after just a one minute delay in departing from the gate. It's now prioritized behind several other airplanes at the airport, experiencing heavy traffic in total will be delayed by departure 42 minutes departing at 8:42. Am this is just six minutes before the first plane with strike world trade center. You are heard the stories of what happened. You know exactly what happened 20 years ago. He probably know most of the facts of what I'm about to tell you, but unless you've heard them presented in a very specific way, the significance of that might escape. It certainly escapes the most common narratives. We talk about what happened 20 years ago, as you might now, at about eight 9:20, AM as playing near Cleveland, Ohio Terrace broke into the carpet that incapacitated the pilot. In first officer. They took control the plane hijacking it. We notice from an air traffic controller transmission from the cockpit before it breaks before radio silence. Mayday, hey get out of here, get out of here get out of here and then silence the plane started the fire radically. After that, the planes altitude, suddenly shop 700 feet likely a struggle air traffic controllers now, where that might be another one. Another hijacking and one of the flight attendants telephones, United Airlines to report hijacking. Just six minutes later 13 passengers aboard the plane between the hijacking at 9:28 and the time of the crash at 10:03 AM were able to make a phone call to their family and friends. Their loved ones, I 9:57 AM the passengers and crew began their assault on the cockpit likely only because they knew of what it happened earlier this morning. If they had not known that, it was likely, their plane would be flown into a building and their lives were already forfeit. Standard procedures would be to cooperate with the hijackers. Typically, this, how do you survive a hijacking not by resisting, however, those 13 phone calls after planes struck the world trade center likely changed the outcome of flight 93 on September 11. What'S the significance of this thing about the targets from the flight plan and the information of the plot that we have ignored it down to either two possible targets, the White House or the capitol building, consider the enormous response for 9/11 and now consider if the nations Capital, the symbol of the United States government has been destroyed, consider who may have been in that building at the time. Vice president, this is only speculation but consider the response. The White House been destroyed, along with the other targets in the September 11 attacks. It doesn't take long to realize the history over the last 20 years, would've been wildly different and members of the government and the nations capital been destroyed instead of a plane landing in an unknown part of Pennsylvania at 10 AM
So I finally updated my app so that I could rebuild it and re-deploy it to TestFlight. After WWDC, I downloaded beta versions of macOS and iOS for my devices and I didn't realize that since Cordova was a little bit behind, I wouldn't be able to build for those new targets on these machines and test things out until, I don’t know what is this, September? So now that Xcode 12.5 iOS 6.2 are supported, I can rebuild this, test things out, and upload it back to TestFlight using the latest versions of all of those build chains. We'll see if it works!
So the WWDC keynote was kind of crazy to watch from here. It starts at one in the morning and ends at 3 AM and there's a lot of stuff packed into it like. It was like two hours of bullet points about everything that every team was working on for iOS. There was stuff that was magical and crazy and new, like the universal control thing and the tax translation there, with some cool stuff like how they're making FaceTime giving it more features to be more of a zoom replacement and the same time there was some stuff that Was like really dumb added into the Keynote like new Apple account recovery methods? I don't think that's keto worthy, but it's just maybe I was tired, but just washing it at one in the morning.
So this is interesting. I thought I would share. A few weeks ago, Guam launched a program for vaccine tourism targeting American ex-pats in Asia. So on their press release, they said you know: there's 750,000 American ex-pats in Asia and since they have a Bandan access to American vaccines, they want to benefit from the space vaccine tourism. So they set up a program where you fly to Guam, which is a US territory, and you do a test for hand. You do six days of quarantine, do a test after and then they give you a free vaccine out, which I thought was really really interesting. They also put you up in a quarantine hotel for free. I guess what they're hoping
For Taiwan is currently in lockdown level 3+ plus for Taipei in Gallicano nephew other cities but basically they don't want to enter level for a lockdown even though they met the criteria so they're kind of try to skirt around it by Adam more restricted shins to level three and rely on people to mostly do the right thing the city is pretty empty almost nobody outside to go places are pretty much empty so it's working fairly well they just don't want to actually do the level for a walk down if they can void it and I've got in the RO down the 1.06 which is pretty much stable and cases of been flat deck lining slightly pretty much since
So Taiwan entered pre-lockdown yesterday after 160 cases of Covid were reported, most of them. Local transmission on the previous record was like 29, a few days earlier and 16 a few days before that I am what that means. Basically, last year, when I think in March or April, they said four levels of Covid restrictions. Like the longest time, we were on level one and level two which was basically just like wearing masks and the train and like level three. I are level two involved. I don't know social distancing and contact tracing for like large events, things like that level, three, which is what we just entered now, it's not locked down. It'S like the step before lock down.
Apple is about to kill podcast thing as we know it, and that might actually be a good thing. So yesterday, during the Apple event, they announced they were making some changes to the way podcasts work in the iOS ecosystem and iTunes, and basically, what they're going to do is add new features on top of podcasts, which aren't possible with a simple RSS feed like podcasts Used today, I'm a little bit of background since I've been working on this social audio app for for five months now, that's one of the things I kept running into is just how limiting the IRS standard for podcasting wise. It'S really obvious that a lot of the directions you could take social audio in Podcasts
So today's Covid press conference in Taiwan was pretty interesting— we have a daily press conference, where the health minister gives an update on all things Covid and he basically, he was concerned that the Taiwanese public appears to be disinterested in receiving the vaccine, he said. I guess we have a couple of hundred thousand.. Let's see— about 320,000 doses, that expire on May 31 and June 15, these are the AstraZeneca doses, and it's been opened to the highest priority groups about 618,000 people are eligible to be vaccinated...
So I'm in a park walking home and I don't know just wanted to share some of my thoughts about what I've been working on in my in the founder journey. I spent a lot of time this year, all of it actually working on pretty much anything. I could, except for my primary business friend of mine, called that my make her vacation and it's been a long one. It'S been like four months started in December. Really am I've worked on those servers that do completed that bill in the a.m. launch. The TestFlight got a working web app and everything runs on that belt and pretty much finished change log that life and spent a few months learning Twitter and growing. My Twitter audience for basically no good reason yet launched help in public
I want to do a post on big cloud because I feel, like I've come full circle now over the past couple of weeks, so I discovered a couple weeks ago, the on boarding process of camp body, and it was not really working. They had some scaling issues. Originally there was some trouble verifying my phone number, the first couple times I tried and it wasn't until I tried using a proxy for my US number, I was trying to verify the user USAP that I figured out how that's what was blocking the verification process. So I had some hiccups getting started, but then it was super interesting for a few days watching then I got super hyped about big cloud I'll, The Big O dark mode, chrome extension and I called designer body Chromatix tension at first. I
Hey this is James. I keep an audio log on indie.am and I just wanted to try posting an audio log to bitclout. It’s the first one I think. Let me know what you think:
I think it's really interesting how people develop a deep expertise or think deeply about us pacific aspect of the Internet or of a product or of a company or a problem, and then that leads them to have a series of ideas all sparked from that unique insight Or that unique perspective that they develop the old canonical start up advice from 20 years ago was like what is your unique insight that makes you that gives you a unique perspective for solving this problem or founding this company etc., but I think the new version of That, especially for product designers and in the founders, is like what have you dive deeply into in this, like
I have this theory that Twitter DM's and your social graph on Twitter is replacing slack in 2021. Him, if you think, of slack or discord as your team collaboration infrastructure that used to be silo did just your company. You didn't work with people outside of your company or, if you did, that, with the exception, not the rule now, if you're starting a new business in 2021 or networking or talking to people, this is largely happening on Twitter now, and your social graph on Twitter is Becoming more important, especially as an in the founder than your real buyer for your company graph on Slack
Wow that donkey Kong versus iguana movie was actually really freaking good. Congratulations! All my friends are used to work with on HBO Max. This is pushing the app back to the top of the iTunes charts again good news. I especially like the part of the end, where no, no, no, I'm just kidding no spoilers here, but I will say the title is incredibly misleading.
When Paul, Graham wrote his first essays, the canonical advice for startups was: don't worry about your competitors coming along and copying you. Don't worry about what if some big company like Google comes along and copies my product, because there's so many reasons why start ups die, and that was almost never the case. I think the first example that broke that rule was Justin Kan’s Calendar start up, but it was basically an early version of Google Calendar which may or may not have been a copy. It was probably just a similar product that was already in development before they launch Kiko, but I'd say for at least a decade after those essays came out, that was really solid advice. You almost never saw a product copied by a competitor out right. The first time..
The best part about buying a new MacBook is you get to declare bankruptcy on all the crap in your downloads folder, your settings, your configuration little things screwed up when you're done environment you just get her wipe it all away and start over fresh. You have tons of free storage. You have all your settings up-to-date, no quirks, no weird bugs from a five year old operating system where you screwed up some part of your desk configuration or settings trying to get something to work. None of that that's the best part. Oh yeah and it's a brand new MacBook
I'm just curious, how much Pokémon Go are you guys playing these days? Is it a lot? I bet it's a lot.
So it's happening, YouTube is finally cloning, TickTock and the UI for the beta product called shorts is well, it's not great. It'S not amazing. I made a little clone of the TickTock. You are just for fun like about a year ago, and I remember when I was playing with that. The biggest realization I came up with was that, no matter what the video has to fill the screen at the edge for the experience to work and the YouTube shorts, you, why constantly crops and add black bars to video, and it just really breaks the experience on Mobile because basically you're swiping up and down through a slideshow, it's like stories but vertical and
I don't know I have a space to post this anywhere so I just thought I would do it as an audio blog post but I guess I never really talked about like the real reason why I thought it be a good idea to build in the a.m. app yeah I wasn't really because I was super in love with the idea I was when I first came up with it but the real reason why I wanted to dig in and build the apps because you know I haven't really built and launched very many complete mobile apps like for iOS or android at all like my entire business is one really simple cross platform mobile app and it's literally the first one that I put on the App Store and I've worked on larger apps and I've worked on other peoples apps
All right, I just finished integrating plausible.io analytics for a change log that life the ideas basically, instead of building my own analytics for my customers to pair inside the dashboard I'll, just use possible analytics. So I was doing this before because I figured out how I could link to a public plausible that I/O page, but now it's gotten even better because they allow you to turn to embed link into a so. They allow you to turn the share link into an I-frame in bed, which I have stuck inside of the app programmatically. It shows basically all of the charts he would normally see implausible but inside the users dashboard, so they can go to their list of change logs and then they just click on the Analytics button for the change log, they're interested in and I'll see all the charts And graphs and top pages are
So here's my Indy maker update I've been working on change log that life pretty much nonstop for the past week, I'm playing around with it on and off for the week past that bunch of updates, you might know my change logging.com drama. That'S still unresolved. I'Ve paid for and registered the domain, but at Verizon is not explaining why they automatically banned the domain at the registrar level, which is really confusing a little bit frustrating I'm glad I'm not 100 % dependent on that name. But when I registered it, I thought it would be a really good.com that you could use for your sub domain website like if you were gon na, have your name.change login.com that seems kind of Americans. Undera.Com
Ok designers, what do you call your untitled draft in Figma? You know what I'm talking about. The junk drawer, the one where you just wanted to resize a JPEG, oh, I just want to crop this little bit out. Oh, I'm going to change the background in this file, real quick. Oh, I scanned this document, but it's too large. I need to compress it. Do you know what I'm talking about? It's been in Figma since you first downloaded the app, it's now probably got hundreds of individual pieces in it. What do you call that?
Starting seeing some traffic to an interesting thread on Twitter I participated in, so I thought I would share a few stories about SaaS billing, specifically for B2B companies. The big thing I learned about that surprised me the most: checks. You might say, but we don't accept checks. Yes you do. You will have customers google your address, google your name, and mail random checks to any address they find. Is it a PO Box that you don't check more than once a year, because it's only for your corporate filing or the address of your registered agent? If they can find on Google somebody at some point- a nonzero number of people- a surprisingly large number of people, will find that address and just throw money at it, and then they'll contact you via your support email and yell at you, because..
I'M prototyping something new today. Basically, I want my product to change log to live on Twitter. It might be a necessity to have a page link to your site where or an in bedded with it, where you can display recent updates to the application you can do. Pop-Up windows - I don't know that doesn't matter as an indie maker, I don't want to have to go somewhere special to post out updates to my change log in my own app I don't wan na pour get meds because those are poorly formatted they're, not great. I just want to make it really effortless to keep my Changelog up-to-date inside my product, so I'm prototyping pulling tweets filtering them by specific usernames and hashtags, and using those tweets to auto generate a change log that you never have to update.
So I'm a frontend developer in 2021, over 10 years of experience building websites - since I don't know 2005, 2006, 2007, and I still use bootstrap and people ask me sometimes, you know, why I still use bootstrap. Why don't I use something more like Tailwind or have I heard of Tailwind or have I heard of Bulma, and I get a laugh out of that every time I hear it. I don't use it, but I like it, but I have a really interesting reason for why I think I don't use Tailwind. Let me tell you a story: I basically came up with tailwind in 2014, the exact same syntax, exact same kind of completion process. I called it declarative CSS. You can find it on my GitHub. I used it for a dozen or so projects.
So I took a break this week and built a thing called space. He plays Pokémon, it's a playable, Pokémon red instants. You can play from my space her profile. This is inspired by Twitter plays Pokémon because it's self inspired by twitch plays Pokémon for years ago. What it is, is it's a game boy, emulator, playing Pokémon red running on Wassom boy, which is a emulator written and go compile the web assembly running under no Jay as a little server. And basically, what happens is somebody presses a button from my profile page? It links to a page and if multiple people are playing at tallies them up and the highest, though every second hour is counted as the end. But then it
So I got an invite to host rooms on Twitter spaces are completed on boarding. Yesterday I tried things out. I want to share my initial impressions of the app. I think I've been in for five large rooms that I host a room yesterday for a few hours and just let people drop in serendipitously to try things out and I feel like. I have a pretty good idea of the current state of the user. Experience of the app I've made my comparisons with Clubhouse, and I just wanted to crystallize those things and capture that so to set the stage Twitter spaces they've made a pretty good copy of the clubhouse room. Experience there's one big difference and that's that they've limited their design just to the room experience and it feels like. Can I get on a group call with people you already known
American Airlines confirms UFO contact over New Mexico on Sunday. The aircraft was flying from Cincinnati to Phoenix and at 1:19 PM central time over the north east corner of New Mexico, they were at about 37,000 ft they radioed Albuquerque Aircraft Control. Here's a clip: [audio clip] — They said it was something long and cylindrical: it moved really fast and right over top of them. I don't think this is a credible siding, but they've confirmed the incident. They've done a debrief, they've basically just said that this is a UFO sighting doesn't mean aliens, it just means they have no idea what they ran into and what they saw.
Apple sounds: Loading, Funk, basso, sosumi, logged in, submarine, mail sent, new mail, put trash, empty trash, invitation, FaceTime ringer, FaceTime accepted, FaceTime hang up, AirPods connected, AirPods disconnected, AirPods low battery.
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So now, every time that you record a new audio log, the transcriptions are turned into subtitles, which are applied in real time to the playback in the app. But I also use the subtitle files to generate a video file with FFMpeg, and video file shows the subtitles in real time overlaid in the audio. That way, if you share the video file to Twitter or another social network, and somebody doesn't turn the audio on, they can still read your post.
So here's my indie maker update today, I'm not doing anything really interesting, I'm just doing something for fun. I am doing a transcription point map for the transcriptions that come from the iOS app when you do a new recording. Basically iOS will give you updates in real time for the completed transcription. It doesn't give you timestamps. So it's a somewhat interesting problem to create that mapping of, you know, just break that completed paragraph of text for the transcription up into smaller segments and timestamp them. That’s all.
Ok, here's my big in the a.m. update for the day. I'Ve updated the website that you get automatically the default theme middle of improvements to that completely rebuild it from scratch, so that it would be a decent looking website that you could share with your friends share on social media etc. lots of improvements, it should feel really Polished also, I added the guides to submit your RSS to the podcast directories, a good guide published in medium and linked it from the app so that you could set all that up.
So I spent a full day, probably making icons and making an icon picture that works on iOS 13+ in Cordova. It was a really interesting process. I learned a lot from it. It was all kicked off, because a friend of mine pointed out that there was an interesting trick that clubhouse used to indicate that their servers were down. They change the app icon and it kind of indicated that the servers were down, and I realized that was a new Developer feature added an iOS 13 and I kind of want to play around with it replicate something like the Apollo. I pass for Reddit, where you can pick your icon from the left. Then change your icon do whatever you want it to be, so I ended up making about a dozen icon variations and coming up with one that I like better than the placeholder icon. I have been using him they're all kind of in a can.
The Twitter plays Pokémon game finally completed today after six weeks of continuous play, the avatar updated every 15 seconds when somebody commented up down, left right AB, select or start on a specific Twitter thread penned by Ashe screen shakes. So today my side project was Twitter played pokémon.com. Basically I created a video player of the entire stream, so you could play it back at any speed. You wanted and published that you can also press the speakers to play a random Pokémon. Might I file - and I applied what I learned over the last few weeks about video CD ends and video fail back video quality control and a few things to make that work.
Oh, this sucks Twitter plays Pokémon was just taken off-line, I'm not sure if it was like a server scaling issue or Twitter or Nintendo took the soft line, but before the game actually ended and people could actually beat the game, it was taken off line by the Creator, I have a sucks if you hadn't seen it. I created a little player inside of a game boy where you can play the Twitter plays Pokémon game on my website, a link to it. But I guess it doesn't work anymore.
So I spent basically all day playing around with audio and beds in Twitter. I initially thought that it wouldn't work, but it turned out that was just the documentation was pretty bad and I was pretty dumb. But if you're listening to this now, it's probably on Twitter and you're, probably on desktop or you'll, see the fall in bed or mobile web or you'll also see the fall in bed. The mobile app captures the link and either redirects to the iOS app. If you have it installed, or it opens up a full page in your browser with your normal audio log theme, to play things back up, so I'm hoping what I can do now is complete that share cycle. Where you download the app you record a few posts and then you can share those out on social media and start to get more people to your audio log.
Here'S my Indie make her update for Monday February 15, so I spent a good bit of time yesterday tweaking the audio encoding pipeline. I thought about it for a while, and I just turned up the audio quality settings to optimize more for higher quality output. Instead of optimizing for better compression, I just thought you know it's really small and while the app is like a really small scale, it doesn't make sense to try to like Pinch a Penny. Zundelowitz costs just to let you know if it sacrifices audio quality at all. So I think the audio compression is still a lot better than your typical podcast, like it used, is a lot less bandwidth that works, because it's primarily spoken audio, most podcasts that I find don't really
I have officially switched from Sketch to Figma: but it's not what you think, I'm not abandoning Sketch, but the other day when I tried installing Sketch on my new M1 Mac, I ran into a maintenance window and I couldn't renew my license. So I ended up having to install Figma and I ended up using it for the past three days without really running into any issues, so I have officially switched from Sketch to Figma. It might be temporary, but not looking back right now.
I woke up this morning with about four hours of sleep. I'Ve got a funny alert on my phone or static city and server was returning errors strange errors. Sometimes it was working. Sometimes it wasn't. I looked at the logs a little bit on my phone and decided to get up and investigate it. It turned out back blaze B2, which is an AWS, is three alternative that we use to store static files was down. Was it a bad? Push to production occurred problem now, due to an abuse report. Go daddy had suspended one of the domains they used by the service so instantly millions of people who depended on back, please be to the other apps that use the service were off-line or broken or in someway impacted.
So here's my update for Wednesday February 10 just got test flight approved for public access, which means I can give people a link to opt into the TestFlight instead of having to invite them as a user in our organization, which is really cool. But ups are limit from about 100 users to 10,000, which will probably last quite a while, and we still don't have to do a full App Store review process, but the obstacles were pretty significant. I thought that it would take longer to get through them, but it seems like if you make a good faith effort to adhere to all of the requirements for your social media and audio app they're just thumbs up the test flight they wanted. It could be a little bit more stringent on actual App Store review, but you know: there's there's a bunch of things. You have to add, like your dad.
Mark Andriessen and Ben Horowitz just hosted a room on clubhouse, and I thought I would recap a few interesting things that came up. One of the most interesting topics that Mark brought up was just that large scale systems usually don't age well, and it applies to a lot of things, especially our government. Basically, it's really hard to make a large scale system work in the first place and those things generally don't hold together very long, and he points out that, basically, what we've done is we've come up with some systems that worked really well at some point in time And it's really crazy that we were able to seal them up as large as we did, and we just got into the problem that it takes a lot of work from a lot of people to change them. And so it's creating a lot of problems in our politics today, but that was an interesting perspective.
A friend of mine, Brian Hall, is about to launch on product on a tool he created called cofounder question cards. It'S basically a website you go to, and it's great questions that you can ask your potential cofounder of something that's inspired by an earlier article called date. Night questions - and you know one of those things were. It was like interesting questions to ask like somebody on a date, but this is more focused towards cofounder dating him. So I thought I would go through the deck and answer one arm and get a couple of other people to chime in on the thread and answer one of the cards. I will share a link as the first reply to this post.
So I just got out of the clubhouse room, with Jason Bloom from blue Mounds and BJ Novak, and they were talking for a while about streaming media and the existing film industry, television, industry and the transition to streaming Netflix on your a few things that I've thought Pretty deeply about as a technologist are used to work at HBO work on HBO max, and so it's some thing I thought about, although I don't have the expertise either of these people. However, the perspective adjacent, bloomer, big, Novak or Mark Andriessen has on these things out. It'S really interesting one of the things that Jason bloom, bloom house and down for is they make low budget everything's low budget relatively low budget for the industry, I'm $ 10 million or less, and despite that they've been all day, they have more
It'S been crazy following the uptake in Mandarin speaking users in the clubhouse up over the last couple of weeks, and so I remember when I first went to Clubhouse the only Mandarin speakers. There were a few Americans in Taiwanese in like language practice room. There is a club where you can practice Mandarin in, like a few hundred people, maybe at most were on the app at a time just like practicing with language learners. Things like that, you know up until a few weeks ago there were no non-English, almost no non-American rooms on Clubhouse and now a couple of weeks ago. I think God, maybe a week ago there was an influx of Hong Kong city, discovered Clubhouse and they start
So I'm gonna kick off at the register talk about audio best social networks in general I am this all happened inside of the in the a.m. app feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts on the subject
So today, I'm working on what I think will become the core feature of this app in that thread and conversations. I'Ve just started experimenting with us a couple of days ago, but basically the idea is when I post a new topic, it's one audio file, all the replies to that become a threat just like a Reddit thread or a hacker news thread or a tweet storm or A Twitter thread, but because you have audio replies it just takes on this. It fundamentally becomes like a Playlist inside of your feed. You kind of take a detour to this thread to you know, to engage in conversation versus consume contact, and I just
Here is my Andy make her check in for Thursday, February 4 haven't worked on the app for a few days I've been minor bug fixes but I got a lot done today and I basically just worked on it all day and implemented a few tweaks to how the fees and timelines work I implemented notifications on an activity feed so that you can see who has a commentator followed you you can also like edit and delete comments you can follow and Unfollow anybody on the app and I think that's about it but it's a lot of work when do those features today you should notice on lotta changes if you download the app on the 0.2.19 version of the app
Right, I want to try a new post format for this time. I'M sharing a meme with a very short audio clip
Fingers crossed if this works it'll be really awesome but I've just completed my first attempt at transcribing audio as it's recorded and uploading it with every post one in the a.m.
Okay, quick follow up to the sequel, JS HTTP virtual file system post. I both the new website to test out a different data set. This is a 10 MB data set of arcade games from archived.org, their Internet arcave project their spread across flash games. In my as titles and name arcade games, this is about 11 or 12,000 records in a sequelightte database. Most things are indexed and I built a view next friend in deposit now, if I test things out so performance, why is the CDN performance just about the best I've ever seen him it's a little faster than anything else, I've deployed to either city and I've used. I have to look into a little bit. More just gave me a good idea of kind of where the 60s and where this fails, so the website is pretty blazing fast, like I have infinite pagination going on for each category, and I am it loads 30 records at a time in normal paginated. Sql queries like limit offset and it's pretty instantaneous like. Basically, you can't see the light indicator at all and that's on it pretty fast Internet connection, but like each of the subsequent request for additional pages are so fast that I don't like 3040. Ms, I keep you. Can you can't perceive it really so you end up with the system. It'S really really really fast. However, it doesn't up with a pretty hefty coldstart problem. It'S web assembly see you have to load the web assembly module before you make your first request that takes about an hour, let's see anywhere from 900, ms to 1 1/2 seconds from the tasks I've done. It'S a 1.3 MB by Ineri Wassom file that contains basically sequel, eight recycled address as a project name for the driver. Anyway, that's about a second just to say you can hide that basically behind you can use as a future to use a high that I am but I'll just start with that also the requests required to perform. My first query on the status are in the Bing about a 1.2 MB presentational 1.2 MB of that 10 MB database and an additional requests end up being just blazing fast, like somebody's come in at like five or 10. Others must be cash. Some of these come on. Let'S see yeah these ones have ask HR they end up. I will just not being really really fast. I guess I'm not 4050, ms 70. Ms, for that, one wrong impression about 30 to call bytes of data. So what is our website? Look like well basically, when users light on the homepage. I can come hide that initial coldstart problem, since it happens, asynchronously the webpage Lowe's in under a second. If it's just a normal knock, stop serving basically start a countdown for the homepage and then, when the page loads. It kicks off that download in the load to initialize the Wasem file and takes a second and then IT by making a query from the homepage. To get that big one megabyte query out of the way, and so basically as long as it takes the user a couple of seconds to click to the category they want to browse, it just seems very, very quick and fast. However, it's probably not possible to optimize too much further. Like you, I think, if you're going to use this approach, do you have to be looking at a larger data set, probably larger than 10 MB? That is index in a way that you're gon na have a lot of subsequent queries, but you can come home hide that cold start problem was actually thinking about it on lake a website like Netflix or the HBO max app. Since I worked on that before I was kind of thinking about that contacts like conceivably, you could take the entire public database of titles that were available to the user and you could stick all the public meditator. Just like you know, URLs to images and descriptions. Titles things like that you can stick all of that in a database if you have, if you had the coldstart problem on the student up being super fast, I guess one trade-off is this. Data ends up getting cash, so your theoretical maximum usage of like memory in your JavaScript deep, is basically the entire size of the database. So that's something to keep in mind, especially for lake Ella webOS. I don't think webOS could handle. Maybe FiOS FiOS, some android TV could, I bet Apple TV definitely could but like why Apple TV doesn't have a technologies is matter. You have to reinvent everything from scratch. It'S probably not worth it. Blake say you implement in webOS for LG TV is. That will probably end up being yeah. I don't think you want your your data set in the consuming 5060 MB of memory in that platform in my name, become an issue in lower and android devices, especially Amazon devices. But I don't have an interest in technique, especially if you use her desktop like I'm. Just imagine you can deploy website directly, can get home to a static. Cnn Kinda, not really think about the problem of a database server while still and I'm getting the unlimited ability to carry a SQL database and read only mode. That'S pretty neat and I'm sure, there's used cases for it, especially data science, are exploring data set alarm.