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12 posts total
Tom MacWright

this is some technology i can get excited about - a translator that works offline in real time that you can just put on a table between two people to have a conversation between languages: petewarden.com/2024/10/11/intr

🍉

@tmcw no thank you, I can't trust AI to do even simple text translations, so I wouldn't trust it for a whole spoken conversation...

a popular AI translation tool is set to translate English to Portuguese. The English text reads "Sorry since I did not hear from you again the dresser has already sold" and the Portuguese translation reads "O meu marido e a minha mulher estão a tentar comprar a cómodo, mas não conseguem" which roughly translates to "My husband and wife are trying to buy a dresser, but they are not successful"
DELETED

@tmcw That is the power of tech!!! Amazing!!!

Tom MacWright

wrote about this side project (an urban trip planner based on plaintext/markdown) that i've been dreaming about a lot, prototyping a bit, but haven't made much progress on macwright.com/2024/10/03/wanti

Drew Dara-Abrams

@tmcw Interesting idea. If you eventually find the time, you're also welcome to try out transit.land/documentation/rou

Andrew Chou

@tmcw > I’m spending my 9-5 focused on Val Town, and my weekends and afternoons are dedicated more to reading, running, social activities, and generally touching grass, rather than hacking on web projects. I miss the web projects, but not that much.

Basically me too, although I've never really had a phase of working seriously on side-projects 😄

but...if you're ever interested in having collaborators for such a project, sign me up!

Tom MacWright

what would be cool in the mapping world would be @protomaps but for geocoding, with overture data. runs on duckdb or arrow or some static dataset, super easy to host… this would rock

brandon

@tmcw I have a PoC of this using overture and lucaong.github.io/minisearch/ (the thing that lets you search docs without algolia) and it's OK, devil is in the details - multilingual, ranking, etc

Tom MacWright

off the top of my head chart of the "world of maps,” maybe this is useful to people gist.github.com/tmcw/b6362f325

a flowchart of relationships in the world of maps
Ian Dees

@tmcw What's Behind the Nav Buttons in the Lower Right? Wrong Answers Only.

Nelson Minar 🧚‍♂️

@tmcw well written, thank you for sharing it. I feel it will strike a chord in some people who need to hear it.

Tom MacWright

i flipped the switch and made the placemark codebase open source today: macwright.com/2024/01/19/place

it's been cleaned up a bit, and some of the external dependencies are now optional, but it'd benefit massively if folks start improving it and tinkering with the internals. open sourcing big applications like this is a big roll of the dice: i think it's valuable in part because it's a complete, production application, but it is also a lot ot absorb all at once. time will tell!

Andrew

@tmcw @zachleat oh, that's handy, that could save me a lot of writing setTimeout calls in the console...

Tom MacWright

inside me are two wolves, one of them thinks that the ai hype cycle is a cult of optimism inherited from the crypto hype cycle and all of the productivity gains will go to existing market leaders and we will be no closer to a world in which people have more free time to create or even basic services like healthcare, the other wolf says tom, you're kind of depressed

Tom MacWright

there's a third one that thinks that the wolves construct might be a riff on sincerely held beliefs of native americans, which already feels bad in the chance that it is

Ariel Kadouri

@tmcw I went to SF last February and then again in July and in that time a few of the billboards switched from crypto to AI

Seb De Deyne

@tmcw Listening to a podcast while reading this and at the exact same moment the guest said “inside me there are two wolves” and this is the first time I ever heard this expression 😅

Tom MacWright

So, news today is that I'm closing down placemark.io macwright.com/2023/11/13/place

It's okay! It was a hard decision but I made it a while ago and have (mostly) processed the feels.

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Jack Dougherty

@tmcw Thank you for creating another fabulous tool, and while I’m sorry your business plan did not work out, thank you for deciding to release the code as open source.

Jo Walsh

@tmcw you had to give it a try, the sustainable startup mode. looking forward to see what you emit next

Ilya Zverev

@tmcw Oh :( I had high hopes for the project, given it's from you. This shows how low the chance of survival is in the mapping world.

Tom MacWright

i think you can explain some of the "software is getting slower and worse" plotline by saying that most modern startups are speedrunning product development and - correctly - judge that speed & reliability are actually low on their users’s list of priorities

but that doesn't really explain why, say, google, can't ship performant web apps or slack doesn't switch to tauri or a native renderer or whatever

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Drew Breunig

@tmcw Gotta show it will increase revenue and the project is already sufficiently profitable!

Adam Keys

@tmcw feels like the answer re: incumbents has to include path dependence and the uncertainty of rebuild efforts

Ian Wagner

@tmcw as someone once said, broke gets fixed, but crappy is forever.

It’s trite but I think it’s accurate. There is no incentive in most of these huge orgs to do these. Obviously there are a lot of complicated things that I don’t know behind the scenes but I suspect it mostly boils down to this. Nobody is going to get promoted for switching to Tauri but they might get fired if they try and it takes longer than expected or goes badly, since electron is the devil they all know. 🤷

Tom MacWright

i wish there was a tool like grandperspective, that mac app that shows you where big files are hiding in your system, but for postgres. does this exist?

screenshot of grandperspective app showing the breakdown of file sizes in a filesystem
Tom MacWright

car horns should be as loud inside of the car as they are outside of the car

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Das

@tmcw you should have to squeeze a big rubber bulb

Keith Jenkins

@tmcw And they should not be coupled to the door locks -- the whole neighborhood doesn't need to know when you lock the car

Grant Gould

@tmcw If a car alarm sound spuriously for more than five minutes at night, you should be allowed to steal the car.

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