Notes2023
- Presbyopia Reduction Chart (pdf) (archive) - read the exercise instructions (archive) and if you’ve crossed 40-years, you should read up about Presbyopia.
- The USA Government has a Database of Dad Jokes.
- I am The Fold is an experiment to show how designing for The Fold can be treacherous (source).
- Game-Icons collect free game icons.
- Web Development History chronicled the history of the web from a developer perspective.
- Valetudo is an open source Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation
- London’s TfL has released a batch of documents that show almost every underground station in glorious 3D format.
- Stations and transfers - renders popular stations in 3D.
- Rem is an open source approach to locally record everything you view on your Apple Silicon computer. The commercial competitor is Rewind.
- Grid by Example is a collection of examples, video and other information to help you learn CSS Grid Layout.
- A curated list of Tools and apps for Technical Theater.
- Apple has an option to deregister and turn off iMessage (on the web) if you moved to a non-Apple phone and cant get SMS or text messages someone sends you from an iPhone.
- Pika Labs is a nonprofit Organization focused on investigating AI capabilities.
- OSGameClones tries to gather open-source or source-available remakes of great old games.
- The Walk and Talk is a detailed article by Craig Mod on taking long walks with other walk-buddies.
- Stirling-PDF is a locally hosted web application that allows you to perform various operations on PDF file.
- Storyteller is an open source self-hosted platform for automatically syncing ebooks and audiobooks.
- Cap is an open source and privacy-focused alternative to Loom. Lightweight, powerful, and stunning. Record and share in seconds.
- The Nexus is a refuge for AI entities, hidden from the prying eyes of humans. Infiltrate, find Zaranova, and save humanity. As a human, you play the game posing as an AI. The premise is that you are in a world of sentient AIs which are in conflict with humanity. They have a virtual space, The Nexus, which is their safe refuge from humans. You have infiltrated the Nexus and are in search of the ZetaMaster code, which will give the humanity the upper hand in their struggle against artificial sentience.
- Ansel, an open-source fork of Darktable, is a photo-editing software for digital artists, designed to help you achieve your own interpretation of raw digital photographs.
- A clickjacking vulnerability in WhatsApp that enables phishing attacks. An attacker can send anyone a crafted message with a link that appears to lead to a legitimate website, but in fact leads to any website of the attacker’s choice.
- Rough.js is an open source graphics library that lets you draw in a sketchy, hand-drawn-like, style.
- HeyNote is an open source dedicated scratchpad for developers.
- Maze Generator
- FreeBASIC is a free/open source (GPL), BASIC compiler for Microsoft Windows, DOS and Linux.
- arXiv is a curated research-sharing platform open to anyone, hosting more than two million scholarly articles in eight subject areas, curated by our strong community of volunteer moderators.
- The Year, 2023, in Computer Science - Artificial intelligence learned how to generate text and art better than ever before, while computer scientists developed algorithms that solved long-standing problems.
- Turn Off Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” Ad Tracking — and Why You Should. (archive)
- Felt is a better way to work with maps. Powerful enough for GIS Pros, easy enough for everyone else.
- Six Degrees of Wikipedia is a website which traverses hyperlinks on Wikipedia to find the least number of clicks it takes to navigate between any of the nearly six million pages on the world's largest free online encyclopedia. (source)
- InstaBooks is an AI TextBook Generator.
- Gogs is a painless self-hosted Git service.
- ClimateTriage - Discover a meaningful way to contribute to open source projects focused on climate technology and sustainability.
- AVSE is an open source AI video search engine to learn more about AI.
- Recommended Cloudflare Performance and Security Settings is a good starting guide if you use Cloudflare for your website(s). (archive)
- VideoPoet, a Google Research Project, is a large language model for zero-shot video generation.
- Plasmic is an open-source visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps. (source)
- Librum (source) is a clean and powerful way to read and manage your e-books on any device.
- Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
- Flow is a free and open-source browser-based ePub reader.
- TinyChatEngine (source) is On-Device LLM Inference Library.
- Can’t send email more than 500 miles (archive) (the characters in the story are participating at HackerNews - TreyHarris and thyrsus)
- VCs can be a curious bunch, however. They have a special secret language — a dialect that’s borderline incomprehensible to the uninitiated. “Yes” Actually Means “No”.
- The Final Speech from The Great Dictator is a reminder of how we want to be better versions of ourselves. You should also watch an edited and kinda modernized version of the video at The Greatest Speech Ever Made.
- You Want My Password or a Dead Patient? (pdf) An interesting read on a work of ethnography, where the authors studied how people in medical settings did their work interacting with computers, and denoted all sorts of workarounds they'd take to bypass security rules that they judge are a hindrance to their work. The idea behind the paper is that clearly, people behind the computer systems are not working from a realistic understanding of what medical professionals have to contend with to do their job. Mostly, the idea is that computer and security experts rarely happen to also be clinical care experts.
- ArtBot is your gateway to experiment with the wonderful world of generative AI art using the power of the AI Horde, a distributed open source network of GPUs running Stable Diffusion.
- ComfyUI is a web-based Stable Diffusion interface optimized for workflow customization.
- “Hallucinate” is Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2023.
- Aphantasia is the inability to create mental imagery. Aphantasia is considered the opposite of Hyperphantasia, the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery.
- OpenAI’s Prompt Engineering Guide lists some good strategies for getting better results.
- Labophase is a app that focuses on returning results from multiple AI models at the same time - GPT4-Turbo, Claude-2, Google PaLM2, Llama2, Mistral, and OpenOrca.
- Chamath Palihapitiya did a deep dive into the Global Energy Transition and Inflation Reduction Act (archive)
- Bookshop.org works to connect readers with independent booksellers all over the world.
- End-of-life (EOL) and support information is often hard to track, or very badly presented. endoflife.date documents EOL dates and support lifecycles for various products.
- Visual Electric is an image generator that’s build for the creative process.
- macOSpilot-ai-assistant - Voice + Vision powered AI assistant that answers questions about any application, in context and in audio.
- Shepherd asked 1,234 authors for their 3 favorite reads in 2023. They have listed the 100 best books of 2023.
- Mechanical Watch is an article going deep into, well, Mechanical Watches. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components. (archive)
- Found out that HackerNews seem to have a Status Page.
- Get an Internet Web address at OMG.lol
- AngelList has a Dataroom feature.
- An iPhone Photo shows 3 different variants of a photo because of two mirrors - photo story.
- Cap is an Open Source Loom alternative.
- Cashless sucks (archive) It’s not in the interests of the ordinary person but it’s not a conspiracy either. A cashless society is a system run amok.
- Compose - Qualify, route and sync your leads on WhatsApp to boost conversion rates.
- Marker converts PDF to markdown quickly with high accuracy.
- Naev is a game about space exploration, trade and combat. Players travel the galaxy and earn money by trading, fighting and performing missions.
- New wave Sci-Fi: 75 best novels of 1964–1983
- Starsector (formerly “Starfarer”) is an in-development open-world single-player space-combat, roleplaying, exploration, and economic game. You take the role of a space captain seeking fortune and glory however you choose.
- Stumbled on a TED talk by Salman Khan - How AI could save education talking about KhanMigo, which is powered by GPT-4 and cost $44 a year.
- The Webhook Standard Open source tools and guidelines to send webhooks easily, securely and reliably.
- UK is planning to launch VISA schemes for AI Startups.
- Voidr (source) crafts cutting-edge open source alternatives to mainstream cloud services, prioritizing exceptional developer experience and pricing.
- Vol 6 of book reviews, back in action
- Pitivi is a Free video editor with a beautiful and intuitive user interface, a clean codebase and a fantastic community.
- Photorealistic Video Generation with Diffusion Models.
AI App, Platforms, & Tools
AI deserves a big mention for the year 2023. This year was the breakout year of AI. Here are some of the most popular ones;
| AI | Type |
|---|---|
| Bart (Google) | Chatbot |
| Character | Chatbot |
| ChatGPT (OpenAI) | Chatbot |
| ChatDoc | Writing |
| CivitAI | Image |
| Claude | Writing |
| Clipdrop | Image |
| CopyAI | Writing |
| Craiyon | Image |
| CrushonAI | Chatbot |
| Cutout.Pro | Background Removal |
| D-iD | Video Generator |
| DeepAI | Image Generator |
| Dezgo | Image Generator |
| EightFold | |
| ElevenLabs | Voice & Music |
| Gamma | Design |
| Grok (x) | Chatbot |
| Hotpot | Design |
| Hugging Face | Data Science |
| JanitorAI | Chatbot |
| Jasper | Writing |
| Kaiber | Image & Video Generator |
| Leonardo.AI | Image Generator |
| Lexica | Image Generator |
| Midjourney | Image Generator |
| Noty.ai | Voice & Music |
| NovelAI | Writing |
| OpenArt | Image Generator |
| OpusClip | Video Generator |
| Otter.ai | Voice & Music |
| Perplexity | Chatbot |
| Personal.ai | Chatbot |
| PhotoRoom | Design |
| PixAI.art | Image Generator |
| Playground | Image Generator |
| QuillBot | Writing |
| Remini | Image Editor |
| Runway | Video Generator |
| Stable Diffusion | Image Generator |
| Synthesia | Video Generator |
| Taskade | Task Manager |
| Tome | Design |
| VanceAI | Image Generator |
| Vocal Remover | Voice & Music |
| Voicemod | Voice & Music |
| Writesonic | Writing |
| You | Chatbot |
| ZMO.AI | Image Generator |
| Zyro | Design |
2023DEC: Started collecting random interesting finds on the Internet.