> Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.
> I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.
Thank god, I wasn’t the only one, just posted a similar comment here.
UI Feedback - I was having trouble figuring out what to do with the website, possibly due to the lack of text. I was tapping everywhere just to find the interactive areas (invisible buttons: who invented flat UI without shadows to hide all the interactivity?), and it took me some time to realize the website was scrollable (invisible scroll bars: who thought hiding the scrollbars without any indication of scrollable content was a good idea?). These issues are typically not the fault of the website, but rather the general UI/UX trends we have accepted nowadays. I’m using Firefox on Android.
Regarding social media - it has created more gaps rather than making us more social. It's ultimate goal is to capture our attention for as long as possible rather than connecting us. And lately, with the celebrities populating it, it has become a showoff/bragging machine.
> Anyone know the best way to get the SpaceX video from Twitter/X onto Apple TV?
I don't have Apple TV but for videos on X, I download it temporarily to a intermediate server then stream using VLC [1] it's a hassle but I get great watching experience on all platforms. For now, you can stream this on VLC: https://bin.hrzn.pics/0AdLye8
Though I generally watch Everyday Astronaut's [2] coverage on YouTube.
You use sideloadly to install any ipa you want.
If you don't have a developer account it will sign the application using a key with the validity of seven whole days! (instead if you have a developer account it will be valid one year, and don't forget to pay the 99€/year ransom)
If there's anything that needs audio/video automation, I've always turned to FFmpeg, it's such a crucial and indispensible tool and so many online video tools use it and are generally a UI wrapper around this wonderful tool. TIL - there's FFmpeg.Wasm also [0].
In Jan 2024, I had used it to extract frames of 1993 anime movie in 15 minutes video segments, upscaled it using Real-ESRGAN-ncnn-vulkan [1] then recombining the output frames for final 4K upscaled anime [2]. FWIW, if I had built a UI on this workflow it could've become a tool similar to Topaz AI which is quite popular these days.
Even when I don't use directly ffmpeg, I often use tools that embed ffmpeg. For instance, I've recently upscaled an old anime, ripped from a low quality DVD. I used k4yt3x/video2x, which was good enough for what I wanted, and was easy to install. It embedded libffmpeg, so I could use the same arguments for encoding:
To find the best arguments for upscaling (last line from above), I first used ffmpeg to extract a short scene that I encoded with various parameter sets. Then I used ffmpeg to capture still images so that I could find the best set.
About 10-ish years ago, my then employer was talking to some other company about helping them get their software to release. They had what they believed to be a proprietary compression system that would compress and playback 4k video with no loss in quality.
They wouldn't let us look into the actual codecs or compression, they just wanted us to build a front-end for it.
I got to digging and realized they were just re-encoding the video through FFMpeg with a certain set of flags and options. I was able to replicate their results by just running FFMpeg.
One more taking part in a time-honoured tradition of taking someone else's thing, adding your own dipping mustard (if even that), and calling it your own.
A new chatbot? Another ChatGPT wrapper. A new Linux Distro. Another Arch with a preinstalled desktop environment. A new video downloader? It's yt-dlp with a GUI.
If they were just honest from the get-go, it'd be fine, but some people aren't.
> If they were just honest from the get-go, it'd be fine, but some people aren't.
If it were just individuals doing it, maybe it would've been somewhat digestible. But it's a pity that sometimes even trillion-dollar companies do it.
Pre-LLM days, the doers were atleast aware of their copy/clone/wrapper, but now it's happening unintentionally when LLMs give out modified versions of someone else's code without binding to its license, because AFAIK LLMs do not automatically add licensing details of libraries used inside their outputted code, or do they?
I tried the exact same steps you did with the exact same movie but with Topaz AI and got very bad results which made me abondon the project. I'd be greatful if you could share the upscaled movie.
On one hand, SPAs took off and became massively popular. On the other, I’m still curious why PWAs—especially the kind with service-worker-powered offline access—never really did. I don't like SPAs only if I find them bloated and with a messed up browser history that back button moves you out of the website.
Imagine an e-commerce site that lets you review your order history and product pages offline (even if a bit outdated). That kind of experience feels genuinely useful—much more so than the "you're offline, here’s a cute dog (I love the pictures though)" fallback most sites provide.
Over the weekend, I experimented with service workers for the first time (assisted by Vibe coding). My initial impression was honestly a bit magical—“this website works offline, unlike most mobile apps these days that are just WebView-wrapped SPAs and crash offline.” [1]
That said, debugging was rough. Vibe coding output had subtle issues I found hard to untangle as a newcomer, cache saved v/s cache matching was being done incorrectly in the code, which LLM wasn't able to point out (cors/non-cors requests had issue).And Chrome’s DevTools made debugging manageable, but Firefox’s service worker support felt clunky in comparison (personal take).
Curious if others feel the same—are PWAs underused because of DX hurdles, lack of awareness, or just industry momentum around SPAs?
Offline is good for things like your ball sort game or a calculator. But the developers of that sort of thing want to make money, so they sell apps in the app store.
Offline order history is only a marginal improvement on the e-commerce experience from a customer and business perspective, so it's more appealing to us engineers who appreciate it as a feat of engineering prowess.
In other words, offline isn't PWAs killer feature. Besides, native apps can do it too.
PWA's killer features are circumventing the app store and the app store tax and not maintaining two codebases for Android and iOS.
Another Hacker News client would be a good example of a good PWA that you might install to your phone. It could have niceties like "save for later" or special styles applied to your favorite commenters. Offline support would be useful too, of course but not the main reason to develop a PWA.
Uncensored, paid content is another significant use case.
Cool idea and this was nostalgic as well... I created a similar application to communicate and send beacon signals over SMS (using Twilio) without Internet (as internet went down) during emergency SoS situation motivated by 2015 Chennai floods...
Suggestion: You can possibly try if you can use OpenHaystack [1] to send some "unknown tracker found nearby" alert to any nearby iPhone even if the receiver device doesn't have your app installed or use the FindMy network to send arbitrary data for your app's communication. [2]
This is so awesome. I hope I can expand my knowledge such that I can understand most of this project, right now it was way past my limited CS proficiency.
Though my highlight (which I could completely comprehend) is "Section 14.b & 14.c - Getting the data..." All it took was 400K files (~275 photos/day after 4 years). We have so much of raw power of processing, storage & network still the most-used (probably) media-sync apps crashed or faced slow sync, AirDrop fails & lack of 'Select-All' UI feature. Crazy times we live/will live in... :)
Sand companies more like sandworms who are producing melange (Chips) and not hesitating to eat away its consumers (Users) on the way... (# Dune vibes)