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> A friend of mine Tweeted this the other night: "I'm sleepless so I just created a voice-based health tracker using Google Assistant in about 20 minutes that t

by dualogy 10y ago

> A friend of mine Tweeted this the other night: "I'm sleepless so I just created a voice-based health tracker using Google Assistant in about 20 minutes that took me wks to write 3 yrs ago." Sounds like someone scripted an Ajax-Json-API-Call to Google Servers.. today's equivalent of writing a small shell script.. "wow, I piped grep, had I done this by hand in C this would have taken me days" would have been the tweet in the 80s.. what did they call it back then, Gopher?

cortesoft 10y ago
I am not sure what your point is? Reusable tools ARE what make things easier to do today than they were yesterday. The fact that there are a lot more easy to use tools today means things are easier to do today, and are going to keep getting easier.
- intrasight 10y ago
  It's not that the tools are easier to use (I'd argue they aren't). It's that the function call you make are much richer, and you can deploy at global web scale just as easily as running that function in a local script.
  - cortesoft 10y ago
    Sorry, you are right. I said 'easier to use' when I should have said 'can accomplish more with the same effort.'
- visarga 10y ago
  External servers and API offered by some other company cannot be considered the same as actual tools. They are not guaranteed to exist tomorrow. A hammer that you own, or a compiler in your computer are real tools.
  - bryanrasmussen 10y ago
    I agree that owning your own hammer, if it is a good one, is preferable to borrowing your neighbor's; but when everything looks like a nail wherever you get your hammer does not keep it from working as such.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    I suppose you also only drink "real" water, sourced from your own well, and use "real" electricity, produced by you? There's no such thing as "real" tools; there are only different models of risk. If you're building a system that needs speech recognition, what you should care about is the risk that the next recognition won't be correctly interpreted, and the odds of that are probably greater for a local installation of PocketSphinx than for a Google service, even including the possibility of it "going away".
oskarth 10y ago
> "wow, I piped grep, had I done this by hand in C this would have taken me days" Exacly. Pipes and grep functionality are great abstractions that have saved people countless hours.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
RIP yahoo pipes. imagine what we could do on the web if everyone was about interoperation instead of walled gardens :(
- jacobush 10y ago
  Create a walled garden faster!? Sorry...
raelshark 10y ago
So I'm the friend who tweeted that. And actually it was even simpler than that. No coding involved - I did this with nothing more than a handful of IFTTT recipes. Hook it up to Google, listen for "Home" commands, and send them to a Google Spreadsheet. I have one for each type of entry I wanted to log - meals, symptoms, medications. Planning to add activities and some general exercise capturing when I have another 20 minutes (ha). And I'll add some biometric logging, although my ultimate goal would be to actually script that to get data directly in from my BP monitor and a scale automatically. Same with sleep data from the app I use to track that. Both would be easier if I were using one of the devices or apps for tracking those that IFTTT supports. The idea is to set up and collect as much as I can with as little manual entry (i.e., typing) as possible, with as little coding as possible.

by dualogy 10y ago

cortesoft 10y ago

I am not sure what your point is? Reusable tools ARE what make things easier to do today than they were yesterday. The fact that there are a lot more easy to use tools today means things are easier to do today, and are going to keep getting easier.

intrasight 10y ago
It's not that the tools are easier to use (I'd argue they aren't). It's that the function call you make are much richer, and you can deploy at global web scale just as easily as running that function in a local script.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  Sorry, you are right. I said 'easier to use' when I should have said 'can accomplish more with the same effort.'
visarga 10y ago
External servers and API offered by some other company cannot be considered the same as actual tools. They are not guaranteed to exist tomorrow. A hammer that you own, or a compiler in your computer are real tools.
- bryanrasmussen 10y ago
  I agree that owning your own hammer, if it is a good one, is preferable to borrowing your neighbor's; but when everything looks like a nail wherever you get your hammer does not keep it from working as such.
- icebraining 10y ago
  I suppose you also only drink "real" water, sourced from your own well, and use "real" electricity, produced by you? There's no such thing as "real" tools; there are only different models of risk. If you're building a system that needs speech recognition, what you should care about is the risk that the next recognition won't be correctly interpreted, and the odds of that are probably greater for a local installation of PocketSphinx than for a Google service, even including the possibility of it "going away".

oskarth 10y ago

> "wow, I piped grep, had I done this by hand in C this would have taken me days" Exacly. Pipes and grep functionality are great abstractions that have saved people countless hours.

LoSboccacc 10y ago

RIP yahoo pipes. imagine what we could do on the web if everyone was about interoperation instead of walled gardens :(

jacobush 10y ago
Create a walled garden faster!? Sorry...

raelshark 10y ago

So I'm the friend who tweeted that. And actually it was even simpler than that. No coding involved - I did this with nothing more than a handful of IFTTT recipes. Hook it up to Google, listen for "Home" commands, and send them to a Google Spreadsheet. I have one for each type of entry I wanted to log - meals, symptoms, medications. Planning to add activities and some general exercise capturing when I have another 20 minutes (ha). And I'll add some biometric logging, although my ultimate goal would be to actually script that to get data directly in from my BP monitor and a scale automatically. Same with sleep data from the app I use to track that. Both would be easier if I were using one of the devices or apps for tracking those that IFTTT supports. The idea is to set up and collect as much as I can with as little manual entry (i.e., typing) as possible, with as little coding as possible.