6 ms·

Things I've built in the last month or so: * A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work i

by tptacek 3mo ago

Things I've built in the last month or so: * A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely". * A calorie/protein tracker that takes 1-liner summaries of meals, resolves them to macros with GPT5 calls, and tracks them in SQLite. * A macOS menubar combined Apple TV and Roku TV remote control. * A calculator front-end to SageMath that renders Latex math notation and has point/click shortcut affordances for linear algebra and MVC. * A "self driving wiki" macOS desktop llmwiki that imports and digests PDFs. * A menubar tracker for the little temperature sensors I have scattered all throughout the house so I can click my menubar and instantly see the temps in the different rooms of the house. * A layout tool for designing picture frames to get cut lists and rabbet depths and stuff. That's just the desktop stuff. These applications are generally better than what I'd get from the App Store. The calorie tracker is one of the better-designed apps on my dock. I feel like I'm not doing this enough yet, it hasn't fully sunk in, and I'm going to be building a lot more stuff when it does sink in. I haven't yet gotten to the point of writing my own note-taking application (still Bear.app for that), but how long can that last?

what 3mo ago
How are you counting calories from a 1-line description of your meal? Surely that’s not even close to accurate.
- faangguyindia 3mo ago
  perhaps using ai.
  - whateveracct 3mo ago
    uh oh
- keiferski 3mo ago
  If it includes all ingredients, cooking method, and weight in exact grams, it’s probably reasonably accurate.
  - tptacek 3mo ago
    For basically anything but chicken I give exact gram weights of proteins and of any fats or carbs. I generally don't give it any precision about vegetables that won't drive protein, fat, or carbs. Most meal components aren't going to meaningfully change the macro breakdown except for fiber, which I don't care enough about to track.
    - cure_42 3mo ago
      You should care more about fiber than any of the others if health is your goal.
      - tptacek 3mo ago
        I'll make sure and let my GP know he was wrong.
        kingkongjaffa 3mo ago
        Snark aside, your GP took one module on nutrition in medical school, years ago. Doctors are not experts in nutrition. Most modern western diets lack fibre the most so eating more fibre is a sensible recommendation for basically everyone.
        tptacek 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        ofjcihen 3mo ago
        People are trying to tell you something that can literally save your life. Colon cancer rates are increasing at a breakneck pace. Chill with the snark for a second and realize you may not be the smartest person in every room.
- tptacek 3mo ago
  A typical (in fact, the modal) line from the database, which goes back to April, is "oyakadon 1/2c rice, 2 thighs, 1/2 breast, 2 eggs, bunch broccolini, std oyakadon broth", and the model works out for itself that these are average-sized thighs and breast (boneless and skinless, because it's oyakadon). "std oyakadon broth" is a reference to a "house recipe", of which there's a side database, each costed by GPT5. There's a low/med/high adjuster on every entry; sometimes the thighs are bigger or smaller, for instance. I've: * Checked these against all three major frontier models and gotten the same macros breakdown within relatively tight bands * Manually researched a couple of the most common recipes * Run this system over many months against my most likely TDEE and reconciled against scale weight loss (which has been profound). My confidence in frontier model's ability to generate "good enough, probably more than good enough" from this level of meal description is quite high. Key simplifying assumption (for the model): I'm cooking most of my meals. I cook. I virtually never order out or eat packaged food of any sort. This would be a harder problem and the answers less reliable if I was giving it, like, "1/2 JP Graziano muffaletta, extra hot giardiniera".
  - Ldorigo 3mo ago
    You can actually get just as good results for packaged food if you just allow the agent to use a web search tool & keep a growing local database of "known food items". I did the same for a while, but it was quite expensive (this was a while back with less powerful models and required a bit of orchestration to make it reliable)
    - tptacek 3mo ago
      Presumably it would Just Work if I wrote "1/2 bag cool ranch doritos", which is one of the virtues of this input/processing system.
jedbrooke 3mo ago
> A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely". how is AI (or a human for that matter) supposed to know what “woodworking-appropriate music is”? I had the same thoughts when spotify released their “let AI make a playlist for you”. Like, we already have recommender algorithms, why do we need to get a LLM involved?Maybe I just don’t understand woodworking and the connection it has to music though (I’m also the kind of person who’s had the same playlist for like the past 4 years) But, I do want to say, personal app built just the way you like it, an alternative front end to a closed source ecosystem even, is super cool, and has been one of the things that AI coding has really enabled. I’ve done a few project where I just give claude a har file and tell it to reverse engineer a cli from some web interface and it’s so powerful to be able to do stuff like that now
- ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
  Woodworking recommendations shall include: “If I Had a Hammer” “Sledgehammer”—Peter Gabriel Anything by The Carpenters Any works by Woody Guthrie Hymns about Jesus and St. Joseph Lumber Capital Log Yard Anything by Nine Inch Nails Anything by the Sandpipers “Turn, Turn, Turn” “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas Anything by Dusty Springfield Anything by MC Hammer Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, “Saw” horror franchise Anything by Level 42 https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=sTUKhRXXiylavwIm https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=sTUKhRXXiylavwIm Anything by 1-hit wonder The Nails and/or powerviolence band NAILS “Morning Wood” by Beavis & Butt-Head “The Lumberjack Song” by Monty Python
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- tptacek 3mo ago
  Because I played a bunch of music while doing woodworking stuff and asked for more like that. Things like this are easy with a simple agent loop. It's not picking random music out of the sky; it's working from my Apple Music library (and then expanding on it from the Apple Music catalog).
_dark_matter_ 3mo ago
This sounds like such a security risk. It just takes one bad library. Your phone and desktop are not a sandbox.
- tvink 3mo ago
  Don't think it has to be, if you are mindful of it. Ai uses fewer dependencies usually, as it doesn't mind rewriting things, and you can easily add scans and sanity checks to your sdlc
- tptacek 3mo ago
  These are all simple SwiftUI applications with minimal dependencies. My phone, by the way, definitely is a sandbox.
  - _dark_matter_ 3mo ago
    Interested to hear more. Auditing dependencies is hard. You fully trust the app restrictions on your phone?
- enraged_camel 3mo ago
  Lmao you're talking to someone who is an accomplished security engineer.
nonameiguess 3mo ago
I feel on the opposite side of a divide when I see these kinds of comments here about people creating bespoke software to address deficiencies they perceive in their daily lives. There's an engineer mindset that tools can solve any and every problem, but do they? Are you quantifiably any fitter than you were before? Better bloodwork, BMI, body fat percentage, anything? Are you creating better wooden goods? More wooden goods? If you track mood in any way, are you at least consistently happier while working because of the auto-generated playlists? Have you gotten any better at math thanks to the pdfs? When I reflect on my own life and think about why I'm not personally adopting LLMs for anything, it occurs to me that I just don't feel like I have any problems like this to address. I was already eating appropriately, already working out appropriately, already happy with the music I listen to, already happy with the way I learn and practice math. I could make a billion personalized apps, but I was already a two-time state champion in cross-country and track who has never been overweight, got perfect scores on the SAT and GRE, won regional academic olympics in math, all before mobile apps existed and before I ever owned a personal computer of any kind. That's not to say I can't do even better than I did as a teenager in the 90s and I try to maintain some proficiency in these things into middle age, but it never occurs to me that I need or should need software to help me with this. I have no clue what the temperature is right now of any room in my house, but I know they're all in a comfortable range that isn't hurting any machinery or animal and that seems good enough to me. I see all these enthusiastic booster posts and comments about all the tools you can make, but I don't feel like what is missing from my life is I don't have enough tools. I wasn't sitting around prior to GPT-3 thinking to myself "you know what would improve my life? More software." There are deficiencies and problems to address for sure, but it's mostly issues of prioritization and motivation. I have fallen off the wagon a bit this year and don't exercise nearly as much as I should. I don't talk to my wife enough. I don't talk to other friends at all. I don't go outside enough. But those aren't problems to address with software, either. If anything, if I spent more time making software, even with LLMs, that would be more time not going outside, talking to my wife, or working out. No matter how much raw output I could get computers to output, more time spent fiddling with computers is not going to improve my life. I shouldn't even be here right now, reading and commenting on Hacker News. The sun will be up and it will be 90 degrees fahrenheit within an hour of that. This is my last chance of the day to go run without feeling extremely uncomfortable while doing so. This isn't a "oh my God look at me I'm so much better than you" comment or at least that's not what I'm trying to get across. But I'd encourage the original poster here and you as well to be outcome-oriented. My weight isn't in a warning zone. This guy is posting stats, so I am leaner than he is and my marathon time is faster, all without the aid of any tracking apps. You're a public figure, so I know you're in the same time zone as me, which means you were posting your own comment at midnight last night, midnight on a Friday night reading Hacker News. My sleep isn't perfect, but I'm not reading Hacker News at midnight on a Friday. Are all these apps actually making your life better?
spot5010 3mo ago
As a new father, just using so many apps sounds exhausting, let alone building and maintaining them. I would have been very excited about these maybe 10-15 years ago. Now I just want the ability to do things with my phone when my hands are tied up holding the baby.
- mynegation 3mo ago
  Tell me about it. Holding a 4mo old right now, nap trapped :-) Speaking of which - Claude Code wrote me a web proxy for HN that rewrites CSS for the dark mode - precisely for this situation. Written and deployed with Claude Code remote control too, also while nap trapped.
  - NegativeLatency 3mo ago
    Haha amazing I’m doing the same thing
  - spot5010 3mo ago
    Wow okay I need to try this out.
  - ajwaxman 3mo ago
    Ha amazing! Brings back memories of holding our sleeping son and voice to texting with Claude on pat leave
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  Make yourself a dashboard that pipes everything you want into the area reachable by one thumb. :) Or with voice. Or even face movement control, like via the camera.
- tptacek 3mo ago
  That's an odd response, because fundamentally all I'm doing is making my computer work the way I want it to. It's the opposite of exhausting to me.
  - 3mo ago
ben_w 3mo ago
> I feel like I'm not doing this enough yet, it hasn't fully sunk in, and I'm going to be building a lot more stuff when it does sink in. I haven't yet gotten to the point of writing my own note-taking application (still Bear.app for that), but how long can that last? Indeed. I'm not sure when, but at some point after I saw Claude Code, I realised what I wanted for my next OS was basically an LCARS-themed* thing, where the "desktop" is a TUI and whenever I needed an app I didn't already have, I'd ask an LLM to write it for me instead of downloading it (benefit: the app would never have an update pending (which might break my flow) that I had to install before use, unless I'd specifically asked for a new feature to be written); and if I wanted to browse something on the web, the browser would use something like an LLM to strip out everything that wasn't content. LLMs aren't quite good enough for that yet. They're interesting, I've also made a bunch of apps this way that was an easier experience than even figuring out which offering on the app store was right for me**, but still, the LLMs are not quite good enough; I'm pining for the OS equivalent of a car with a self-driving mode so good there's no steering wheel and the windows have black-out shutters so you can sleep while it drives you and your insurance is fine with this. * because I'm that kind of nerd ** e.g. rhythm action game that takes midi files for the songs and listens for a midi keyboard for your input: https://benwheatley.github.io/Piano-Trainer/piano-trainer.html https://benwheatley.github.io/Piano-Trainer/piano-trainer.ht...
moralestapia 3mo ago
@tptacek (and others who have their house full of sensors and toys), check out https://httpstate.com https://httpstate.com. Your feedback as a builder is greatly appreciated :).

by tptacek 3mo ago

what 3mo ago

How are you counting calories from a 1-line description of your meal? Surely that’s not even close to accurate.

faangguyindia 3mo ago
perhaps using ai.
- whateveracct 3mo ago
  uh oh
keiferski 3mo ago
If it includes all ingredients, cooking method, and weight in exact grams, it’s probably reasonably accurate.
- tptacek 3mo ago
  For basically anything but chicken I give exact gram weights of proteins and of any fats or carbs. I generally don't give it any precision about vegetables that won't drive protein, fat, or carbs. Most meal components aren't going to meaningfully change the macro breakdown except for fiber, which I don't care enough about to track.
  - cure_42 3mo ago
    You should care more about fiber than any of the others if health is your goal.
    - tptacek 3mo ago
      I'll make sure and let my GP know he was wrong.
      - kingkongjaffa 3mo ago
        Snark aside, your GP took one module on nutrition in medical school, years ago. Doctors are not experts in nutrition. Most modern western diets lack fibre the most so eating more fibre is a sensible recommendation for basically everyone.
        tptacek 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        ofjcihen 3mo ago
        People are trying to tell you something that can literally save your life. Colon cancer rates are increasing at a breakneck pace. Chill with the snark for a second and realize you may not be the smartest person in every room.
tptacek 3mo ago
A typical (in fact, the modal) line from the database, which goes back to April, is "oyakadon 1/2c rice, 2 thighs, 1/2 breast, 2 eggs, bunch broccolini, std oyakadon broth", and the model works out for itself that these are average-sized thighs and breast (boneless and skinless, because it's oyakadon). "std oyakadon broth" is a reference to a "house recipe", of which there's a side database, each costed by GPT5. There's a low/med/high adjuster on every entry; sometimes the thighs are bigger or smaller, for instance. I've: * Checked these against all three major frontier models and gotten the same macros breakdown within relatively tight bands * Manually researched a couple of the most common recipes * Run this system over many months against my most likely TDEE and reconciled against scale weight loss (which has been profound). My confidence in frontier model's ability to generate "good enough, probably more than good enough" from this level of meal description is quite high. Key simplifying assumption (for the model): I'm cooking most of my meals. I cook. I virtually never order out or eat packaged food of any sort. This would be a harder problem and the answers less reliable if I was giving it, like, "1/2 JP Graziano muffaletta, extra hot giardiniera".
- Ldorigo 3mo ago
  You can actually get just as good results for packaged food if you just allow the agent to use a web search tool & keep a growing local database of "known food items". I did the same for a while, but it was quite expensive (this was a while back with less powerful models and required a bit of orchestration to make it reliable)
  - tptacek 3mo ago
    Presumably it would Just Work if I wrote "1/2 bag cool ranch doritos", which is one of the virtues of this input/processing system.

jedbrooke 3mo ago

> A personal music player for Apple Music with an embedded agent loop, so I can say things like "I'm going to work in the wood shop, play woodworking-appropriate music and keep the playlist full and non-repeating indefinitely". how is AI (or a human for that matter) supposed to know what “woodworking-appropriate music is”? I had the same thoughts when spotify released their “let AI make a playlist for you”. Like, we already have recommender algorithms, why do we need to get a LLM involved?Maybe I just don’t understand woodworking and the connection it has to music though (I’m also the kind of person who’s had the same playlist for like the past 4 years) But, I do want to say, personal app built just the way you like it, an alternative front end to a closed source ecosystem even, is super cool, and has been one of the things that AI coding has really enabled. I’ve done a few project where I just give claude a har file and tell it to reverse engineer a cli from some web interface and it’s so powerful to be able to do stuff like that now

ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
Woodworking recommendations shall include: “If I Had a Hammer” “Sledgehammer”—Peter Gabriel Anything by The Carpenters Any works by Woody Guthrie Hymns about Jesus and St. Joseph Lumber Capital Log Yard Anything by Nine Inch Nails Anything by the Sandpipers “Turn, Turn, Turn” “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas Anything by Dusty Springfield Anything by MC Hammer Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, “Saw” horror franchise Anything by Level 42 https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=sTUKhRXXiylavwIm https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=sTUKhRXXiylavwIm Anything by 1-hit wonder The Nails and/or powerviolence band NAILS “Morning Wood” by Beavis & Butt-Head “The Lumberjack Song” by Monty Python
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
tptacek 3mo ago
Because I played a bunch of music while doing woodworking stuff and asked for more like that. Things like this are easy with a simple agent loop. It's not picking random music out of the sky; it's working from my Apple Music library (and then expanding on it from the Apple Music catalog).

_dark_matter_ 3mo ago

This sounds like such a security risk. It just takes one bad library. Your phone and desktop are not a sandbox.

tvink 3mo ago
Don't think it has to be, if you are mindful of it. Ai uses fewer dependencies usually, as it doesn't mind rewriting things, and you can easily add scans and sanity checks to your sdlc
tptacek 3mo ago
These are all simple SwiftUI applications with minimal dependencies. My phone, by the way, definitely is a sandbox.
- _dark_matter_ 3mo ago
  Interested to hear more. Auditing dependencies is hard. You fully trust the app restrictions on your phone?
enraged_camel 3mo ago
Lmao you're talking to someone who is an accomplished security engineer.

nonameiguess 3mo ago

I feel on the opposite side of a divide when I see these kinds of comments here about people creating bespoke software to address deficiencies they perceive in their daily lives. There's an engineer mindset that tools can solve any and every problem, but do they? Are you quantifiably any fitter than you were before? Better bloodwork, BMI, body fat percentage, anything? Are you creating better wooden goods? More wooden goods? If you track mood in any way, are you at least consistently happier while working because of the auto-generated playlists? Have you gotten any better at math thanks to the pdfs? When I reflect on my own life and think about why I'm not personally adopting LLMs for anything, it occurs to me that I just don't feel like I have any problems like this to address. I was already eating appropriately, already working out appropriately, already happy with the music I listen to, already happy with the way I learn and practice math. I could make a billion personalized apps, but I was already a two-time state champion in cross-country and track who has never been overweight, got perfect scores on the SAT and GRE, won regional academic olympics in math, all before mobile apps existed and before I ever owned a personal computer of any kind. That's not to say I can't do even better than I did as a teenager in the 90s and I try to maintain some proficiency in these things into middle age, but it never occurs to me that I need or should need software to help me with this. I have no clue what the temperature is right now of any room in my house, but I know they're all in a comfortable range that isn't hurting any machinery or animal and that seems good enough to me. I see all these enthusiastic booster posts and comments about all the tools you can make, but I don't feel like what is missing from my life is I don't have enough tools. I wasn't sitting around prior to GPT-3 thinking to myself "you know what would improve my life? More software." There are deficiencies and problems to address for sure, but it's mostly issues of prioritization and motivation. I have fallen off the wagon a bit this year and don't exercise nearly as much as I should. I don't talk to my wife enough. I don't talk to other friends at all. I don't go outside enough. But those aren't problems to address with software, either. If anything, if I spent more time making software, even with LLMs, that would be more time not going outside, talking to my wife, or working out. No matter how much raw output I could get computers to output, more time spent fiddling with computers is not going to improve my life. I shouldn't even be here right now, reading and commenting on Hacker News. The sun will be up and it will be 90 degrees fahrenheit within an hour of that. This is my last chance of the day to go run without feeling extremely uncomfortable while doing so. This isn't a "oh my God look at me I'm so much better than you" comment or at least that's not what I'm trying to get across. But I'd encourage the original poster here and you as well to be outcome-oriented. My weight isn't in a warning zone. This guy is posting stats, so I am leaner than he is and my marathon time is faster, all without the aid of any tracking apps. You're a public figure, so I know you're in the same time zone as me, which means you were posting your own comment at midnight last night, midnight on a Friday night reading Hacker News. My sleep isn't perfect, but I'm not reading Hacker News at midnight on a Friday. Are all these apps actually making your life better?

spot5010 3mo ago

As a new father, just using so many apps sounds exhausting, let alone building and maintaining them. I would have been very excited about these maybe 10-15 years ago. Now I just want the ability to do things with my phone when my hands are tied up holding the baby.

mynegation 3mo ago
Tell me about it. Holding a 4mo old right now, nap trapped :-) Speaking of which - Claude Code wrote me a web proxy for HN that rewrites CSS for the dark mode - precisely for this situation. Written and deployed with Claude Code remote control too, also while nap trapped.
- NegativeLatency 3mo ago
  Haha amazing I’m doing the same thing
- spot5010 3mo ago
  Wow okay I need to try this out.
- ajwaxman 3mo ago
  Ha amazing! Brings back memories of holding our sleeping son and voice to texting with Claude on pat leave
Schiendelman 3mo ago
Make yourself a dashboard that pipes everything you want into the area reachable by one thumb. :) Or with voice. Or even face movement control, like via the camera.
tptacek 3mo ago
That's an odd response, because fundamentally all I'm doing is making my computer work the way I want it to. It's the opposite of exhausting to me.
- 3mo ago

ben_w 3mo ago

> I feel like I'm not doing this enough yet, it hasn't fully sunk in, and I'm going to be building a lot more stuff when it does sink in. I haven't yet gotten to the point of writing my own note-taking application (still Bear.app for that), but how long can that last? Indeed. I'm not sure when, but at some point after I saw Claude Code, I realised what I wanted for my next OS was basically an LCARS-themed* thing, where the "desktop" is a TUI and whenever I needed an app I didn't already have, I'd ask an LLM to write it for me instead of downloading it (benefit: the app would never have an update pending (which might break my flow) that I had to install before use, unless I'd specifically asked for a new feature to be written); and if I wanted to browse something on the web, the browser would use something like an LLM to strip out everything that wasn't content. LLMs aren't quite good enough for that yet. They're interesting, I've also made a bunch of apps this way that was an easier experience than even figuring out which offering on the app store was right for me**, but still, the LLMs are not quite good enough; I'm pining for the OS equivalent of a car with a self-driving mode so good there's no steering wheel and the windows have black-out shutters so you can sleep while it drives you and your insurance is fine with this. * because I'm that kind of nerd ** e.g. rhythm action game that takes midi files for the songs and listens for a midi keyboard for your input: https://benwheatley.github.io/Piano-Trainer/piano-trainer.html https://benwheatley.github.io/Piano-Trainer/piano-trainer.ht...

moralestapia 3mo ago

@tptacek (and others who have their house full of sensors and toys), check out https://httpstate.com https://httpstate.com. Your feedback as a builder is greatly appreciated :).