Things like ”If you want, I can also show a very fast Photoshop-style trick in Krita that lets you drag-copy an area in one step (without copy/paste). It’s hidden but extremely useful.”

Every single chat now has it. Not only the conversational prompt with “I can continue talking about this”, but very clickbaity terms like: almost nobody knows about this, you will be surprised, all VIPs are now using this car, do you want to know which it is? Etc

It seems a tricky one to code the way I did the engine, but I’ll give it a try

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382037

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

One thing I am exploring is that, with LLM (and enough $ to pay the tokens) you can filter out offenses and hate speech in player communications.

All typed message is effectively translated by the LLM as “coach speech” and what is put in the UI is the LLM output. Sure, it is not exactly the player words and can get expensive, but I think it can be a good solution

It is a pretty fun project

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47121510

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

It is a comeback from a post that stayed for a few hours in the front page a few years ago. Also, it is a useful, non-AI slop, free product. So when it got none upvotes it made me think how I don’t understand HN community anymore how I used to think I did.

Here is the post for the curious

Show HN: (the return of) Read The Count of Monte Cristo and others in your email

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854574

Yes, I went with Postgres to be safe. I am still serverless, but now there is Vercel doing a good job for serverless DB. They integrate with Neon, which makes Postgres serverless possible.

More things are into Vercel as well, as the cron jobs, which I used to use AWS only for that. Much easier now in configuration by code through Vercel.

Anything goes wrong with Vercel or Neon and I can just export my whole DB and go for a regular server anywhere.

It got front page for a few hours. I posted in the anniversary of when The Count of Monte Cristo first started to be published in serialized form. To celebrate it, I created a website called "Serial Literature" that allowed you to subscribe and read the book in a similar way, serialized, but in your email. I also added another famous work that was initially published serialized, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I later added about other 100 books to be read the same way (not all of them originally serialized).

I never posted about it anywhere else (maybe flopped on Reddit, I don't remember), but it got a lot of engaged subscribers. It never grew over that initial HN burst (I never advertised it again), but it got about 1,000 subscribers and, years later, a few dozens of those were still reading some book through Serial Literature.

That was until... a startup failed and my web app wouldn't work anymore.

At the time, I wanted to build something serverless and learn some new tech. I chose FaunaDB, learned their proprietary query language (FQL), actually enjoyed it a lot, and built the site with it. It was pretty neat and worked fine. But then, 5 years later, around June last year, their service stopped working (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414742). As it was serverless, the DB was also on their cloud, hosted by the failed startup, in a proprietary format. One day, Serial Literature stopped working overnight. I downloaded the data, but in their weird format, it was not very helpful.

I got a bunch of emails in the last months asking about it, people wanting to continue reading more through their email, where I explained what happened and promised it would come back in some form. This site I am showing now, Confabulists, is the come back.

I am a writer myself, indie, self-published, science fiction writer, and I missed a newsletter/blog platform more adequate for fiction writers, so I built one myself. And, yesterday, I finally completed bringing all those public domain books in English to Confabulists and now I am able to offer that same service of Serial Literature, again, still for free.

I hope this reaches everyone that loved Serial Literature, but just accepted it was gone and never contacted me (the ones who contacted me I am replying back telling them about Confabulists).

Thanks HN!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46855232

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

It got front page for a few hours. I posted in the anniversary of when The Count of Monte Cristo first started to be published in serialized form. To celebrate it, I created a website called "Serial Literature" that allowed you to subscribe and read the book in a similar way, serialized, but in your email. I also added another famous work that was initially published serialized, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I later added about other 100 books to be read the same way (not all of them originally serialized).

I never posted about it anywhere else (maybe flopped on Reddit, I don't remember), but it got a lot of engaged subscribers. It never grew over that initial HN burst (I never advertised it again), but it got about 1,000 subscribers and, years later, a few dozens of those were still reading some book through Serial Literature.

That was until... a startup failed and my web app wouldn't work anymore.

At the time, I wanted to build something serverless and learn some new tech. I chose FaunaDB, learned their proprietary query language (FQL), actually enjoyed it a lot, and built the site with it. It was pretty neat and worked fine. But then, 5 years later, around June last year, their service stopped working (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414742). As it was serverless, the DB was also on their cloud, hosted by the failed startup, in a proprietary format. One day, Serial Literature stopped working overnight. I downloaded the data, but in their weird format, it was not very helpful.

I got a bunch of emails in the last months asking about it, people wanting to continue reading more through their email, where I explained what happened and promised it would come back in some form. This site I am showing now, Confabulists, is the come back.

I am a writer myself, indie, self-published, science fiction writer, and I missed a newsletter/blog platform more adequate for fiction writers, so I built one myself. And, yesterday, I finally completed bringing all those public domain books in English to Confabulists and now I am able to offer that same service of Serial Literature, again, still for free.

I hope this reaches everyone that loved Serial Literature, but just accepted it was gone and never contacted me (the ones who contacted me I am replying back telling them about Confabulists).

Thanks HN!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854574

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

There is a lot a of ambition and uncertainty in it. I always enjoyed writing (whatever the context, not only fiction) and now I enjoy getting better at writing fiction. I enjoy being part of a group of other wanna-be writers with the same goals and challenges. I made real friends this way. I enjoy listening podcasts, videos, interviews from experienced authors. I am even enjoying more working on some software side-projects that are related to literature (in general or my own).

At the same, there is very little chance that this endeavor will have any financial return. In Brazil, where I live, you can count in the dozens the number of writers that live solely from the income of book royalties and in the hundreds the number of writers that live from literature (royalties + workshops, online courses, literary services, etc).

So, even some successful authors that have decent number of readers (for Brazil's context) and some awards, have a day job.

This, interestingly for me, who has a well-paid job, removes the pressure of this project of mine. Since it is an art project, to not have the pressure of needing to earn money, actually makes my art better, I have more patience and time to reflect upon it (ironically, increasing my chances to earn money through my art).

But I still have the pressure to earn readers. It's not like I am painting paintings that I am happy enough to complete and leave them on my house studio. I am not doing art for myself, but for others. That's where the ambition part come from. Which I like.

I don't think this comes from a mid-life crisis, as I write short stories since my twenties. It's only now that I have the time, money, and, I might say, wisdom to be able to do it seriously. Writing is one form of art that benefits a lot from like experience.

Just to share what worked for me, and maybe you can find something for you that fits the bill of being an ambitious project that you hope to achieve something meaningful from, but that it's not necessarily attached to financial outcomes. The privilege of being able to be professional about something that might not return more money, even if successful, is something that I treasure a lot.

https://twitter.com/BookReviewAi

I find the results very interesting. Like this "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" one.

https://twitter.com/BookReviewAi/status/1758162004529885573

As a side-effect, I just noticed that I prefer a long markdown file with proper headings (and an outline on the side) than Milanote's board view, which initially felt like a more free form better suited for unorganized thoughts and ideas for writing that I had (I use it for my fiction writing).

I still can have documents as a list of loose thoughts, but once I am ready to organize my ideas, I just use well written and organized headers, edit the content and now I have a really useful view of my idea.

https://acrostic.ai

One neat thing that emerged is that it can be used to create mnemonic phrases (by generating one-word-verse acrostics).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36654113

Points: 2

# Comments: 1