Border-line off-topic, but since you're flagrantly self-promoting, might as well add some more rule breakage to it.
You know websites/apps who let you enter text/details and then not displaying sign in/up screen until you submit it, so you feel like "Oh but I already filled it out, might as well sign up"?
They really suck, big time! It's disingenuous, misleading and wastes people's time. I had no interest in using your thing for real, but thought I'd try it out, potentially leave some feedback, but this bait-and-switch just made the whole thing feel sour and I'll probably try to actively avoid this and anything else I feel is related to it.
Thanks for the benefit of the doubt. I typed that in a hurry, and it didn’t come out the way I intended.
We had the idea that there’s a class of apps [1] that could really benefit from our tooling - mainly Fireproof, our local-first database, along with embedded LLM calling and image generation support. The app itself is open source, and the hosted version is free.
Initially, there was no login or signup - you could just generate an app right away. We knew that came with risks, but we wanted to explore what a truly frictionless experience could look like. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for our LLM keys to start getting scraped, so the next best step was to implement rate limiting in the hosted version.
The generation is running while you login, so this appreciable decreases wait time from idea to app, because by the time you click through the login, your app is ready. (Vibes DIY CEO here.)
If login takes 30 seconds, and app gen 90, we think this is better for users (but clearly not everyone agrees.) Thanks for the feedback!
I feel like we’re on the verge of seeing the start of a whole new wave of local-first apps (and "personal software" as mentioned here https://x.com/rauchg/status/1840293374059839726), but we’re really missing Rails-like frameworks that offer a complete package for development. Something that gives you all the tools you need—from syncing, conflict resolution, state management, authorization, background jobs in the context of local-first to deployment—without having to reinvent the wheel.
I built a simple SaaS [1] to get a sense of what's missing and while React Router + a syncing local first database [2] + $5/month Cloudflare gets you pretty far, I still found myself needing to think through a lot of pieces
This sounds so fantastic. Thanks for sharing. I wonder how well it'll be able to incorporate into existing apps vs making new ones from scratch. I've been using Splitt.app a lot lately while traveling and it drives me nuts that it doesn't have better offline/low data support. I'd like to improve it but haven't dug into the site yet to see what it would take.
Yes, Replicache is more the local-first solution, if you’re going for offline-capable with eventual data sync. But requires some work to integrate your API, and thinking about how to do conflict-free updates with your API.
I haven’t gotten my hands on Zero yet, but the gist I get from those who have is that it gives you the same kind of experience with less work, where the client just operates from the local cache, and I’d assume there will be some way of lazy loading the entire data set into the cache which would give you offline capabilities if desired, but still functions as a traditional web app if the data set is too large.
You are allowed to work full-time with J-2 without a work visa. But you need to get an EAD ("employment authorization document"). Not sure about the recent processing times, but I usually received mine in ~50-60 days from sending the application.
Looking good. Once customers realize that our platform is far more powerful that just throwing a browser at everything, they get really excited. You can fully automate everything with the API, build perfectly smooth 60fps content and even play synchronized content across any number of screens. And a lot more. Coupled with the low cost and the reliability of the Pi, it really looks great. Still, getting the word out is difficult as the Pi is still considered a toy by many.
Just saw the demos, and they look great. Back when I ran this sort of thing I moved from Pis to Android boxes for our own in-house system for SVG support (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/albums/72157643937892...) but often wished I’d had a simpler, more efficient setup.
info-beamer pi (the software that runs in the Pi and drives the output) doesn't expose OpenGL directly at a very low level. Instead it provides a higher level API to draw and move images, fonts and videos around (see https://info-beamer.com/doc/info-beamer#referencemanual for the complete API). So it's indeed similar to Löve. As a programmer you really don't have to know OpenGL to get anything done. Right now info-beamer pi doesn't have SVG support but images and even videos get you pretty far for most effects I can think of.
Just a couple of thoughts/questions if you don't mind:
- How's the supply-chain side of things? For a while, vendors would only sell one Pi at a time, if they had stock at all. Have you had any problems with that?
- Why do your customers know or care that there's a Pi inside? It seems like an implementation detail that only a select few would ever think to ask, unless you're telling them. "COTS ARM Cortex A53" would likely be enough to make most people's eyes glaze over before digging enough to discover that there's a "hobbyist" board inside.
Edit: I looked at your website and get it :). You're selling hosting, not pre-packaged devices. That's really interesting!
Supply for the "normal" Pi has never been a problem AFAIK. Only the Pi Zero has these problems. But as you noted: We don't sell prepackaged hardware: Only the software and service. Shipping/Warranty/Return handling seems pretty complicated and not worth the hassle (at least for now). Instead we made the installation as simple as possible and as a result users only have to unzip a single ZIP file to an empty SD card and put that in their Pi. So far even to most non-technical users managed to do that.
That's awesome! Congrats! That's a really cool niche, and it sounds like you've executed on it in a pretty interesting way. Although I haven't done it recently, I did a fair bit of Lua embedded in C in my M.Sc. and found it to be a really smooth way to add a ton of power to C code without needing to do a bunch of work.
One of the authors here. It can be used for realtime analysis. The data is updated using a parser program which performs incremental updates. Adding a single block is extremely rapid. Running this repeatedly (for instance using a cron job) will keep the data up to date. I'm planning on adding a daemon mode in the next version to simplify the process of live updates.
