> Our goal was to build an app worthy of an Apple Design Award [...] After weeks of experimentation, we landed on React Native with Expo to achieve this.
Balatro and a number of other games have. But react-native? I can't think of an example and the framework wouldn't be my choice for "award winning" design.
Watch Duty won with a Cordova app in the "Social Impact" category, so it's not impossible.
The extension I've always wanted is a one that makes every link to a modern story on the New York Times, CNN, ESPN, etc. load using their same websites from like 2004.
I tried "Make this page look like the 2004 version of CNN" and it did update the theming to be older but it didn't have the true reference, so it just made up the old style.
We don't currently have a way to provide a reference during generation, but if I were you, I'd personally try downloading the old page archive and a new page archive, throw them both in codex/claude code as context and see what it can come up with. Wouldn't be surprised if it could do a decent job writing a converter.
Somewhat tangential: I have had luck with more generic retheming, e.g. "Turn Google into a 1970s era CLI " (https://www.tweeks.io/share/script/8c8c0953f6984163922c4da7) or "Turn LinkedIn into a 90s era Neocities site" These aren't the most useful, but they are fun!
Does Anna's Archive or a similar site host, say, the complete New York Times (pre-1930) as a full PDF download set? And every other newspaper too?
Tons of public domain sources are locked into websites like Newspapers.com or the nearly-dead and now completely unsearchable old Google News / Newspaper.
It would be nice if the massive pursuit of AI training data resulted in some fully-legal open source alternatives to these proprietary, outdated, or abandoned sites. I know some of it is available via the Internet Archive, etc., but something new with an AI-powered search and finding aid sounds so useful.
I imagine it's possible to achieve this through torrents from Anna's, but you'd have to search and compile the list of all individual PDFs.
> something new with an AI-powered search
With enough time and willingness, someone could put all the old NYT issues through optical character recognition and convert them to text; then make it available to large language models for semantic search of some kind. Ideally public cultural funds could support the effort as academic research.
It just feels like the complete public domain New York Times should be a big deal. Why is it only available via individual issues in the Internet archive? Why hasn't every single story been cut out individually, fully OCR'd, so that it shows up as a top hit on Google? And do that for every public domain newspaper around the country, too.
Maybe the TikTok algorithm is better, but the "I don't like this" action on Meta properties just blatantly does not work. I still get the same type of clickbait content no matter how many times I try to get rid of it. Maybe watching other types of Reels would do it, but no thanks.
on facebook, yes, for many stupid reasons. It doesn't have a "I don't like this" function on most stuff. and there are no controls for stopping "non friend" content injection in the feed.
In instagram, its very different.
First there is "snooze suggested content" which gives you a pure follow feed.
However once you reach the end of that and go into the "for you" feed, which has one "personality". Then there is the explore page, which has another "personality"
The new reels carousel stuff I think is possibly another personality.
So there are now three places where you need to yeet stuff you don't like.
I noticed that when the reels carousel was introduced they went heavy into thirst traps.
But again, this is a regulation issue. If this was the 1980s, there would be a moral panic causing something like the v-chip to stop "the youth" getting access to soft porn (not that it worked that well) Now it'll be a executive fatwa, which'll be reversed when he gets distracted by something else.
Now, even better, allow any neighbor to open a legitimate (yet small-scale and cheap) coffee shop or wine bar by-right in the garage space under their SF home.
Yea, one of the problems of USA zoning laws is that very small scale retail/food service businesses are not allowed in the middle of a block. In other more walkable/urban density places businesses will pop up where you can get a coffee and it's not on a "business street". It's where people actually live and gather.
- Subscription model that gives you guides and connects you to vendors to open a 3k garage coffeeshop under a shared name. You can be your own boss and we collect beautiful / plentiful / gracious MRR.
It's not about monetizing friendship, it's about providing comfortable places where events like this can happen all over the city/country. People want this community but it kinda sucks to do (and mostly won't happen) if you're meeting up monthly on chairs in a city street. If small neighborhood pubs and coffee shops were legal to build...
I have heard about areas in rural Wisconsin where front porches have been converted into very small bars. Low overhead, serving primarily to your neighbors, and no doubt creating community.
I might actually use "Downloads and background play" (for which you need the higher $$$ tier) if the YouTube app gave "Skip back 15 seconds" controls on the phone lock screen. Insane to use YouTube as a "podcast" player when the only control you have is skipping to the previous/next video.
Can you use that app for any/all YouTube videos? I want to listen to long-form video interviews and such, not just listen to music and 'actual' podcasts.
Is anyone building a public domain repository / AI training ground for old newspapers? Anything before 1930 has no restrictions. Newspapers.com has pretty good content but the interface and search is extremely lacking. Google News was abandoned a decade ago. This seems like something where AI could really help, for once. Not in training chatbots or whatever but actually just providing great search for articles in books, newspapers, and magazines.
There’s also a fascinating proposal I read somewhere where you create a training set with a knowledge cutoff of 1900 or 1930 and see if the resulting AI could predict the future or independently discover later scientific breakthroughs.
The interface and search could probably be solved without the use of AI. Seems like mostly an OCR problem. Both ElasticSearch and Sphinx are already really good, and I'm sure that there are other open source or commercial search engines available, or hire ex-Google engineers, Google doesn't seem interested in search anymore.
Newspapers have nearly identical newswire columns printed in 100+ newspapers, but with slightly different headlines and content. Or OCR breaking due to words being physically next to each other but in separate stories. The Newspapers.com search has fine OCR but is difficult and time consuming to use because of those issues. Seems like something "AI" could solve easily.
For a long time they were heavily promoting "Ships to You" non-local goods. Annoying. Lots of dropshipper type stuff rather than a local unique items. Marketplace seems to have backed off that in the last year(s) though, my feed seems very local, one-off, and "real.
Has a non-native app ever won an ADA?