I wanted a simple harpoon-esque neovim plugin where I could view the files that the Claude Code CLI changes within a simple popup within neovim, and optionally dismiss the ones I've already reviewed, so I built one. Can definitely do a lot more here, but this is meeting my needs so far. Would love to hear thoughts!
Working on: Pantry Recipes – AI meal generation based on what’s in your kitchen
Over the past few weekends, I’ve been building Pantry Recipes – a mobile app that lets you quickly generate recipe ideas based on the ingredients you already have at home.
The idea is simple:
- Save or quickly select ingredients you have on hand
- Tap Generate Recipes and get ideas instantly
- You can also describe what you want to make free-form (e.g., "cheese omelette") and the app will generate a recipe for you.
Since you are using AI, what are the chances of your app suggesting existing recipes vs "inventing" new recipes.
Also, there can be set of ingredients that should not be mixed together or be cooked in certain way. Are these cases considered when generating recipes ?
Cool idea! I’m a big fan of AnyList so this was intriguing.
I think it could be useful to have a “recently generated” section in the Recipes tab that lets you find things you might have forgotten to save. Substitutions could also be a useful feature. For example, if I can’t find Mexican oregano, what else can I use?
I found an app called Meomind (https://meomind.com/) recently that has helped me a lot. It has a collection of real recorded therapy sessions from individuals that they've decided to share (with personal details scrubbed I assume) that you can listen to at your leisure. They're categorized as well, so if you're looking for understanding why you have a lack of interest in things, are having relationship issues, etc... you can find topics that you're interested in. It's been super helpful for me to realize how many people have the same issues or are in the same boat as me without me having to go in to see an actual therapist.
It doesn’t always respond sensibly, but repeating the query will usually hit on a sensible answer after a few tries. It is best used with an intermediary who can enter the queries and respond in a way that is consistent with how a therapist might respond in a real session.
Hm... it feels about on par with Eliza. Or at least I haven't gotten it to provide any constructive insight or meaningful questions. At its best what kind of interactions can it produce?
Sure, here is an example of a productive exchange:
Bot: Hello, I am a chat bot to talk with about problems. What can I talk with you about?
You: Well I have a bit of a problem with having trouble getting myself to exercise
Bot: And so it seems like there's a way to find out what the right opportunities for you are.
You: well I enjoy rowing on my machine
Bot: It sounds like a challenge to me, isn't it? Is there something in you says, I don't want to something unless it's really right?
You: Sure, but I enjoy rowing on the machine, it's just hard to set up a consistent time for those things
Bot: You said you want to to deal with this problem and get rid of it.
You: I am not sure how to set up a system so that I will exercise
Bot: And again, tell me some times where you felt like you were doing the right thing. What were some other times where you had
those kind of feelings?
You: Well, I had that feeling when I was out running
Bot: You're saying too that you know perfectly well the feeling within yourself that occurs when you are really doing something
that's right for you.
You: Yes, so you are saying maybe I need to vary my exercise routine to some degree?
Bot: And that's something of interest to you?
You: Maybe, I could try it. Maybe I could do an hour of a different exercise on some days
Bot: That's true. That's very true.
You: Okay, so that's what I will try. Do you think there might be something else I can do to make myself more consistent?
Bot: Is it fair to say that you feel, really, that at times you're acting in ways that are not in accord with your own inner
standards?
You: well yes
Bot: And you want to learn new things. Is that fair to say?
You: Yes I do want to learn new things
Bot: What might you say?
You: I might say that I could learn some strategies to be more consistent about my exercise, or try something new and see what
works for me
Bot: What are you doing about that?
You: I could set up an exercise log in a paper book
Bot: All right. So you mentioned feeling guilty about making a choice. How do you feel about that right now?
You: Maybe a little better about it because I know there is something I can try to improve my exercise routine or improve my
consistency
Bot: The point is, you haven't forgotten.
You: Right, I am motivated now
Bot: It sounds like a tough assignment.
You: Yes, but I am up for it
Bot: One thing I might ask, what is it you wish I would say to you?
You: I guess you could say you think I can make it work
Bot: Well, yeah. It sounds like one of the hard things is that you really value the time late at night.
You: Yes, maybe I could shift more to the morning
Bot: Is that the main idea?
You: Well maybe ultimately it is because if I got up early I could make the time to exercise with more consistency
Bot: You mean you want to get over this for yourself?
It feels pretty hollow to me. If the person wants to guide themselves through some issue it's possible for them to do it in the format of the bot, but the bot isn't really assisting, and it's actually harder to follow through the thought process when responding to the bot than it would be without it.
Well... that's kind of critical, but I'm specifically interested in this stuff so I'm apt use to a critical eye.
I'm still trying to understand Rogerian therapy... I do think it has particular application because it's centered on the idea that the healing or changes the patient seeks ultimately comes from within that person. The humility of that stance is one where there might be a place for a computer, as it has an opportunity not to try to tell the person who they should be or how they should act, but only to act as a kind of emotional mirror, reflecting the patient's own statements and intentions back to them (hopefully constructively!) Most computer-assisted mental health products right now are, in comparison, very behavioralist.
There's also more to Rogerian therapy, especially empathy which is perhaps forever out of reach of a computer. PRETENDING to feel empathy is possible, of course... but I believe another principle is honesty, and pretending to feel empathy is not honest.
Anyway, it feels like this could benefit from being more reflective: have the bot repeat back to the user more often. It's okay if it can't come up with new ideas or tell the person what to do, but being able to rephrase statements or pull up meaningful past statements could be genuinely insightful without attempting to generate insight.
This is really cool. Would love to chat and exchange ideas if you are up for it! /Makan Amini (Co-founder at Meomind). My email is makan@meomind.com. Thanks!
One of the biggest frustrations I've had after switching from Slack -> Teams is the lack of support for syntax highlighting or 'code snippets.' Also, I can search for past comments, etc.. but for some reason it doesn't take you back in time to view the context around them - it only shows you the exact search result.
I ran into the issue of authentication when trying to learn GraphQL. I made a Node/GraphQL/React boilerplate with an example implementation of authentication in place. It's my first foray into both Node and GraphQL so I apologize for any inconsistencies.
It's also worrying for households that have animals that are not particularly friendly toward strangers. Would the delivery person be able to press charges should a home owners dog bite them?
Yes, you are responsible if your dog bites somebody. They might not press charges, but they would likely sue you (or Amazon's insurance company would directly or through a subrogation company).
You should probably talk to your own home insurance company as well. Owning certain breeds raise your premiums already (at least ours does), and enabling strangers into your insured property to now potentially interact with those breeds probably needs coverage.
I'm one of the people that switched from a MacBook Pro to the new Surface Book.
The ENTIRE experience was dreadful for me.
The day I went into the Microsoft store to purchase it (Black Friday), their credit card system was down, so I had to wait around for nearly 2 hours until they finally figured things out. That wouldn't typically upset me, but my brother-in-law went through something similar just 2 weeks prior. Aside from that, the reps in the store were constantly trying to up-sell me on different items and get me to purchase other things throughout the store. This is something that is extremely irritating to me and something that I appreciated the reps at the Apple Store not doing.
As far as the actual product goes - I found the trackpad to be lacking. It just FELT a bit buggy and non-responsive at times. I have yet to find a trackpad as solid as the ones that Apple ship. This became more apparent of time after using the product. Aside from the trackpad I don't have too many complaints, except for things that are of personal preference (I can't say I like the design / functionality of the snake hinge). I also realized, as mainly a pro user, that I don't have much use / need for the touch screen or tablet portion of the device.
Needless to say, I ended up returning the device and buying the new touch-bar 15" MBP a few days ago. Aside from how annoying it is to locate / use the touch-based Esc key, it's a really solid device.
Trackpads are one of the main things that other companies just can't get right, even on premium devices. Given how long ago Apple 'solved' trackpads, I'm amazed that the rest of the industry hasn't caught up.
True story: I still have one of the old white plastic MacBook 4,1s (w/ Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4 GHz) from 2008. Even though it's eight years old and runs Snow Leopard, and will not run current XCode or Chrome/Firefox, and has slightly outdated command-line tools, it's still a functional rig that I can do a surprising amount of work on (especially since it remains plugged in all the time, SL is very stable, and I do a lot of work in vim/zsh/tmux).
Well, my wife has a brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad running Windows 10, which is probably one of the better-quality non-Apple laptops. My five-year-old son recently tried my old MacBook for the first time after using nothing but Mommy's before to watch Minecraft videos, and the first thing he said to me was, "Wow, Daddy! The trackpad on your old laptop is so much better than the one on Mommy's laptop."
This was not prompted by any audible parental Apple fanboyism. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling...
It's a tricky thing. From my experience, the capacitive sensing chip vendors (e.g. Broadcom, Cypress, Atmel) want to move units but don't want to spend the time working on the necessary physical integration to make the sensing pad work correctly. A trackpad is really nothing more than a phone-class touchscreen without an LCD behind it. There's a lot of sensitivity tuning and noise rejection that needs to be performed to refine the performance.
It's not their field of specialization, and they don't want to manufacture the finished components themselves. Apple obviously has taken the time and care to get it right. A lot of others...it seems like they went with the reference design as being good enough.
It's not just the hardware either, it's the drivers. Try using bootcamp on a macbook pro. The previously-perfect trackpad becomes unusable. There is an apple-recommended driver you can install that helps, but not much.
The thing that bugs me is that companies are mindlessly copying Apple.
PC makers are basically copying Apple's implementation of trackpads without consideration to the execution. They spend a lot of time copying the superficial features of the Apple track pads, but no time on the actual functionality of the trackpads.
My main problem with trackpads on Windows laptops is actually a software problem: there's no separate sensitivity/acceleration settings for trackpads vs mice for Windows (MacOS has this).
Acceleration is pretty much a necessity for trackpads to be usable with high-res/multi monitor setups for me, but I cannot stand to use mice with acceleration enabled (probably a relic from my hardcore PC FPS gaming days... I get horribly distracted when my mouse movements don't map 1:1 to movements of my cursor). Not being able to keep separate settings for these different classes of input devices means I simply can't get any decent amount of work done on my laptop without connecting a mouse or going into my settings and enabling acceleration (and of course, disabling it afterwards when I need to use a mouse again, which is a huge PITA).
Having touch alleviates the problem somewhat, but there are still plenty of instances where having the precision of a touchpad is necessary.
Mainly, from what I can gather, because laptop makers (or trackpad makers) still haven't got their act together about including "precision touchpads". That was meant to sort out the touchpad issues a few years ago!
Mostly they seem not to bother fitting the newer type.
I've heard the new "Precision Touchpad" based devices are much better than the current crop of bad trackpads. They are on all "Surface" branded products and some OEMs. I haven't used any personally. YMMV.
I don't think that's the reason why. Track pads are just another part of Apple's obsession with UX. They invest millions (literally) into track pad placement, feel, and ability knowing that users care about it and they'll make it up with volume. It's hard to justify UX spend.
Yes, these comments are exactly right. The other companies resigned to it being Good Enough for them, and don't care about making the trackpad excellent.
I'm not positive but I would guess that the hardware is pretty similar. The same manufacturer, synaptics, made the touchpad in my MBP and Thinkpad. Yet the Apple touchpad is far superior. Aside from the fact that my lenovo has a textured tract pad, I think the Apple software is just that much better.
Apple acquired FingerWorks[1] in 2005. They were pioneers in multi-touch pads. I believe their technology is one of the reasons the original iPhone was successful.
It's interesting, because my experience has been the opposite. I've found the Surface and Windows 10 to consistently exceed my overall expectations for the platform and are mostly on par with my experiences with OSX.
But I have found with some units, after you move the device the trackpad does have issues. In a few cases (perhaps once every 2 weeks) I have to disconnect and reconnect the base to fix them.
> The day I went into the Microsoft store to purchase it (Black Friday), their credit card system was down, so I had to wait around for nearly 2 hours until they finally figured things out.
Every store's shopping experience on black friday ranges from barely tolerable to unbearable. You know where I had to drop by on black friday to do a chore for my hospital-bound sister? The Apple Store. It was an unpleasant experience.
> I also realized, as mainly a pro user, that I don't have much use / need for the touch screen or tablet portion of the device.
What does this mean? Do pro users not look at or create webpages, mobile apps? Touch works everywhere but IDEs.
I find myself accidentally touching my corporate macbook's screen all the time to click a distant link because it's so much faster than the trackpad travel, and I'm better at home-rowing my hands from a high position rather than a wrist swivel.
Needless to say, I am sick of being "forced" to use OSX. It's slower for my purposes, it's less developer friendly, and the battery life on most of these devices is just atrocious the instant you start doing I/O intensive things like compilation.
My Surface book w/ battery saver mode on still goes 6+ hours doing clojure and kotlin compilations periodically with battery saver on, with only maybe a 10-15% speed loss (which amounts to less than 10 seconds per compile in my worst case). That's substantially better than any mac product I have.
> Every store's shopping experience on black friday ranges from barely tolerable to unbearable.
This is true and I would be completely sympathetic to this if the same thing hadn't happened to my brother-in-law (also purchasing a Surface Book) a couple of weeks prior. Note: this isn't a dig on Microsoft or even the product - I was more trying to make the point that I went into the store super excited about a product, and the experience alone completely turned me off to it in the long run. Granted, I probably didn't give the product enough of a chance in the end.
I am sorry you didn't, and I do want to sincerely invite you to try powershell on your mac and other MS dev stuff. You don't need a surface book to enjoy the environment improvements.
We don't have Microsoft stores here in Asia so I really cannot compare.
But I absolutely hate going into Apple or iStudio stores.
They try to upsell and add all sorts of crap. When I bought my 12" Macbook I ended up leaving the store and buying it online.
I just went in to the store today to buy a case for my new iPhone 7 and I wanted a flip case just so i didn't need a screen protector and the guy kept insisting on getting a screen protector. Despite me saying no a dozen times. I ended up taking my stuff and handing it to another staff member at the counter.
Unless there's specific reasons (like credit card extended warranty), it's probably best to avoid those chains like iStudio. Third party support via AppleCare has been great though.
Though this was just my very limited experience with the apple store , I really did appreciate the lack of upsell. When I bought my macbook air, I walked in, asked for a macbook air, and the only questions were screen size and amount of ram. Same experience when I had to get a replacement power cord after a cat got at it. Only question was "what model?" And wss donr
I've got a laptop that I hate using precisely because of it's awful trackpad. Anymore I use it only for watching old episodes of adventure time and playing sega genesis games.
Agreed. Though I have no idea what motivates other people, and opinions vary, so I can't say the decision to go back to Apple is wrong.
I am surprised that for all of the online ordering we do in today's society, so many people use bricks-and-mortar stores for their high-tech purchases. I had my Surface Book shipped to my doorstep like most anything else I purchase in my life. I find it unpleasant to go into Apple stores or Microsoft stores. I've had negative experiences with both and prefer to just get things shipped to my home now.
In my experience, the Surface Book trackpad is as good as any Mac trackpad. I'd say both trackpads are about 80%, if a good mouse is 100%.
"I am surprised that for all of the online ordering we do in today's society, so many people use bricks-and-mortar stores for their high-tech purchases."
Many tech products, like laptops, are quite personal. You're going to be staring at this thing for several hours a day, almost every day. It makes sense that most people would want to see it in person and try it out. And, at least regarding the Apple Store (and presumably the Microsoft store; I haven't checked), it's not cheaper to buy online than it is in the store.
"In my experience, the Surface Book trackpad is as good as any Mac trackpad. I'd say both trackpads are about 80%, if a good mouse is 100%."
I cannot agree, but I have a feeling that this is one of those things like Pepsi vs Coke: There's no objective measurement, so no one can say they're right or wrong.
I work around a 5 min walk from both Apple & Microsoft stores. When my old Thinkpad laptop died, I went over to the Microsoft store and got a Surface Pro. Much more convenient than waiting for one to be delivered. The annoying thing with the Microsoft store is that you can't order online and pick up in-store. I did the same thing when buying my iPhone. Ordered it online and picked it up in store a few hours later. If you have the store close by, you can get your stuff much quicker.
When I purchased my Surface Book, I was told it's best to purchase it in the Microsoft physical store so I could return it with no questions asked if I encountered any problems. Whereas if I purchase it online, from a website like Amazon, I would have to deal with Amazon's customer service.
Edit: The only problem I have with my SB trackpad is that I normally use two finger swipe to scroll down with my hand slightly at an angle to the touchpad (since I'm right handed). I've never had a problem with any MacBook, but on the SB it frequently registers that as a pinch and attempts to zoom.
The Microsoft Store itself has online ordering, so why not order online from there. The return policy specifically allows returning an online purchase at a retail store ( see near bottom of https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/DisplayHelp... ).
Think about it this way: people who leave an ecosystem for mostly-aesthetic or status-signalling reasons (e.g. a small touchscreen replacing some keys they don't use, making their favoured device appear less 'professional' according to people who've never used it) are likely willing to discard other options for reasons that are just as petty.
I haven't heard any criticism of the touchbar predicated on it making the device "appear less 'professional'" at all; I don't even understand why anyone would think that.
Funny you should mention that experience you had at an MS store, that what I THOUGHT it was going to be like but when I ended up buying myself a SB it was the exact opposite. I guess each store is going to be different, I remember when the Apple store in my city first opened - they hired younglings from similar stores nearby and for the first month or so they were really pushy when it came to upselling stuff.
Overall though I'm a huge fan of my Surface Book, I wouldn't say it's 'better' than my previous MBP but it's definitely better at different things. For example the MBP was a bit nicer to type on and the trackpad felt nicer, but it's screen wasn't as good. I've also found the pen to be a HUGE benefit for me, anything from meetings to note taking has gotten a lot easier.
Plus I'm pretty happy with Windows 10 overall, nice and easy to use and I have to say I like the aesthetics of it a little more than the current OSX.
I had the opposite experience. The MS Store was quick and easy. The Apple store was more than a 2 hour wait to buy something I had already picked out. It wasn't even Black Friday. I'd happily return to the Windows store. If I had to go to the Apple store, I'd expect it to be a bad experience.
It seems like you're basing your judgement largely on your Black Friday shopping experience. You go from saying the "ENTIRE experience was dreadful" to "Aside from the trackpad I don't have too many complaints". This is a rant about Black Friday, not Microsoft.
I think Microsoft is still resolving scalability challenges producing a mass-market in-house hardware line. A friend of mine purchased a Surface Book shortly after release and it had a litany of hardware and software issues, the Microsoft Store replaced it free of charge and he hasn't had issues with the new device.
