Comment by tptacek
14 hours ago
Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim:
* Podcast apps
* Music listening apps
* Feed readers
* Bluesky clients
* Note-taking apps
* Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps
* Chat and instant messaging
* Time trackers
* Recipe managers
These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not necessarily the best, not necessarily the most globally competitive, but certainly an application more closely tailored to exactly what you want it to do for your own idiosyncratic work style.
Music.app is a miserable experience, and I can just tell as I use it that it's miserable trying to serve me. But Apple long ago factored all the meaningful bits out of Music.app into MusicKit. Why am I still using Music.app? MusicKit is the real product now. This is new.
The common denominator: the data needs to be owned by you, or at least made accessible. Companies love to create walled gardens where they own the content and control how you access it, making this kind of personalized interface impossible. Hopefully we can push back more now.
I agree that owning the data is ideal:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48129841
Not necessarily, you can ask the LLM to reverse engineer the protocol.
I mean, hold up, if that thought lights you up I'm happy, but I don't actually think that's the common denominator. I used Things.app to track projects for a long time and ultimately fell out of love with it. Things.app didn't own my data; it's a pure UI app.
But now it occurs to me: I know precisely how I work, I know what patterns are valuable to me, I know when and how I need to remind myself of things. I don't know why I haven't already started building my Things.app replacement. But I'd guess I have it to a place where I'm happy by this time Saturday.
Honestly, it's harder for me to think of daily-driver apps where this wouldn't be the case. I guess vector graphics editing? I'm not going to vibe up a vector editor. But I'll bet all the money in my pocket that 5 years from now, the real value in vector graphics tools will be their API/SDK, not the packaged application experience.
I'm not following your reasoning about the common denominator, not sure we're on the same wavelength about what I meant. I'm claiming that in order for an application to be "reclaimable", you have to be able to access and manipulate the data under the app. Some applications currently work that way now, lots of them don't.
For example, we can "reclaim" non-DRM ebook readers, audiobooks, and music players that play local files or use an open API. But a company-specific walled garden streaming DRM'd ecosystem will be almost impossible to build around.
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> didn't own my data
Ownership can have different forms. Slack.app that doesn't let me easily extract code snippets from a thread - owns me. Jira that forces me to use their imbecilic, quirky wysiwyg owns me. Note taking app that keeps the data in their db and not my files - ain't my friend. The friction is the ownership. When extraction requires effort, the tool has leverage over you. It's a subtler form than data lock-in - behavioral lock-in. You adapt your workflow to what the tool makes easy, and gradually the tool's affordances shape what you even think to do. information gets buried in threads, search is mediocre, export is hostile. The "solution" they offer is to stay in Slack/Jira/Dropbox/Evernote/Notion/etc. longer, search in Slack, link to Slack, screenshare in Slack, summarize with AI in Slack, don't ever leave Slack. The tool becomes the answer to the problems the tool creates.
Plain text, local files, standard formats - they don't fight you on extraction because there's nothing to protect. That's why investing in FOSS tools is almost always paying for your own liberation rather than your own imprisonment. Even when there isn't feature parity, even when the FOSS tool doesn't have a "polished UI" and it's "maintained by a teenager in Nebraska" - still a better choice.
Our social media should be decentralized and local first, allowing for bespoke clients on any OS.
This is an experiment towards that:
https://github.com/dharmatech/9social
The first client is written for plan9. This keeps the design honest. (If it can run on plan9/rc/acme...)
Video demo:
https://youtu.be/q6qVnlCjcAI
The current implementation is less than 3000 lines of code.
And speaking of Emacs... 9social was heavily inspired by an Emacs project called Org Social:
https://github.com/tanrax/org-social
I love this idea. Thank you for the examples!
I've been thinking of this as well:
Something like old school Facebook in UI, but functions more like MSN Messenger. You connect to your contacts via P2P, and download/upload updates to your social media network.
> You connect to your contacts via P2P, and download/upload updates to your social media network.
Yup, local-first is central to the design.
And, you only see who you explicitly follow.
I love your username!
I hope there's a sympy-thagoras out there.
( • ‿ • )
Sounds similar to scuttlebutt
1 reply →
> I love this idea. Thank you for the examples!
Thanks for checking it out!
How to upvote in bold? /j
It's plan9 so:
"There's a filesystem for that."
¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
* Time trackers
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/timeivy
An unfinished spreadsheet-based interface for entering time. Meant for consulting, but never got around to persisting the data. Mostly created it because I couldn't stand all the ways that time trackers force users to enter structured time when there's a cute algorithm to handle just about every way a human might naturally enter time.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/49185071/59087
* Recipe managers
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/recipe-fiddle
In the days of LLMs, it would be far easier to categorize ingredients and format them into TeX for publishing as a PDF file. The idea behind this project was to let people essentially copy/paste recipes off the web or scans of handwritten content and autoformat it.
Someone wrote a web server in assembly the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48080587
It is very inspiring.
> but certainly an application more closely tailored to exactly what you want it to do for your own idiosyncratic work style.
Yep, I'm doing this all the time. I've been doing it for a year. The silliest on is an IG post previewer. My app is better suited to me than the preview function that Instagram provide itself.
I just made a one-shot Android music player because I need a very simple one to listen to tracks to practice drums, and I need to go back from the beginning a lot of time, reduce speed, open them from Whatsapp when my teacher sends them to me and access easily the last 4-5 played. There was nothing in F-Droid that ticked all the box so I just made my APK.
Music apps especially went downhill, spotify and tidal etc need to offer apis so we can integrate several sources in one app. They used to offer much more. I was able to import my library into spotify once (thoigh it could only hold 10k item back then). I want all my music in one place, not 4 apps
They don't offer APIs precisely so that you can't integrate several sources in one app.
Many of them have been reclaimed. Check out the "awesome self hosting" GitHub repo.
Podcasts: audiobookshelf
Music: 500 different subsonic clients, many of which are good. Or some fun tuis
Feed readers: lol, more than there are grains of sand in Torvalds' flippers
Note taking: again innumerable, also, just use nvim or emacs of course
Chat: tons of very good self hosted options that can save orgs thousands a month.
Rather than build your own from scratch, rediscovering already solved issues, why not contribute to or fork a FOSS project? LLMs make it easy easier to get up to speed on large projects
Audiobookshelf is a web app! Like, if you had a good TUI music player, I don't think you'd be rebutting my thesis here. I don't doubt anybody's ability to build TUIs.
The point of the post is the emacsification of the native macOS (and Windows, I assume) environment. Totally reasonable not to care that it's occurring, that's not really responsive to the post, is it?
I was responding to your comment that nerds should reclaim software that's overwhelmingly professional and pre packaged by sharing that there already is FOSS software for the categories you listed, which imo represents nerd reclamation.
Audiobookshelf has a native android app, not sure about desktop, I only use it on Android.
Anyone can build a TUI sure but why try to rebuild the whole mpd client/server stack that lets anyone on your network play music from the several TB collection of FLACs on your NAS? Same for subsonic, why reinvent the client server protocol there when it's already solved? And for subsonic clients, why reimplement streaming, offline downloads with de-duping, stream bitrate, album / artist handling... If there's something a subsonic client doesn't have that you want, fork it, point claude at it, done! That probably falls within the emacsification thing, right?
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
I'd add Email to the list.
Email is right there waiting for disruption.
Google wave rides again!
I'd say the thing with email that most improvements would need improved standards?
That said, as with the emacs user example, the ability to automatically process all your email in madly custom ways can now be opened to the masses.
Can you elaborate?
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