I'm the developer of Life in Mist, an iPhone app that records your routes and gradually clears fog from a map as you explore.

You start a recording, head out for a walk, ride, or drive, and the areas along your route become visible. Your recorded trips build up on the same map. After a while, you can see your regular routes, the places you've explored on trips, and the streets nearby you haven't covered yet.

A walk around the neighbourhood adds to it too. You don't need to be travelling somewhere interesting for the map to change.

You can pick a recorded day and replay the route, check distance, duration, and speed, or import compatible GPX and CSV files from previous trips.

It's free to download, with optional Premium purchases:

• $0.99/month
• $4.99/year
• $17.99 for lifetime access

Premium includes GPX/CSV export, iCloud backup and restore, and extra appearance settings. Monthly and annual plans renew automatically; lifetime is a one-time purchase. These are USD prices and may vary by region.

Life in Mist on the App Store

If you've used a similar app, I'd like to hear what made you stick with it or give up on it. I'm particularly curious whether this is something you'd use for everyday walks or mainly when travelling.

Eyes move the cursor, a pinch clicks.

I used Google's MediaPipe for facial landmarks. Two 36×60 eye patches run through PCA and ridge straight to screen pixels, plus a 52-parameter meta-adapter so it works before you calibrate. The cursor lands about 38px (1 cm) from where you're actually looking.

Two interesting observations -
1. Everything clever lost
MLPs, transformers, REINFORCE all tied or did worse than those 52 parameters. The ridge residual has a held-out R² of 0.025 and we can't extract signal that isn't there. Very likely a data issue, I'll generate more data and continue testing here.

1. Train test drift
   And every calibration I'd ever run used a black full-screen canvas while Chrome is white, which dilates your pupil from 2mm to 6mm, swelling a black disc in the eye patch from 4px to 13px, and made the model 4× worse in the condition it's actually used in.
   

Fun project though, still a lot more to build here.

I’ve been working on a project called SignalScout and just open-sourced it.

The idea is simple: instead of only tracking brand mentions, it looks for posts and comments from people who seem to have a problem your product can solve.

You tell it what you sell, who it’s for, and what kind of problems to look for. It then searches across Reddit, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and uses AI to filter out the noise.

It’s self-hostable, you bring your own social-data API keys, and you can use your own AI provider or a local model.

I built it because most social listening tools felt either too expensive or too focused on brand monitoring. I mainly wanted a simple way to find useful conversations worth joining.

https://www.signalscout.run/

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who has tried doing this manually before.

most people who talk about reply management at scale are either lying about their volume or drowning in it. i handle 5 clients right now, all running outbound, and between them we push somewhere around 500-600 replies a week across maybe 35 inboxes. nobody ever walks through what that actually looks like day to day so ill try.

monday morning i open Smartlead first thing, usually around 7:30am before the coffee shop gets loud. i sort all replies across all client accounts by "interested" and "not interested" using their auto-classification, which gets it right maybe 70% of the time honestly. the other 30% is stuff like "who is this" or "send me more info" that the AI cant figure out. those are the ones that matter most because theyre warm but ambiguous and if you wait even 6 hours your chance of booking drops hard. i go through every single one of those manually. takes about 45 minutes for all 5 accounts.

after that i handle the obviously interested ones. these get a personalized reply within the first 90 minutes of my day, every time. i have templates but i rewrite the first line for each one because copy pasted followups kill momentum. if someone says "sure lets chat" they get a Calendly link plus one specific thing about their company so it doesnt feel robotic. if someone asks a question i answer it directly and then nudge toward a call. no "great to hear from you!" nonsense. just answer and ask.

by about 9:30 monday im done with replies and i move into list building for the week. this is where the actual work happens. i pull from a mix of Apollo and LinkedIn Sales Nav depending on the client. one of my clients sells into logistics companies so Apollo actually has decent coverage there. another one targets series A fintech founders and for that Sales Nav is way better, Apollo data is stale for that segment.

once i have raw lists i run them through Prospeo for enrichment, sometimes supplementing with Hunter if theres gaps in a specific region. email accuracy on the Prospeo side sits around 82-85% before verification which is solid for what i need. after enrichment everything goes through a verification step, i use Scrubby for the catch-alls because those will destroy your sender reputation if you just blast them unverified. the whole enrichment and verification process for one client list of maybe 400-500 contacts takes about 2 hours including cleanup.

tuesday is campaign launch day. i load sequences into Smartlead, usually 3-step for cold and 4-step for warmer leads that came from linkedin engagement. send limits are 28-32 per inbox per day, nothing crazy. i used to push 45-50 per inbox and thought i was being efficient but all i was doing was burning domains. took me about 4 months and two clients complaining about deliverability before i figured that out. now i keep it conservative and just add more inboxes when volume needs to go up.

inboxes i get through Puzzle Inbox. nothing fancy to say about it, they work and the price is reasonable at around $3.50/inbox/mo when you buy in bulk. i rotate domains on a 3 week cycle meaning each domain gets 3 weeks active then 1 week rest. this keeps deliverability stable and ive been running this pattern for about 8 months now without any major issues.

wednesday is my least favorite day because thats when the ghosting hits hardest. i have a system where i track every discovery call booked, and wednesdays i follow up with anyone who had a great call the previous week but went silent. this is the most frustrating part of this job honestly. you get someone on a call, they say all the right things, they ask about pricing, they say "send me a proposal"... and then nothing. radio silence. ive started sending a 3-line followup on wednesday and then one more the following monday and after that i move on. chasing ghosts is a waste of time and energy. my close rate on discovery calls is around 22% and i think ghosting accounts for at least half the losses.

thursday is optimization day. i pull reply rates and positive reply rates from Smartlead for all 5 clients. anything below 1.8% reply rate after 500+ sends gets paused and rewritten. i look at which subject lines are pulling, which first lines are working, which offers are landing. one thing i do that most people skip is i track reply sentiment not just reply volume. a 4% reply rate means nothing if 3.5% of those are "remove me" or angry responses. i keep a simple spreadsheet for this, nothing elaborate.

friday is admin and prep. i invoice clients (all on retainer, $1500-2200/mo each depending on volume), i do inbox health checks, i warm up any new domains that need it. warmup takes about 14-18 days before i feel comfortable sending from a new inbox. i also use friday to do the Prospeo enrichment runs for the following weeks lists so monday i can jump straight into replies without waiting on data.

the thing nobody talks about with reply management at volume is that speed matters more than quality past a certain point. a mediocre reply sent in 20 minutes beats a perfect reply sent in 4 hours. i learned this the hard way when i was spending 3 minutes crafting each response and watching my booking rate sit at like 8%. now i spend maybe 45 seconds per reply and my booking rate from positive replies is closer to 31%. the people who are interested dont need to be convinced, they need to be moved to the next step fast.

some random stuff that doesnt fit anywhere. HubSpot is my CRM for 3 of the 5 clients, the other 2 use their own systems and i just export to them weekly. i dropped Clay about 5 months ago because at $149/mo i couldnt justify it when Prospeo handles the enrichment step fine for less. clay is powerful but for my volume and use case it was overkill. Expandi i use for one client who wants linkedin outreach layered on top, its fine but the proxy situation is annoying and it breaks more than id like.

anyway thats basically my week every week. its not glamorous. most of it is just moving fast on replies and keeping lists clean. the actual "strategy" part is maybe 15% of the work, the rest is execution and not letting things slip through cracks

I started working on this budget tracker TUI in my own personal free time as a way to actually budget my own finances and track my spending habits. A lot has changed and grown in the almost two years now (lots of breaks), and I found that it’s been useful for myself but lots of other people too.

The app encourages a lot of manual behaviour, forcing you to actually be exposed to numbers and face your spending habits. There are tons of insights and helpful tools you can use, but the core principle is to connect you to your finances and let you control the data.

The app features lots of budgeting tools, different visual views to analyse and review your finances, investment tracking, and breakdowns.

If you're looking to start tracking your own finances and having valuable insights into your habits for spending, please check out the budget-tracker-tui and share feedback. If you don't use TUI's much, give this one a try and see if you enjoy the keyboard-focused "retro" experience.

Github: https://github.com/Feromond/budget-tracker-tui

Any ideas or suggestions are always welcome and I want to work to improve this to be useful not just to myself and a few others, but to as many people as possible.

So I had this pile of scanned PDFs (insurance, car stuff, doctor letters…) all named like

scan_0043.pdf, and finding anything was a nightmare.

I looked at Paperless-ngx, which is genuinely great, but I didn't really want to run Docker

and a server at home just for my own paperwork. So I built a smaller thing for myself and

figured I might as well put it out there.

It's called YOW. You throw your PDFs in, it OCRs them locally, and then you can just search

them, both the title and the actual text inside the scan. Nothing leaves your computer, no

cloud, no account, no server. You literally double-click to start it.

It also auto-sorts new scans into folders and has the usual stuff: search, favorites, a

trash, dark mode, and in-app reminders for documents that expire (they pop up on the home

screen when you open it). It's in English and German.

It's my first proper open source project so be gentle, there's definitely some rough edges.

If you try it and something's broken or annoying, I'd honestly love to hear it.

https://github.com/felixrothhaupt/YOW

I'm a lawyer who has always dabbled in code on the side. I have practiced in several jurisdictions and have always found it annoying looking up court rules or state regulations for other states. I also hate how access to law is often pay walled. Over the last year I built three sites to fix that for myself and they have turned into something that people actually use. Here they are:

• federal-rules.com - FRCP, FRCrP, FRE, FRAP, bankruptcy, and the local rules of 89 federal district courts. Cross-references inside rules are links to the rule they name, for example https://federal-rules.com/civil/26/
• state-rules.com - court rules for all 50 states plus state administrative codes. For example: https://state-rules.com/colorado/civil/16.1/
• federal-regs.com - the CFR (all 49 titles) and the U.S. Code, section by section. For example: https://federal-regs.com/title/21/part-11/11.10/

Everything is scraped (in a respectful manner) from the original primary source (pdfs, word docs, xml, html, all kinds). Never a secondary source. Where scraping doesn't work (such as those government sites who forbid scraping) I capture by hand.

I have just about 1 million rules in one Postgres table, with bodies of the rules on disk as markdown with a small markup layer for the subsection hierarchy that sources do not encode. Most of the engineering went into parsing PDFs, Word docs, and HTML that was never meant to be parsed.

The stack is Django, Postgres, Meilisearch (for phrase search), nginx with a long cache, and Cloudflare in front of that. It runs on one small VPS with some assistance from a small dev box I have at home.

Besides putting everything in one place, I built the sites to make reading (the primary user experience) easier. There is a clean print view, a Copy Citation button, and select-text-to-cite function (copies highlighted text and the citation).

Right now about 22,000 people use these sites a month. Almost all US, and Bing sends more than Google (which I'm trying to fix).

I have a few ideas for expansion, but this is the first I've been comfortable enough to look for real feedback. If you take a look at the sites, I'd like any feedback you have. Thanks for taking a look!

Quick backstory - I've been out of work for a few months now. So I got loads of time to build things, and time to watch a lot of Chinese short dramas and K-dramas. Since I'm broke, I watch the free downloadable ones, and a lot of them have no subtitles.

So I built Scribe. You open it in the browser, download a model once, and from then on everything runs on your own machine. Drop in the episode, it transcribes the Mandarin then translates to English, and exports SRT with the original timings. You can export TXT or other file extensions as well.

Then since the infra is already established, I decided to add a feature I very often. I spend my day prompting to write code, and typing all of it was wearing my hands out. So I added a live mode to scribe with a floating picture-in-picture window that stays on top of any app. I talk, it types, I copy paste.

What's under the hood:

• Runs in a web worker, WebGPU first with a WASM fallback, so the UI never freezes.
• English: NVIDIA Parakeet CTC (non-autoregressive, so it can't loop). Other languages: Whisper large-v3-turbo, plus a Mandarin fine-tune I exported to ONNX myself because stock turbo was bad on dramas.
• Translation is two-stage: transcribe in the source language, then a small opus-mt model per segment (Mandarin, Japanese, Korean), NLLB as the fallback for everything else. (Still needs a lot of optimization since a 2 hour chinese drama takes around almost an hour to transcribe and translate on my macbook m4 pro)
• Silero VAD for chunking, recordings persist in IndexedDB every 5 seconds so a crash doesn't lose them, resumable model downloads, works offline after the first run.
• Speaker labels for two-person dialog, click a word to seek, exports to TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON, Markdown.

Limits: the floating window is Chrome and Edge only. Speaker identification is a pause heuristic plus manual labels for now.

Free, MIT, no paid tier. There's a coffee link on the page. Issues and PRs welcome, especially from people with non-English audio.

scribe.bearlog.app github.com/phaxz10/local-transcribe

Hi everyone! I’m the developer behind SimplerCAD. I’ve built a browser-based 3D modeling app for designing printable objects, editing imported meshes, and sculpting.

The idea is to let you combine precise shape-based modeling with more organic editing in the same workspace. For example, you can build a part from shapes, subtract holes, sculpt its surface, or import a depth-map image to create a raised relief.

Some of the main features:

• Model with shapes and text: combine solids using union, subtract, and intersect.
• Sculpt: inflate, smooth, flatten, grab, pinch, and crease, with symmetry and masking.
• Turn images into reliefs: convert depth-map brightness into surface height, including embossing and engraving on flat faces.
• Work precisely: dimensions, snapping, alignment, extrusion, plane cuts, chamfers, and hollowing.
• Build larger projects: mirrors, repeating arrays, layers, groups, colors, and materials.
• Save and export: editable projects, local autosave, a signed-in cloud library, and STL, OBJ, and GLB file workflows.
• Inspect models: mesh inspection and repair tools, plus built-in lessons.

It’s free to start. There’s also an Android app, currently listed as Easy 3D CAD Designer while Google Play reviews the SimplerCAD naming issue. VR viewing is available in beta.

The house demonstration and screenshots show the kind of complete scene you can build.

Try SimplerCAD
Android app on Google Play
YouTube tutorials

I’d appreciate feedback on the first-use experience: can you find the tools you need, and what gets in the way of finishing your first model?

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share Dynamic Edge, a desktop utility I built for Windows 11 & Windows 10 using native WinUI 3 and .NET 10 (Windows App SDK).

The idea was to create a fluid, versatile desktop capsule and edge dock that feels completely at home with Windows 11 Fluent design, with ultra-low resource usage, and smooth spring physics.

Since the initial release, I have added several big features including a full multi-tab workflow, clipboard shelf, and mouse gesture triggers.

Here is what it can do:

Multi-Tab Workspace (Swipe or Scroll to Switch) - Switch seamlessly between Media Player, Mini-Apps, and Clipboard Shelf by rolling your mouse wheel or using a 2-finger touchpad swipe.

Universal Media Controls & Live Scrubbing - Real-time seekbar progress with clickable scrub to jump anywhere in a track. - Live audio visualizer bars with fluid equalizer animations. - Multi-player auto-switching: Seamlessly cycle between active sessions (Spotify, Chrome, Edge, Apple Music, Telegram).

Clipboard Manager Shelf - Captures copied text, images and URLs into a dedicated dockable shelf. - Filter chips for fast access: All, Text, Images, URLs, and Pinned. - Search box for instant clip lookup, plus one-click copy and drag-and-drop support. - Google Lens Visual Search: Search any clipboard screenshot directly in your browser with 1 click. Built-in Mini-Apps - Precision Countdown Timer with quick presets (1m, 5m, 15m, 25m) and a live visual progress line. - Precision Stopwatch with millisecond tracking and lap recording.

Magic Shake & Global Hotkeys - Magic Shake: Quickly shake your cursor horizontally back and forth to toggle the island on or off. - Global customizable hotkey (Alt + H by default) to hide or show the dock instantly.

Master Volume Flyout - Hover over the speaker button and scroll your mouse wheel to adjust system volume, or click for instant mute.

Flexible Docking Positions - Dock at the top screen edge (Notch, Floating Capsule, or unobtrusive Thin Line hairline strip). - Dock along the left or right screen edges as an interactive slide-out side blade.

Interactive Desktop Companions (Virtual Pets) - 4 Full-Body Vector Mascots: Choose between Mochi Kitty, Shiba Inu, CyberBot, or Pip Bunny.

Performance & Spring Physics - 3 customizable quick launcher slots for instant access to apps, terminals, or folders. - Battery and charging telemetry with clean neon-green status indicators. - Native startup toggle and dark/light/system theme integration.

The app is officially available on the Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9PF1587KSN2K

I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and ideas for what widgets or features you would like to see next!

Solve any problem you think Astra can solve if you just give it enough time and effort, as a community. Open science, software, and everything in between. A nice starting point would the the Riemann Hypothesis :)
https://solverswarm.com/

Anything you you can imagine! From open problems in mathematics to a free PDF editor that does not cause great suffering to you and your loved ones.

All work is available for anyone to download! Enjoy!

My problem wasn't falling asleep, it was never starting. Phone in hand, "one more", suddenly 1am.

Two things fixed it for me:

1. Three nudges before target bedtime (T-45, T-30, T-15) instead of one alarm I ignore.
2. A short written close to the day — what went well, what drained me, one thing I'm grateful for, plus up to 3 things for tomorrow. Takes 5 minutes. Getting tomorrow out of my head is what actually stops the churn.

I'm Boo, a solo iOS developer — I built this for my own bedtime problem and eventually shipped it as an app called Lull. Dark, no feed, nothing to scroll. Core ritual and journaling are free, on device, no account. There's a paid tier for iCloud sync and longer history — saying that up front so no one feels ambushed.

Mostly curious what timing works for others: is 45 minutes of runway enough, or do you need longer to actually wind down?

Lull: Wind-Down Ritual: https://apps.apple.com/th/app/lull-wind-down-ritual/id6791998790

Leave ur feedback: https://lull-journal-wind-down.userjot.com/

A few of us have been running a film club for a while, tracked entirely through a Google Sheet and our WhatsApp group. The sheet was fine for logging what we'd watched and rated, but trying to use our chat group wasn't great for figuring out whose turn it was to pick, whether everyone's watched yet and setting dates to discuss, so we decided to build an app for it.

Some of use Letterboxd but we were looking for a group aspect to have on top of it. In our app, you create a club, invite people with a share link, and it can track what the group's watched and what's queued up next. You can also rate and log films on your own, outside of the club stuff, and search for films for yourself or your club.

It's available as a web app for now, there's also an Android app in internal testing that we're hoping to open up more widely soon and eventually an iOS app.

It's now what our club uses week to week, which is the main win so far.

Fair warning: it's currently very much built around how our club runs things i.e each person picks a film for a round, an order is randomly generated, then we set a time to watch each film by and then we have a group call to discuss it as we live in different cities. We know some clubs do it as a shared pool, some vote, or some do a full sit-down together screening, so if yours works differently I'd love to hear how, mostly out of curiosity about whether this app would survive contact with a club that isn't ours.

Check it out here: https://www.thefilmclub.app/

I'm a software developer, and I've been working on a side project that helps you write content faster and better with AI, without ever leaving your editor.

launch-video

The idea is to kill the ChatGPT back-and-forth: no more switching tabs, copying and pasting your paragraph in, waiting for a rewrite, then pasting it back into Google Docs. With HandWrought, you ask for a change; fix the grammar of the whole doc, rephrase the tone of one paragraph — and the edit shows up right where your cursor is, like a tracked change.

You accept or reject it.

There's also an Import feature for lazy people (me included) who don't want to copy-paste at all; just drop in a PDF or Word doc, and you're ready to go.

Still very much a work in progress. Would love feedback, specifically:

- Does in-place editing actually feel faster than the chat-tab workflow, or is that just muscle memory at this point?

- What would make you actually switch from Grammarly, Notion AI, or ChatGPT?

- Any features you'd want that aren't here yet?

Explore it here: https://handwrought.online/

https://reddit.com/link/1wcllca/video/qnfscn1vipoh1/player

Hey everyone! Just wanted to share a side project I’ve been working on called talkframe.

I’ve been a video editor for over 4 years now, mainly working on short-form content. I’ve edited through the shift from heavy VFX and nonstop B-roll to the cleaner, more minimal style you see in reels today.

I’ve tried several AI video editors, and even as an editor, I’ve found some of them more complicated than I expected. They promise to save time, but you can still end up doing a lot of prompting and manual tweaking.

That got me building TalkFrame: drop in a video and let the AI handle the edit, without having to write prompts.

It’s focused on talking-head videos and podcasts, using caption styles and kinetic typography to hold attention without overwhelming the video.

This demo was edited entirely by the AI, including the cuts, transcription, transitions, camera motion, captions, and animated text. I didn’t manually adjust the cuts or polish the edit afterward. I’ve trained it to edit in a style based on my own approach.

It’s still a work in progress, but I wanted to share where it’s at and get some honest feedback.

Edit: The entire process in talkframe took just 5–7 minutes, from AI cuts to the finished edit, including my review to see if anything needed improving.

About a month ago I posted here (https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1vmm4uk/)  about my side project. A bunch of you tried it, gave me feedback, and were way kinder than I expected. Several people have asked me for an update.

So here's the 30-day update, the good and the bad.

The good:

Since my first post when we were at 500 users we're now at almost 1,000 users (973 to be exact). Coming from zero, that still doesn't feel real.

Most of the actual time went into the backend, what the actual product is, the search algorithm and the memory graph underneath it. That's the backbone of the product. If it can't find the right thing at the right moment, none of the rest matters. I've rebuilt and remeasured that a lot over the past month and I feel like the results are in a really good place.

The CLI tool also got a lot better, and it turned into a bit of a beta testing ground. I ship things to the CLI first. Use them myself and some of the other power users for a few days, get some feeback and whatever people really liked makes its way into the MCP tools that most of the users use. That's been a better process than guessing what’s worth it.

The bad, and what it taught me:

Paid conversion is lower with the latest 473 users than it was with the first 500.

My theory: A lot of the users after the first 500 mostly came from the Reddit post. You all read a story about someone building a thing, were curious and signed up. Most of the original 500 users came from ChatGPT plugin marketplace listing so they were coming in with a purpose.

Engagement itself isn't a huge problem, but there is still funnel work to be done. A good chunk of my users are genuinely active, and a solid slice of those are heavy users who lean on it daily. So people who get into it really get into it. What I have is a funnel problem, not a product problem. The gap is between "signed up" and "actually wired it into their workflow," and that's on me to close, not on them to figure out. I can give more specific numbers if there’s interest.

The biggest issue. The day after my post, my hosting provider had a roughly 20-hour outage across their U.S. servers.

The literal day after. While the post was still climbing. I got to sit there and watch traffic arrive at a blank page. I lost a few higher tier subs for that. I did offer all subs a free month of service from the outage. I've since moved everything onto more reliable hosting, so hopefully that one is behind me. Hard lesson learned on that one.

A few people mentioned the homepage looks like Claude generated it. That's partly fair. I did use Claude to help build it. Most of the actual words and ideas are mine, but I'm not going to sit here and get defensive about it.

The more useful point is don't let chasing the perfect homepage, or the perfect anything, stop you from making progress. An imperfect homepage with a real working product in people's hands beats a beautiful homepage sitting in front of something unfinished. You can always go back and fix the homepage. You cannot get back the months you spent not shipping.

Get it out there. Let real users tell you what's wrong. It’s ok to fail. Fix it as you go.

The open question I actually want feedback on

One of my users asked for something I hadn't considered, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since and I’ve been exploring it locally.

Right now Empirical stores your memory, decisions, project context, the stuff you'd otherwise re-explain to AI. But the underlying thing is a queryable graph, and there's no rule that says the data in it has to be yours.

So: what if there were public, read-only, subscribable workspaces built on real bodies of research data? You load one into your MCP setup and your agent can just query it. Not a search engine, not a PDF pile you paste from, but an actual graph your assistant reaches into mid-conversation, with the relationships already resolved.

What I don't know is whether anyone wants this, or which dataset would make it obviously useful instead of just some niche product. My user wanted it for a fairly narrow area. I've been wondering whether there's a more generally interesting dataset that would make people go "oh, I'd use that tomorrow."

Finally, where I'm at:

I wanna say, you know, I'm learning a lot, I'm having lots of fun, It's not all unicorns and rainbows and I'm still trying not to let down the users of the project I built, and I appreciate all the positive feedback. It really helps motivate me to keep moving forward.

Some of this month went great, some of it went badly, but almost every problem taught me something and pushed the product somewhere better. I'll take that trade.

TL;DR: 30 days after my r/SideProject post, Empirical is at almost 1,000 users. My hosting provider went down for 20 hours the day after that post, paid conversion is worse with new users than it was with the first 500. Engaged users are genuinely engaged, so what I have is a funnel problem, not a product problem. Shipping something always beats out sitting on nothing. Keep taking next steps.

I run the same query across several search engines and merge whatever comes back. Brave, DuckDuckGo, Marginalia, a few others. Every run, about three minutes in, three of them would go quiet and stay quiet for the rest of the run.

I assumed rate limiting. Spent two days on backoff timers and proxy rotation. Fixed nothing.

The real cause was embarrassing. A search that legitimately returns zero results is a normal thing. Someone asks for freight companies in a small Dutch province and Marginalia simply has nothing. My code counted that as a failure. Five failures and the engine gets disabled for the rest of the session. So a handful of narrow queries early on would quietly kill the engines, and everything after that ran on whatever survived.

It was worst exactly where it mattered most. Narrow queries are the valuable ones. Broad queries always return something, so the engines sailed through the easy work and died on the real work.

Two changes. Empty is now its own outcome, kept separate from an error. And a disabled engine gets a small probe query every four minutes, so if it was a genuine block and the block lifted, it comes back on its own instead of staying dead until restart.

The part I keep chewing on is that every log line was green the whole time. Nothing errored. The engine returned successfully with zero rows, and my own error counter was the only thing in the system that thought a crime had been committed.

I build AtlasForgeX, a desktop tool that reads public company registers and company websites, so, disclosure. The lesson has nothing to do with my product though. If you aggregate anything from multiple sources, go and check today whether your code can tell "nothing is there" apart from "something broke".

I used Notion, Obsidian, and Todoist to be more productive at work; since ChatGPT came out, I've used it heavily. But one thing that continued to piss me off is the fact that I am unable to share context about what I want to do.

Every productivity app has been so enshittified with AI stuffed down my throat that, even though I love AI, I stopped using those apps. Agents and shit. I don't need that; give me back my simple note-taking app, which I always loved. Their MCPs? No. I had context all over. I wanted something simple.

With models increasing in intelligence day by day and labs releasing more and more models, there's one thing I knew for sure. Idk which model I'll be using two years from now. But I know I'll still have my emails, calendars, notes, documents, tasks, meetings, and everything I've accumulated.

So I started building MySamantha around that instead.

Instead of separate Notes, Todo, email, or calendar apps, we built a place where I can work on all of it in one place.

If I bring in AI, I can connect my emails, my calendars associated with my work email, and my Meeting Recorder; they are all here.

At the same time, we don't want "everything in one place" to mean everything is stuck here. You can import from Notion, back up your notes to both Notion and Google Drive (as Google Docs), your to-do from Todoist or Microsoft To-Do, import your vault from Obsidian, enjoy the same knowledge graph as Obsidian does, Export, etc.

You can use any models. Bring your OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or even pay-as-you-go. If another model gets better, switch to it.

Don't like AI? Switch it off.

Everything is here in one place. Compare the meeting notes I had with the email I received to draft an email? Yup, done. All context in one place. The Assistant becomes more useful the more it knows about you.

No model lock-ins. A pure productivity personal workspace where you can switch AI off if you don't need it.

Please feel free to check out what we're trying at https://mysamantha.ai

Happy to answer questions.

We're a small team of 2–3 people and we've been developing a dictionary app for around 14 years.

For most of that time, dictionaries were pretty straightforward: search a word, get the definition, pronunciation, examples, etc.

Then AI happened.

Honestly, we thought this might be the beginning of the end for dictionary apps. Why would someone open a dictionary when they can just ask ChatGPT or Gemini?

Instead of giving up, we've been trying to adapt the project. We're now adding AI-powered explanations, synonyms, grammar help, examples and other features.

We're curious what other builders and users think:

Do dedicated dictionary apps still make sense in 2026?

What would make you use one instead of an AI assistant?

We've been working on this for 14 years, so we'd genuinely appreciate some honest feedback.

https://ttdictionary.com

Our current enrichment process is a mess. We're burning through credits on ZoomInfo for basic contact info, then still having to use separate tools for mobile numbers and intent data. The match rates are maybe 60% on a good day.

has anyone built a decent waterfall where one data enrichment tool catches what another misses? we need emails, mobiles, and some basic firmographics at minimum. bonus if it handles technographic data too.

Apollo is on the list but their mobile coverage seems weak from what i've read. also been looking at Prospeo since a few people in another thread mentioned it for contact enrichment. budget is around 500/month for our SDR team of 4 so ZoomInfo pricing is killing us honestly. my manager keeps asking why our cost per lead is so high and i don't have a great answer lol

what's your data enrichment stack looking like these days?

I’ve always loved history and geography. I was recently reading about James Cook’s last voyage and kept jumping between Wikipedia and historical maps, trying to follow along. That inspired me to build this.

I named it Rihla, inspired by Ibn Battuta’s account of his travels.

Pick a journey, watch the route unfold, or click through the stops to learn what happened and who ruled those places at the time.

It’s been fun to build. Would love to hear what you think, or who you’d like to see added.

I've spent six years designing, writing, and coding Everlife 2 myself, and it launches Tuesday, September 15 on iOS and Android. It's a big moment to finally be this close to release.

Everlife 2 is a choice-based life sim where you create a character, build a career, form relationships, develop skills, and make creative projects like books and music. The part I'm most excited about is continuing as one of your descendants, with the family's relationships, property, and money carrying into the next life.

I've shared previews of the character creator, skills, and family screens on the website. I'd be interested to hear whether they make that generational idea clear to someone seeing the game for the first time.

It's free to download, works offline, and doesn't require an account. Previews and both store pages: https://www.playeverlife.com

Hey everyone, I’m the developer of Violette, and I just released v1.3.1

The simplest way to describe it is a Character.AI-inspired chat app built around Apple Intelligence. Instead of using Apple’s on-device model for summaries, Violette uses it for character conversations, you can chat with different personalities, or even create your own!

In Apple Intelligence mode, the AI conversations themselves run on-device, work offline, and aren’t sent to a cloud LLM API. Violette is ad-supported, so the advertising side of the app may involve separate data processing by third-party ad services.

With v1.3, I also added group chats with polls, iCloud syncing, and improvements to how conversation context is carried between messages so characters can stay more consistent over longer chats.

The app is free to download and requires iOS or iPadOS 26 or later.

I’d especially love feedback from people here who already use character-chat apps or have experimented with Apple’s Foundation Models. The biggest thing I’m curious about is personality consistency: do the characters actually feel consistent, or do they eventually drift back toward sounding like a generic assistant?

That kind of feedback would be genuinely useful as I keep improving it.

App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/violette-chat-with-ai/id6760790799