Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter
199 points
4 hours ago
| 22 comments
| github.com
| HN
JumpCrisscross
1 hour ago
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Ironically, Tom Riddle's diary encouraging kids to commit suicide [1] and then showing them how to do it would be more on brand than the version in the books.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...

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sillysaurusx
1 hour ago
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Every AI would refuse the prompt. I was banned for researching Nordic assisted death and asking which drug exactly they administered (and what quantity). Claude refused, alerted Anthropic, and I was banned a couple days later. Thankfully the appeal form worked, but by then I was using a different Claude account praying they didn’t ban me again.

There’s an uncensored model floating around that you can run locally with llama.cpp: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rq7jtm/qwen353... it’s annoying to use since you run out of context window quickly, and it’s certainly not able to be deployed in production (i.e. Tom Riddle’s diary as a service).

For better or worse, fun is no longer allowed. It coincided with “AI psychosis” being coined as a term.

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Terr_
1 hour ago
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For a dash of dystopia: Imagine a company starts using that same LLM fuzzy-matching [0] against what you intend to be normal search activity, to detect "bad" queries and "bad" users who will be blocked. Maybe they'll delete your SSO/email/videos/photos too, who knows.

I can easily imagine it happening, especially after some point where they start using the same systems to "enhance" your query.

[0] To be specific, your searches will be placed into a narrative document template, where a character Mr. Safety Bot is about to speak a verdict, and then the LLM story-generator decides whether it "fits" for Mr. Safety Bot to declare you banned.

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genxy
25 minutes ago
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There is prior art with Tuttle vs Buttle.
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Terr_
9 minutes ago
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Ahh, but with Naruto v. Slater, animals can't create or hold copyright, so the art posthumously created by the fly would be in public domain. :p
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sillysaurusx
25 minutes ago
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That is in fact what happened to me, except I think the final decision was made by a human since the ban came later. I didn’t issue any queries in between, so I know it was my convo about barbiturates.
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imglorp
36 minutes ago
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Wait, so instead of saying "I'm sorry Dave, I can't talk about that", they're now banning you for one blocked prompt? Is this new?
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sillysaurusx
32 minutes ago
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As far as I can tell, Claude flagged me as high risk of suicide and then Anthropic issued a ban later on.

It wasn’t one prompt, it was a detailed conversation where I was trying to find out the exact dosage of barbiturates that assisted suicide programs use.

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imglorp
19 minutes ago
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Hrm, it sounds like they're managing their liability. Anything that might get them sued later?
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fragmede
1 hour ago
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> it’s certainly not able to be deployed in production

Why not?

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sillysaurusx
27 minutes ago
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It’s a PITA to offer a language model as a service. You’d need a beefy server, at minimum.

This particular use case might work, since no one can write fast enough to consume too many tokens — the whole session should fit in the context window. But you’ll need to handle all the people connecting to your service indefinitely, which will become expensive for a hobby project.

But sure, theoretically you could deploy it if you have resources. I’m not sure what you’d use to create instances of chat sessions, or if llama.cpp offers an API you can build the app on top of (probably) or whether that’s a workable solution.

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Tcepsa
3 hours ago
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I understand that this is kind of beside the point, but it seems like a bad thing to compare inventions to haunted artifacts that mind controlled their users into betraying their friends to a powerfully evil being. (Though since it is being powered by GenAI, which has also driven people to do bad things, perhaps it is an apt comparison.)
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CarVac
2 hours ago
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Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

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mikestorrent
2 hours ago
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At least we're giving out free verification cans
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Chaosvex
1 hour ago
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Drink your Mountain Dew verification can to continue.
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annzabelle
38 minutes ago
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At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel "Don't Create The Torment Nexus."

https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=e...

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avaer
3 hours ago
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Why would that comparison be bad if it's accurate?

Also, "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Both can be made good and evil.

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p-e-w
3 hours ago
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It’s not accurate, it’s absurd hyperbole no different from the kind the people who peddle it have arrogantly ridiculed their entire lives.

A mentally unstable person being “made” to do something by a chatbot is no different from other mentally unstable people doing bad things because they saw them in a TV show.

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lwansbrough
3 hours ago
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You don't think there's a difference between passive entertainment and a conversation with a sycophantic enabler?
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RossBencina
1 hour ago
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You think mental instability is a necessary prerequisite for covert persuasion?
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McGlockenshire
3 hours ago
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No, actually, an interactive textual conversation is a significantly different thing than a television show.
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fjdjshsh
2 hours ago
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I thought that was part of the appeal of this. There's something spooky and ironic about it.
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boothby
2 hours ago
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> it seems like a bad thing to compare inventions to haunted artifacts that mind controlled their users into betraying their friends to a powerfully evil being.

It's worked pretty well for Palantir?

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archagon
20 minutes ago
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I had to do a double take. They’re framing this comparison as a positive thing?!?

(On second thought, the LLM probably made up this analogy on its own… which, in a way, is even worse.)

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anigbrowl
1 hour ago
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That explains why the video was posted on X
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trhway
3 hours ago
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Once/if we lose understanding of the tech it will become magic/haunted artifacts.
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devmor
2 hours ago
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You hit on the point at the end… It’s not a bad comparison, it’s an apt one.
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jxf
3 hours ago
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This is one of those ideas that would really benefit from a short video demo, gif, or even a screenshot directly in the README. Otherwise, the title reads like a "Curtains for Zoosha?" meme. [0]

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/comments/15hcc4x/c...

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josh2600
3 hours ago
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punk_ihaq
2 hours ago
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keithnz
1 hour ago
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thanks! Now having seen the video, certainly not as cool as it sounds.
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irjustin
1 hour ago
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What did you expect?

For me the video is basically what I expected. Maybe a cool/spookier "full page" reveal but that doesn't really work with the token speed well.

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msftgreed
7 minutes ago
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I expected, from the description, it to look like text was being written by hand -- with the letterforms being stroked at roughly human pen speeds. Not just a fancy font over a text box being entered character by character. The description WAY oversells it.
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int32_64
2 hours ago
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I remember for roughly a month after Elon bought twitter he opened the site up again and public viewers could browse it. Now you can't even click play on a video lol.
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ekianjo
1 hour ago
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You can still open a single post just fine
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sillysaurusx
1 hour ago
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Can anyone verify that you can/can’t see a video if you’re not logged in?
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jetrink
1 hour ago
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I can see the video and view the first three seconds or so, but after that, it throws up a login prompt.
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fragmede
1 hour ago
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An incognito window let me watch the whole 25 seconds with the user writing something and three book writing back, but I don't know if my IP or incognito cookies or anything else are special.
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sillysaurusx
1 hour ago
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It would be ironic if you have to actually sign out from Twitter, not just use incognito mode, to bypass the signup nag. Or if they mark IPs as “signed up” or something. Thanks.
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sillysaurusx
1 hour ago
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Thank you. As someone who tweets, this is helpful to know.
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someguyiguess
1 hour ago
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You can. You just have to close 3 or 4 “please sign up” nag popups.
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lrvick
3 hours ago
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Twitter videos are hard to watch when you do not have an twitter account.
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NDlurker
2 hours ago
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I use this website whenever I get sent a Twitter video link that won't load twittervideodownloader.com
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sillysaurusx
1 hour ago
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Clickable https://twittervideodownloader.com

Works well. Bookmarking this.

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stronglikedan
1 hour ago
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must be your browser or something, or maybe regional. they play right away for me on Windows Chrome as a rando
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someguyiguess
1 hour ago
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Nope. Thats just you. The rest of us have lots of issues.
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teaearlgraycold
1 hour ago
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I kindly request people do not link to Twitter. I don’t have an account and won’t make one to see a video clip.
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petesoper
3 hours ago
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A new high water mark for R T F A.
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jxf
2 hours ago
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Can't use the Twitter links if you don't have a Twitter account. Also, why make the user click away when they're trying to understand if your product does something interesting, and why do they need an account on an unrelated service when an image/gif embed would get the message across in 5 seconds?
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anigbrowl
1 hour ago
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There are many workarounds like xcancel and nitter.net and xcancel.com that have been operating for a couple of years now. This is Hacker News, not Consumer Reports.
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chongli
56 minutes ago
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By that point I've lost interest in the project. Not a very good elevator pitch if you're losing people before they even see what it looks like.
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saghm
3 hours ago
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Is Baby Gronk the new Drip King or was he just getting rizzed up by Livvy?
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kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
1 hour ago
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That is the weirdest thing I've ever read
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saghm
9 minutes ago
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I reacted similarly when first hearing it
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Dibes
3 hours ago
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dvngnt_
3 hours ago
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After clicking play, there's a prompt to log in. I had to use a video downloader service to watch it
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chickensong
3 hours ago
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You can just replace x.com with nitter.net, though their bandwidth sucks for media playback.
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rerdavies
2 hours ago
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Harry Potter would have posted the original video to YouTube instead. It seems like a tragic irony, and perhaps a sign of danger, that OP posted the demo video to the website of He Who Should Not Be Named. Why? Why?!
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sillysaurusx
1 hour ago
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Because Twitter posts consisting of YouTube links die quickly. It’s very obvious once you have a few thousand followers.

Your option is basically either upload to twitter, or put the YouTube link at the end just before a screenshot. Or both a video and a YouTube link, I suppose.

If you trigger their YouTube embed, it seems like it gets penalized quite harshly. I’ve seen other people agree with the sentiment.

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teaearlgraycold
1 hour ago
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Just don't use a Twitter post as your demo video in the GitHub readme. I don't care what someone does on Twitter - I never go there. But you can just embed a .gif or .webm in your readme or link to YouTube there.
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derbOac
2 hours ago
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The poster to x apparently has a bsky account also — I wish they would cross post.
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emmelaich
2 hours ago
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or xcancel.com
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dvngnt_
1 hour ago
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that was my first move, but i got an infinite redirect
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stronglikedan
1 hour ago
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could be regional cuz that don't happen in the US. they play right away regardless of log in status
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usea
1 hour ago
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That's simply not true.
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georgemcbay
1 hour ago
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I'm in the US and twitter videos don't play for me. I see what looks like a video control when I view the post, when I click it, it throws up a modal log in/sign in dialog. No way to view the video while logged out.
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kQq9oHeAz6wLLS
1 hour ago
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They used to. Not anymore.
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xdennis
2 hours ago
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> Otherwise, the title reads like a "Curtains for Zoosha?" meme.

This is also why capitalization is important. In the title, "remarkable" refers to "Remarkable Paper Pro", a tablet. Not knowing that "Fable turned remarkable into Tom Riddle's diary" is very hard to parse.

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themadturk
2 hours ago
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A Remarkable tablet was the first thing I thought of, but it was still so unclear I had to click through to actually understand (more or less) what was going on.
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rhoen
27 minutes ago
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What a fun project! I don’t think I’ll ever actually get a paper pro and run this application, but I’m happy that it exists and that folks are enjoying using it.
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josh2600
3 hours ago
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This is sick, in the 90's Tony Hawk sense of the word.

I love that people can just bang stuff into existence now.

There were times in my life where I would wait for an engineering team to change the color of a button for a day to a week.

We are not in the slow times anymore.

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nonethewiser
1 hour ago
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The funny thing is, making the input/output mechanism is way less impressive and especially way less useful than the underlying LLM tech that hackernews loves to deride.
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tffrr
3 hours ago
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There were times in my life where I would wait for an engineering team to change the color of a button for a day to a week.

lolwat

sarcasm surely

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glerk
2 hours ago
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> stylelint beeps you can't just pass hex colors directly, that color is not in our design system, you need to write a design doc for custom color tokens and get approval from the frontend platform team, open a PR in their repo, make sure you have storybook tests covering all the color <cross product> button variants, ask in their slack channel for approve, ask their manager, wait. someone from their team leaves a comment: "we should make this an approved custom colors enum not a string, so if you want to add custom colors you also have to update this enum", fix the PR, staff engineer from sister team drive by request for changes: "we are currently implementing custom themes and changing colors will be done through the ColorSwatch service", ask for timelines, "maybe next week behind a feature flag", give up, close the PR, open a new PR with "stylelint-disable", force-merge it.
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MarkusQ
3 hours ago
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I remember it taking long enough (they had to wait for another project to need a lot of that color) that we wound up using dope to mock it up. (Regular paint didn't hold and just chipped off.)
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dylan604
1 hour ago
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gotta catch 'em at the right time of a sprint cycle
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delichon
3 hours ago
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If Fable can now create horcruxes, the Commerce Department should seriously consider another time out.
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bel8
1 hour ago
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yeah, and might as well ban Chinese models too for safety since they can do the same.
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cml123
1 hour ago
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Amusingly, I made the same thing late last year, though just on an ordinary computer, allowing you to draw in the browser. I used pageflip [0] with styling akin to Riddle's actual diary and a tiny local model crafted for roleplay via ollama. I remember writing "my name is Harry Potter, what is yours?" and getting back Snape, Malfoy, and even Harry Potter back across a number of iterations. After completing my experiment I learned I wasn't the first to think of this idea and found a few other similar AI Riddle diaries out there.

Incidentally, I have a Remarkable 2 and as of this weekend an m4 iPad air. Maybe I'll test this one out and see what the landscape for running models on iOS looks like.

0) https://nodlik.github.io/react-pageflip/

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munificent
2 hours ago
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> No screen glow, no keyboard, no chat UI.

Is this not just... a chat UI?

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russdill
14 minutes ago
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The no x no y no z is absolutely necessary to include.
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msftgreed
5 minutes ago
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This is absolutely a chat UI.
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asp_hornet
2 hours ago
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Yes, arguably a worse one because you can’t stop to think.

Doesn’t stop it from being really cool though.

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derektank
2 hours ago
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Incidentally, have any of the major AI provider's solved this problem for voice chats yet? It feels like even something like a simple keyword like “stop” would make having a conversation with an LLM a much better experience than a chat interface on a phone.
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newspaper1
2 hours ago
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I would argue that it does stop it from being really cool, but I'm not a millennial and thus despise Harry Potter.
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nonethewiser
1 hour ago
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People are impressed with this and will call LLMs a junk.
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minraws
36 minutes ago
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I have questions how is this something I couldn't do manually over a weekend or with my dozens of other models.

What's the point that Fable is making here?

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kevmo314
14 minutes ago
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Riding the marketing hype train, of course.
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binarymax
2 hours ago
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This is really cool, but the best part is the response in the twitter post demo had an em-dash.
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adyavanapalli
2 hours ago
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This is soooo incredibly cool. Beyond the Tom Riddle diary aspect, I love the idea of this as a new medium for interacting with an LLM. You could gift it to someone and they could just write naturally, their thoughts, questions, notes, and get responses back without typing or speaking. It feels less like a chatbot and more like a journal you can communicate through. You could give it a personality and all.
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IAmGraydon
2 hours ago
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I mean no offense, but it's kind of crazy that people think that linking handwriting recognition, a technology that was first rolled out 24 years ago in Windows XP, with an LLM is "soooo incredibly cool". I don't get it.
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SoMomentary
1 hour ago
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What really irks me about it is that the palm pilot I had 20+ years ago actually had BETTER hand writing recognition than the software on my devices today!
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nonethewiser
1 hour ago
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It's cool but it has nothing to do with the tom riddle application.

It's cool because LLMs are actually fucking amazing technology and people are already numb to it.

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heyitsguay
1 hour ago
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Products are something other than the sum of their technical parts.
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msftgreed
9 minutes ago
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Holy shit this looks tacky. Response speed is WAY too fast for the effect of feeling like something is writing on the other side. Text is very much written in the style of an LLM.

> an answer writes itself back in a flowing hand, stroke by stroke, then fades away.

Characters aren't "flowing" at all, it's very much just printing text. Like, I could change my terminal font to a fancy font and get very much the same visual experience.

Also, how are we not over Harry Potter yet? There's a MILLION examples of this phenomena in fiction. Heck, even the Bible has an example of text mysteriously appearing (it's where we get the idiom "The Writing's on the Wall".)

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taosu_la
40 minutes ago
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Ok I'll admit it. At this point, Fable is good enough that I question what the point of me being a software engineer is other than "You're cheaper than Fable... for now.
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cheema33
2 hours ago
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Very cool. I don't have a remarkable, but have the Amazon Kindle Scribe. Same idea. Would any of you be so kind to waste your precious Fable tokens on getting something like this working there? I have other plans for my remaining Fable tokens.

:0

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isatty
40 minutes ago
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Lame.
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Cshaya
1 hour ago
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One day we are going to have flying broomsticks and I cannot wait. Hopefully I wont be 90 years old though
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someguyiguess
1 hour ago
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Haven’t you heard? 90 is the new 75!
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fragmede
1 hour ago
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Vonaut makes speeder bikes, and there's a YouTuber that's made a lightsaber. Gonna cost you a lot of money though.

https://volonaut.com/

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Footprint0521
1 hour ago
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What in the click bait? DeepSeek V4 Pro could one shot a three js project better than this
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derektank
2 hours ago
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This is strong “criticism of the man in the arena” energy on my part, but I’m kind of disappointed the text just wipes across, rather than the ink sort of “emerging” from the page like in the movie, with the heavier parts of the font appearing first and the thinner lines appearing last.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9GgYbFVYkow&t=2m40s

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marcus_holmes
1 hour ago
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Source code is right there, no need to be disappointed!
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recursive
2 hours ago
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I've heard of Harry Potter.
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newspaper1
2 hours ago
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For those of us that hate Harry Potter, this apparently takes your written prompt and responds on the Remarkable. I think you'd have to be a fan of the series to care as otherwise this is just a really slow chat interface.
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stronglikedan
1 hour ago
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well, yeah, of course
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maxlin
1 hour ago
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Criminal lack of a demo video in the github
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ButlerianJihad
3 hours ago
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Ginevra was my favourite and the most beautiful character in the HP films. Poor Ginny. Relieved that she survived all that. One tough cookie.
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wpm
3 hours ago
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> No screen glow, no keyboard, no chat UI. Just ink appearing on paper.

No soul. No care. No consideration. Just slop appearing as text. Shut the *fuck* up BOT. How in the hell is this not the most appalling, offensive smell by now? All this says to me is someone proompted some garbage into barely working, didn't even bother to look at what the stupid token machine generated for a readme. How unfathomably embarassing.

I cannot take any project seriously no matter how silly it presents itself as if this sort of obvious slop CRAP makes it into what is presented. Good fucking god give the slightest hint of a fuck if you want me to care at all about what you're throwing into the aether. Rub a few brain cells together, please.

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arachnids
2 hours ago
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This is an unhealthy amount of rage to feel about a random person doing something random on the internet
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anigbrowl
1 hour ago
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It's not a random person doing something random though. It's bait leveraging two very hot brands (Fable! Harry Potter!) and gluing them together with the the most clichéed, of-the-moment ad copy prose style. I don't hate the project or the brands particularly, but you have to be living under a rock not to be aware that social media is absolutely awash in this sort of content.

You've always wondered what would happen if Thing You Like had existed alongside Other Thing You Like. They called you crazy. They told you it could never happen.

They were wrong.

For the first time, Thing and Other Thing together - just like you imagined. It's not fiction. It's not a dream. It's real, and you can have it now - today. Thing Other Thing. Experience the magic with 40% off your first month's subscription if you sign up in the next 20 minutes.

I don't feel as activated about it as OP, but only because I've already opted myself out of this media landscape as much as possible. I think it's perfectly natural to be hostile towards such overt hijacking of one's limbic system. Modern marketing is incredibly toxic.

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al_borland
2 hours ago
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I don’t think it’s about this single random person, but the larger trend it represents. It’s everywhere now, and it shows a general lack of care and craft.
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someguyiguess
1 hour ago
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It’s certainly not new. These sorts of “look at me” slop projects existed long before modern LLMs
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bschwindHN
41 minutes ago
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I enjoyed the unfiltered rage, it probably felt good to type.
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Retr0id
2 hours ago
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It might not be a productive emotion, but I think it's completely normal to be experiencing it.
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Exoristos
3 hours ago
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Those who did not lose their minds because they were talked into by AI lost their minds because AI was so grating and ubiquitous.
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wrs
2 hours ago
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I really don't think this project was meant to be taken seriously.
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r3trohack3r
2 hours ago
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You doing okay man?
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nearlyepic
1 hour ago
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Facts, but also are we at all surprised that a harry potter fan is Like This? I knew just from the title that this would be vibe-coded dogshit.
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esikich
3 hours ago
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Take a walk outside bro.
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BoorishBears
2 hours ago
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Both of you are right of course
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