What's interesting (and kind of sad) here is that while AI drastically increased product count, more than 50% are now composed of dev tools and AI
Some kind of golden shovels situation. I wish there were more games, personal apps, and open hardware – more fun stuff that became affordable due to AI
But there ARE more games, personal apps and open hardware! Games went from 38 in 2023 to 609 so far this year. A golden age for taking whatever sounds fun and making it happen. Yes, 50% of HNers appear to think AI metaprogramming is fun/important, but I'm excited that I can faff about with making little games and music apps and whatever else I can dream.
If you think about and use AI all the time, you’ll inevitably think of AI projects. Like that website indiehackers is mostly filled with ideas that market to other indiehackers
My quirky wishlist app https://thingstohave.app is finally done and heading to public launch this or next week.
I already partially covered the last few months of app development in this topic. But actually, its development took way longer, as only this iteration started in 2024. So it is the end of a long milestone— this launch date initially was to be a year ago, but I procrastinated and missed important for such apps holiday season
This year I was able to go way beyond last year’s backlog, and now I’m releasing a fully finished app instead of early access.
I’m proud of the result — a lot of overengineered stuff that is not viable in any commercial product, especially in what appears to be a simple CRUD app. For example: image loading from blur, unadvertised but very advanced DnD everywhere, natural language currency inputs with sorting, platform-agnostic quick add, and many more.
Its stack is also very fun: it has been running on the Cloudflare Workers ecosystem since 2023, and is powered by a custom Inertia.js adapter for Hono (that predates the official adapter by one month, lol), with Vue SSR. That all enables me to write old-school MVC with Vue as a template engine for views. It also proved to be very easy to work with and cheap to run.
With a tsunami of vibcoded beige wishlists, my weird app stands apart, for sure, but I’m unsure about its appeal to the average customer.
Yeah, I have one of their keyboards. The keyboard is advertised as a QMK based device but it doesn't work with QMK software. At minimum using their website means they get a ping whenever I'm configuring my keyboard. At worst they could be asking for all sorts of tracking information, usage details, etc. Heck, since their website can configure the keyboard's firmware they could add keystroke recording the next time and I'd never know. Now, I'm not accusing them of that or saying they would do that, but it's possible. When the site goes down one day what do I do then?
Local software will always live longer and have more respect for my privacy than web based software.
I'm thinking about throwing AI at the problem and either working to make their site work offline, making standard QMK software work with my keyboard, or replacing the firmware with more standard QMK.
I'm not a big keyboard nerd, but I had three of their keyboards, two of which were declared QMK.
As far as I remember, QMK software was extremely annoying from my own perspective, and the Keychron team was also dissatisfied with them (there was something about them being slow to add their keyboards to the app). I can say that I was able to customize my keyboards only after they released their own app.
So huge chance that your problem is caused by QMK, not Keychron.
Regarding app, i'm sure it can be made portable, maybe even via turning it into single file html.
WebUSB is indeed great, but this particular tool would not work in it, as it does something different (HID input remapping as opposed to, or maybe in addition to, reprogramming a HID device to behave differently via vendor-specific commands).
Some things could probably be pushed to the HID layer, but that would require a at least firmware redesign of the mouse, and some kinds of complex shortcuts are probably better done on the computer OS than that of the HID device, which is inevitably working with much less context.
No. You can emulate the network matters in software.
For more details, go look up the Linux USB Gadget framework.
You can even play around with some of it yourself using a Pi Zero 2 W (I did, making it appear to be a USB webcam - I saw guides on how to make it be a serial port and even an ethernet adapter too)
How does that work with Firefox and Chrome's local network access (LNA) restrictions? Should a remote site be able to reconfigure your hardware? Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
I don't know much about LNA, but recently configured my new Ducky keyboard via duckyhub.io. I had to configure some udev rules[1], and use Chromium instead of Firefox, but it worked in the end.
It's all client side -- someone (maybe me!) would spin up openkeychron from an old saved copy of the webpage and we'd be back in business in a day. Right now the keychron-hosted solution is fine -- no accounts or anything crazy -- so there's no impetus.
EDIT: turns out that my keychron, at least, is compatible with QMK/VIA and there are already open source alternatives [1] that do the job.
Web-based software is easy to extract (singlefile), preserve (webarchive), or even rebuild during its lifespan.
Desktop software is way less reliable than you think – I have a few Akai keyboards I can't configure because they don't work on my Mac already, not to mention how hard it was at least finding this executable for more than decade old keyboard.
WebUSB is deliberately unsupported on Firefox due to potential for abuse, which seems reasonable to me. Therefore, delivering updates to USB devices likes that is, in my opinion, suboptimal because it requires a specific browser feature which not everyone is willing to use.
It is also less transparent and more difficult to review than, e.g., a Python script. Which would do just the same job. While being even more portable.
I'm at least 10 times more willing to run a shady website in Chrome's sandbox and grant it USB permissions to a specific device for limited time than I am to install some random script or software running with full user privileges.
> It is also less transparent and more difficult to review than, e.g., a Python script. Which would do just the same job. While being even more portable.
Are you absolutely sure you would catch any malicious payload in some obscure single-purpose Python script?
Open source is great, but it's not a complete replacement for a narrow permission model.
> Are you absolutely sure you would catch any malicious payload in some obscure single-purpose Python script?
Of course not. But I can at least fairly easily review it. And that is the point.
A review cannot be done as easily with a minified JavaScript webpage or a WebAssembly binary that the WebUSB loader tool would use.
Also, with regards to binary Windows blobs that would require installing Windows drivers - yes, I agree that it is considerably worse than WebUSB. But we can always find something worse..
The point I am trying to make is that WebUSB, although being better than Windows binary blobs, is still less transparent, in my opinion, than e.g. a simple Python script.
Edit: To clarify: Whether the user will actually be able to find potential issues during the said review is a separate topic. But I think that the goal should be to enable users to do so. And make it as simple as possible and user-friendly as possible.
Firefox now supports WebSerial though. An alternative to Via/Vial could perhaps use that, with the USB device exposing a virtual serial port.
Kinesis' keyboards with their "Clique" keyboard has a web-based configuration tool that does that. Their older "SmartSet" firmware instead exposed a virtual USB drive, with the configuration as a text file, and a firmware update could be done by dropping a new blob in there.
API is highly overpriced and keeps Anthropic profitable or at least close to break even, as was reported recently. Why would you think they will be interested in advising enterprises in cutting their bills pre-IPO?
Some kind of golden shovels situation. I wish there were more games, personal apps, and open hardware – more fun stuff that became affordable due to AI
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