Totally fair question. Substack is great for what it is, but it's a newsletter. Your posts show up in reverse chronological order and a new subscriber sees whatever you published most recently, not the thing they should start with.
Lesso is for when you want someone to start at lesson 1, work through to lesson 6, and learn something in a specific order. A Substack archive and a structured course are pretty different experiences for the reader, even if the writing is the same.
They're not really competing. The use case I'm thinking of is writers who keep their Substack for audience building and use Lesso to package their best stuff into something they can charge for separately. There's a Substack import that pulls your posts in so you're not rewriting anything if you want to just repackage what you have in Substack onto Lesso.
Cool. I work in edtech, happy to walkthrough it and give my thoughts. My first instinct was that you could offer something interactive even if its mostly text based, like flash cards, quizzes, etc. happy to take a closer look
I started working on something that brings to Node.js what JVisualVM provides to the JRE. I've been struggling with memory leaks in a project I've been working on recently and while attempting to debug those found that there's a woeful lack of tools for memory profiling and heap visualization.
This fixes that. There's a lot more to be done here but this is an initial proof of concept I threw together in a couple of hours.
I just launched RecipeGPT, a small project I built this weekend. Enter your ingredients, calorie and macro requirements and time constraints to get 5 quick recipe ideas suggested with concise instructions.
Ah, I see, so it's just a matter of reading something, not understanding it, figuring out what it means and learning from that rather than there being a place where I can specifically read up on it.
> ... so it's just a matter of reading something, not understanding it, figuring out what it means and learning from that rather than there being a place where I can specifically read up on it.
Not entirely ... but partially. That's one way you can start to learn. Usually formulas are presented with a broad gloss in English (or other) to let you know roughly what it is saying, with the formula just being a precise way of saying it that can subsequently be used in algebraic manipulations.
Example:
The force due to the Earth's gravity is represented by g at the surface, and falls off as an inverse square. Thus:
I've actually been thinking about this problem a lot recently.
I think it'd definitely mean a dramatic shift in workflow which would have to be learned, although I spent years learning how to work on a computer, why not spend some more time learning to do so on a mobile device? I think that in general, developers would resist the idea but for those that were open to it, there may be hope.
I think the first thing that'd need addressing is the ability to type. An on-screen keyboard just won't cut it, we're working with limited screen real-estate here so we need some other way.
I came up with an idea for how to replace an on-screen keyboard, without reverting back to the old-school blackberry keyboards or the number pad we all used on those old nokia 3310s.
What I propose is a reduced size keyboard affixed to the back of the device somehow.
Eight of these keys would be your 'home' keys, where you rest your fingers. Other keys would behave as function keys. You'd need some level of visual feedback on the screen so you can see where you are on the keyboard. Maybe some extra keys could be thrown in there for very commonly used keys, brackets, return, tab, space, backspace, etc.
Ultimately, you'd end up with more keystrokes than normal, simply due to the fact that you're having to shift around the keyboard using other keys, but I'd imagine with enough time, people would be able to adapt and become proficient at typing quickly with these devices.
I haven't thought too much into screen real estate, but I think a huge benefit could be the ability to switch between applications/panels quickly (using the physical keyboard mentioned above).
Tooling would be super important, having tools that allowed you to mimic your desktop workflow would be super important. I think this would probably even need to be done at the OS level. I think you'd need some way to install a mobile, stripped down distribution of linux with a desktop environment specifically built for the mobile environment.
Further thoughts:
To increase adoption rates - you could make it possible to dock the mobile at a workstation and use it as you would a regular computer.
I definitely think it's possible, I'm just not sure anyone's that interested in making it happen. Personally, I think it'd be awesome to see this kind of thing come to life and I would definitely invest the time in learning to use it given how much time I spend on trains/travelling. I don't always have a laptop with me to get work done so having this all in my pocket would be very convenient.
You could build a slide out keyboard for yourself and attach it via the usb port on your phone or via bluetooth. I've seen a wireless keyboard attachment for iPhones already. Maybe to get a larger keyboard you could have a well designed fold up or rollout keyboard that is compact?
You might also be able to use your phone as a thin client if you can put up with the limited screen space. There are some good systems like Apache Guacamole. It's too hard for me to use but maybe it's possible with a phablet or diy smart glasses and a bunch of determination. :)
People use the word "graphics" and "sound" often, but that's not all that makes a game. So many indie "ugly" games work out just fine. It's all about the gameplay. You can make the graphics and the sound be a core part of that, but you can also focus on other places.
Factorio and Dwarf Fortress are two examples of those. Can someone say their graphics are amazing? Probably not. Yet they focused on their differentials: the unique gameplay.
I have to agree with the GP. They're always unique in one form or another.
People however overuse the marketing card IMO, saying that you need a lot of marketing. Good games do stand out for being good games. Word of mouth only works if your game is good. Nobody will urge their friends to play a bad game and for indie games, word of mouth is king. You can't "force" word of mouth marketing, so it's not really a marketing effort. It comes naturally with good games.
They're not really competing. The use case I'm thinking of is writers who keep their Substack for audience building and use Lesso to package their best stuff into something they can charge for separately. There's a Substack import that pulls your posts in so you're not rewriting anything if you want to just repackage what you have in Substack onto Lesso.