You linked to the Android app there, not the experimental webapp linked above – I'm wondering what gave you that idea though?
Those commit messages look pretty human to me, don't think an LLM would ever just commit 'WIP' or 'code cleanup', it's also 4 years old, before the height of vibe coding.
I can imagine the author may have used an LLM for this webapp version of it though
Thanks for sharing this!
I'm also looking for an alternative to the official app, since having to log in with an account and accepting a privacy policy every time I want to change the time on my watch is pretty ridiculous – unfortunately I think this doesn't quite fit my use case as usually I'll want to sync the time when I go to a different country, and I'll normally only have my iPhone with me, which won't support WebBluetooth.
But this tool might be a starting point to fork and build a capacitor app with that can run on the phone I suppose.
Wondering why you're considering this move, I also use Bunny for some embedded videos and am considering fully moving my websites away from Cloudflare's CDN to Bunny
Not at all, it was a regular maintainer account that was hijacked (probably through phishing) and used to push a malicious payload, not a threat actor posing as a contributor and adding a backdoor like in the Jia Tan case.
I'd argue this has not much in common with Jia Tan apart from both being supply chain attacks, there is no malicious maintainer here, a trusted maintainer had their account taken over.
I guess the end result is the same, a malicious package pushed by an account that was thought to be trusted, but I think the Jia Tan case is worth being looked at differently than just simple account takeover.
It's just a longer backstory. All the same in the end. Hackers targeted a popular package. The lead maintainer was compromised. The pattern fits. There will be more of these.
I wonder what engine they are using with ReactNative on Windows. Is it Hermes like with regular RN projects targeting iOS/Android? Or do they run on some system installation of a more traditional engine like V8/JavaScriptCore?
It looks like they were originally on Chakra (the JS engine used by IE9+ and pre-Chromium Edge) but added support for Hermes in 2021 or so and removed support for Chakra last year, so Hermes is now the only option. Edge moved to Chromium in 2019, so this means they actually kept Chakra around for a few years just? for React Native on Windows.
Neat project! I'd be interested in how the power supply is done. I've wanted to do things with LEDs like this, but not knowing much about electronics this always seems the most complicated part to me, specifically powering both the micro-controller and the LEDs with a single wall plug in a safe and reliable way.
It's not really hard at all, calculate the max power the leds will draw and get a psu that'll never exceed 90% of that. Your average usage will be waaay lower anyways since you don't usually show all white.
5v power supplies are easily available, Meanwell is a popular & reputable brand. The same psu can run your lights and microcontroller.
Newer said it was a hard problem in general, it's hard for me with my limited familiarity with electronics, that's why I was curious how it was done here.
I recall the last time I wanted to do this, my problem with it was that my microcontroller had a different voltage requirement than the LEDs and I tried to put together a little circuit that delivered the right voltage to the microcontroller and LED matrix from a single 5V power supply. I think it worked kind of ok and then not anymore and I had trouble figuring out where I went wrong, most likely did some bad soldering somewhere.
Fully lit, these would be blindingly bright, and would need tens of amps of power supply (source: I have a strip of 100 WS2813s (I think, anyway the 12V ones) and the 3A supply I have would be fully loaded if they were all on full bright white. These suckers are bright).
However, you can always just limit it in software. Total "brightness budget" for the display, scale everything to dimmer if exceeded.
Rive has an open SDK and my understanding is that you could build an entire app without ever opening theirs. But then there goes the “flash” vibe, unfortunately. Their primitives are also a little obscure without their IDE.
Would be great to be able to seamlessly bundle a Gleam app for the Erlang target alongside the BEAM in a single binary, like Burrito but without the extra Elixir code. The BEAM is smaller than most JS engines, you could get a binary of 30-40 MB I believe -- still a fair amount, but much smaller than bun/deno compile.
Imagine you go into a shop to buy a newspaper every day. And every day, the shop owner explains to you what a newspaper is, what it usually contains, how much it costs, and how to read it
Is that excellent interaction design and good customer service? (edit: not a rhetorical question fwiw)
Government services need to be as easily accessible and clear to understand as possible, they may be used by the elderly, people with learning disabilities or people who don’t speak the language of the country that well (like those who would want to enter it for tourism as in TFA) - designing them with the assumption that the user is a 5 year old who needs everything explained to them in simple terms is a good approach.
The fact that it’s slightly more tiring for users like you who already know all the details and just want to get to the point is at most a minor drawback that’s easily justifiable by the accessibility gains.
To answer your question specifically: No, for a newspaper vendor that’s not great interaction design, but if you replace newspaper with any government service and shop owner with the government, it sounds perfect to me. I also struggle to imagine a scenario in which you’d need to access those services every single day, but I may be missing something there.
Do you not get how awful of an analogy that is? You're implying you cant move forward until that explanation process is done. Last I checked you've got a finger and scroll wheel at your disposal.
Analogies aren't perfect by definition (it doesn't imply that, btw, you're reaching). Anyway, it's a weak reply to attack the analogy rather than the thought behind it.
I notice you're not the person I asked btw. No need to start a vendetta just because I have a different opinion about one aspect of gov.uk. That's a bad look, for you.
I can imagine the author may have used an LLM for this webapp version of it though
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