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lewisjoe

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Antirez is working on a Hacker News alternative

twitter.com
3 points·by lewisjoe·3 months ago·8 comments

Google Workspace no longer supports MCP

github.com
2 points·by lewisjoe·3 months ago·0 comments

Pretext: browser independent text layouting engine for the web

twitter.com
3 points·by lewisjoe·4 months ago·0 comments

Ask HN: What is your AI assisted dev workflow

2 points·by lewisjoe·5 months ago·0 comments

Agent Mode for Microsoft Office Suite

microsoft.com
1 points·by lewisjoe·10 months ago·0 comments

Notion Agents

twitter.com
3 points·by lewisjoe·10 months ago·2 comments

comments

lewisjoe
·9 days ago·discuss
I'm part of the Zoho Writer team (Google docs alternative). And the new architecture is very similar to Zoho Writer i.e edits represented as a sequence of retains/keeps followed by action.

Also the decision to forego browser's selection and draw a custom layer.

All this makes reasoning about changes a lot more saner and intuitive. I've always wondered why prosemirror's transactions & steps couldn't be simplified further so I'm one vote up for the new design direction!
lewisjoe
·9 days ago·discuss
The person who got inspired by prosemirror and built lexical is no more at meta. Go to the repository and you'll find it's already in maintenance mode. Its promise of cross platform extensible editor is unrealised yet.

I'd pick prosemirror any day over Lexical.
lewisjoe
·9 days ago·discuss
This is amusing as well as slightly scary. Prosemirror over the years has become the backbone of editors on the web. ChatGPT uses it. Gemini uses it. Linked chat and feed composers are Prosemirror powered. Literally every serious product uses Prosemirror for composing text on the web.

There is an entire YC company built on top of Prosemirror (Tiptap).

The thought that Prosemirror is no more in active development is scary.
lewisjoe
·27 days ago·discuss
Takes me back to the time where I would pickup any books that taught anything about computers/programming. I was too young to understand any of it, but the fact that there's this knowledge to be unlocked, that would then let me do new things with this white boxy device on my table top - was truly addictive.

I can't say the feeling remains because most new stuff that I learn now is not runnable on my machine now. Tech has gone back to the days when owning hardware that's capable of running the latest has become a costly affair.
lewisjoe
·2 months ago·discuss
Just checked out VMPrint and it's crazy! Keep up the efforts. If you/someone could get a HTML/CSS input layer in front of VMPrint that would be a killer feature? Or is it possible already?
lewisjoe
·2 months ago·discuss
If you squint enough, you'll see the official Google doc app for Android/iOS is a webview (i.e the editor part)

Fancy text rendering/editing is hard to implement when you leave the luxury of webviews.
lewisjoe
·2 months ago·discuss
Got it. Thanks!
lewisjoe
·2 months ago·discuss
Congrats on the journey. How did you implement the layouting engine? And how much of an effort did it take?
lewisjoe
·2 months ago·discuss
Honest question: How can an entire html/CSS layout engine fit in a single layout.c that I can read over an afternoon? This looks too simple to be usable for serious work.
lewisjoe
·2 months ago·discuss
Jetbrains maintain a kotlin based ADK - https://github.com/JetBrains/koog

Since it's written using kotlin multiplatform it's compilable to js/wasm/ios/android or any platform of choice.

Worth checking out.
lewisjoe
·3 months ago·discuss
What's more fun is: LLMs too are really good at CSS selectors. I've been building a document editing agent and I used this fact to present the document as HTML to LLM and make it query and pull pieces of documents into context by just specifying CSS selectors.

Works like magic!
lewisjoe
·3 months ago·discuss


    > ChatGPT can’t run CLIs. Neither can Perplexity or the standard web version of Claude. Unless you are using a full-blown compute environment (like Perplexity Computer, Claude Cowork, Claude Code, or Codex), any skill that relies on a CLI is dead on arrival.
Incorrect observation. Claude web does support skills upload. I guess claude runs code_interpreter tool and filesystem in the background to run user uploaded skills. ChatGPT business plans too allow uploading custom skills in web.

I can see Skills becoming a standard soon. But the concern still holds. When you publish a MCP you liberate the user out of installing anything. But with skills what happens if the skill running environment don't have access to the cli binary or if it isn't in PATH?
lewisjoe
·3 months ago·discuss
1. Reviving an old project that lets users sync their google docs as blog posts.

2. Writing a rich text editor library powered by pretext for cheap pagination

3. A layout engine that understands html/CSS subset for lightning fast pdf generation

Although AI is the main reason why I'm able to work on all these projects concurrently.
lewisjoe
·3 months ago·discuss
Tempted to write a grammarly-like underline engine that flags writing mistakes across all apps and browser. Fully private grammarly alternative without even bundling an LLM!
lewisjoe
·3 months ago·discuss
Got it! :)
lewisjoe
·3 months ago·discuss
This is not an accurate take. Especially the SSR one. Pretext doesn't liberate text layout from the browser entirely (at least not yet). It still uses canvas.measureText that does critical heavy lifting like font fallbacks, default styles, etc.

Once you take pretext out of browser environment, you'll have to worry about lot more things around fonts.
lewisjoe
·4 months ago·discuss
If the author is right, this is going to be huge for GUI web frameworks and for future rich text editors.
lewisjoe
·4 months ago·discuss
Quick overview of pretext: if you want to layout text on the web, you have to use canvas.measureText API and implement line-breaking / segmentation / RTL yourself.

Pretext makes this easier. Just pass the text and text properties (font, color, size, etc) into a pure JS API and it layouts the content into given viewport dimension.

Earlier you'll have to either use measureText or ship harbuzz to browser somehow. I guess pretext is not a technical breakthrough, just the right things assembled to make layouting as a pure JS API.

I have one question though: how is this different from Skia-wasm / Canvaskit? Skia already has sophisticated API to layout multiline text and it also is a pure algorithmic API.
lewisjoe
·4 months ago·discuss
This is great work. I'm curious how did you get the agentic behavior integrated into your datamodel?

1. How does the AI read your document? have you exposed a JSON/XML?

2. How is AI generating edits over the document?

3. How are big documents presented to AI? Was minimizing token consumption a goal?

Fantastic work, btw!
lewisjoe
·4 months ago·discuss
Can you elaborate more?