I have a Clicks Keyboard and love it. As far as I can tell the team behind the Clicks are pretty intertwined with https://www.fxtec.com/ - in that FX Tech staff seem to be involved in Clicks support, etc.
The Clicks Keyboard for iPhone (14) was a great concept, and pretty well executed for a V1 - I haven’t tried their follow-up devices.
But assuming it’s the same team, there’s a history of shipping devices behind them.
(That isn’t to encourage you to pre-order! Just to perhaps contribute some more optimism to your hope that they succeed)
I have the clicks keyboard for the iPhone 16. I haven't used the older one, but I can say its a very solid product as well.
The only annoyance is rememberimg to hold the magic key combo before plugging it in for car play. Regardless, this is a real company that delivers real products of solid quality.
I can confirm, this is sensible advice. I backed the FxTec Pro 1x during a depressive period in depths of COVID. It took ~years of hamstringing for them to deliver, but they did eventually deliver the phone. Even aged as the phone is, it's really well designed, and I occasionally use it with Claude from my couch in the evenings.
Being LineageOS capable is a strong selling point (for the Pro 1x), so if that's on the table with this new phone then I would consider reserving one. But I wouldn't hold my breath that it will ship in 2026.
The Micro:bit Educational Foundation also make a web-based Python Editor at https://python.microbit.org which is designed to be a supportive introduction to text-based coding and physical computing with no installation, friendly error messages and device simulation
Did you look at Mattercraft? https://zap.works/mattercraft/ - the team that are building it have been delivering mixed reality experiences across platforms in Zappar for a long time and it's very complete.
Yes we did! That team is doing some super cool stuff! Early on we laser focused on the more traditional UX / Interaction Design workflow by helping with state management and opening up more complex interactions. So it is not just about the content, but how the user experience flows across many different moments in a product.
We've also focused on a no code solution, to give designers the tools to prototype AR without having the overhead of learning programming.
While this looks super cool and impressive but if I were to choose a tool for my next serious project, Mattercraft still gets my vote without hesitation
Yeah, to be fair to Boris ordinary.space looks like a much more appropriate tool for interaction design than Mattercraft, which looks much more like a drag-and-drop tool for building relatively static, single user 3D scenes. Mattercraft also looks to be pretty bloated with random content features (3D Text?) in comparison.
While Mattercraft has some drag and drop elements, it's predominantly a development environment for content, featuring TypeScript and NPM support. So it's a bit like a 'Unity for the web'. Many of the features (e.g. physics, particles) are provided as optional additional NPM modules. The 3D text support is included in the base 3D module because it only adds a few kb and Mattercraft's built-in bundler doesn't bundle it if your project doesn't use it. (My team and I run Mattercraft )
Thanks for the extra context. I haven't actually looked at what you at Zappar are doing for a while. Would you care to comment on what the key differences are between Zapworks Studio [1], Zapworks Designer [2] and Mattercraft [3]? Their elevator pitches on those pages feel like they have pretty complete overlap with each other tbh.
Zapworks Designer - it's our no-code tool focussing on AR+VR. It's targeted at folks without scripting experience and is very much 'drag and drop'. Our customers typically use this for bringing simpler interactive content to, e.g. menus, posters and also for Learning & Development.
Mattercraft - this is our complete 3D development environment for the web. We took everything we'd learned from Studio and built MC from the ground up embracing the web ecosystem. It has a fully featured animation system, scripting, built-in bundler, live preview, collaborative editing - the works :-) Our customers use this for building high end campaigns and content for consumers.
Zapworks Studio - this is our previous generation of creative tooling. It was originally built to target native platforms but we ported its runtime to the web. Mattercraft is the 'spiritual successor' to this tool.
This is fascinating. A reminder that being (broadly) right in your analysis doesn't necessarily mean you can execute to turn things around.
They note the impact to the high-end, the fact that UI is crucial, they even had a good guess at 2008 sales numbers (estimate 14m, looks like real was 13m).
I was intrigued by this bullet point on how their Maemo platform could help:
* Cellular development of the maemo platform and the politics surrounding it?
Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that? I always felt the N9 was a beautiful piece of design and implementation - just late and under-supported.
N9 was very close to launch when Elop came, so that went ahead, but the rest of the development got cancelled immediately to focus on Windows phone: N9 would've otherwise been the first in a series of devices to slowly take over from Symbian.
Until Elop canceled everything Symbian was still selling - declining sales, but still millions of units. So while the situation was bad slowly phasing out Symbian for taking all the money you could make with that, while hoping N9 software stack sticks sounded like a more sensible approach than "cancel everything, go for Windows". Elop did respond to criticism from Developers (including a mail I've sent him with colleagues), but had made up his mind.
This blog post is a byproduct of that discussion, and was referenced by Felipe in internal mailing lists back then:
I have no idea how successfull it'd have been in the end - the UI was great, parts of the softwarestack were problematic (though we've been doing quite well with parts of that at Jolla later on). The planned hardware for the future models was less than ideal, though.
Elop was the trojan horse that killed Nokia. He worked at MSFT prior to this and single handedly destroyed Nokia. The N9 was revolutionary on its own; GPU accelerated UI, sleek looks, Maemo OS, it is a device people would actually want over the limping Symbian that never fully adapted to touch-only, or the useless Windows Phone 7.
No developer dared to touch Maemo because its future was so uncertain due to the switch to WP. My dad was one of the early Lumia adopters and it was so limiting in what it can do.
Symbian was the core OS, phone manufacturers build the GUI on top of it.
Series 60 was the dominant Nokia UI at the time, but then that received a shake-up with Belle?
Fun fact: Until Nokia bought them, Symbian devs never got actually see any phones that were being built, unless you worked in a specific team that had access restrictions to even enter.
I bought an N9 in 2011 and it was an incredible phone. The design and UI were gorgeous and it was a joy to use. I still miss the swipe-driven UI - it was clever, intuitive and well thought out. The phone itself had Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Spotify clients, and MS Exchange support for calendaring and email (I believe Nokia developed or ported many of these in-house) and was completely usable day-to-day.
Compared to Nokia's symbian phones and earlier Maemo efforts, it felt revolutionary and I'd agree Nokia had a device which could have paved the way for a post-symbian future. It definitely felt like, with continued investment, it would have been a real iPhone competitor, and in just the nick of time.
There was even the Qt strategy for making the transition smoother (and better hedged) by having apps portable across the different OSs. It was of course killed too because it could have challenged Windows Phone.
I worked in Nokia at the time and played with the N9. Meego was actually really good. It could have been competitive with the iPhone and Nokia could have stayed at the top and been where Samsung is now.
> Any folks from Nokia in this time care to shed more light on that?
Cellular connection was not allowed for the Linux devices so they don't compete with the Symbian phones. Nokia had deeply dysfunctional internal politics at that point.
That was a big source of contention, but admittedly there was plenty of skunkworks going around internally to experiment with the officially forbidden material.
I was probably one of the first people to ever possess[ß] a Nokia device running Linux. A research unit in US wrote a library to interface with the baseband modem and provided the whole thing as a single, mostly-statically linked binary that could be used for phonecall functionality. A skunkworks team in Finland wrote a bootloader for N95 to use a Linux kernel. And an ex team member helped put together the initial Debian-based userland.
I wrote the wrapper library that under the hood ran the baseband binary, exposing a sane state machine you could then rely on from "regular" userspace. And I wrote the first, really rough contact book to make/receive calls from the prototype UI. The UI was built with a very early version of libflutter, a GL-based widget library. We built our own layer on top of it.
The prototype became known as the "Flower Phone", thanks to its default background screen. A few months after the device having been showed off our team was provided with about a dozen bright orange[0] N95 devices that ran Linux, booted off of a userspace we had built, and came with our prototype UI. We used them for on-device debugging and developing the UI layer further. Making real calls with them was a core piece of functionality.
From what I understand, the phone functionality in N900 became a reality thanks to that little project.
ß: wasn't mine, it firmly remained property of Nokia. But I used it for experimentation and making real calls.
0: the colour was used to signal the devices were prototypes.
Doing well and being dysfunctional are not mutually exclusive. Google is still a dysfunctional company.
At one point they had five different messaging apps. They bought Motorola and then sold it for pennies, quickly abandoned the Nexus line before then, and the Pixel isn’t taking the world by storm.
Their efforts in the home have been scattershot, they have three separate OS initiatives that are not based on the same platform, and have all but abandoned Flutter.
Also remember that RIMs stock price was at its peak around 2010 - 3 years after the iPhone came out.
A set of individuals being broadly correct in their analysis at an organization doesn't mean that that organization will be able to execute a pivot, even if that organization is pretty competent.
When an entire organization is built around executing on one local maxima hypothesis well, and there's no tangible threat to it that most individuals feel, it is hard for that org to take the temporary hit to change tacks.
Out of curiosity, were you setting out to create something new for stylistic reasons? Or licensing? For the fun of it? From a distance I'm trying to distinguish this from something like remix icons https://remixicon.com
Do you plan to keep adding more icons? How will these relate to the MynaUI Pro plan in the long run?
MakeCode Arcade also has the ability to put your games on physical hardware, which can be a game changer for engagement. A simple game on a 128x256 grid can feel a bit “rubbish” on a laptop screen, but put it on something with a Gameboy form factor and it comes into its own.
Arcade also has amazing editors for sound, sprites, etc.
Looks like it's an "and" in silicon and an "or" at boot time?
>RP2350 includes a pair of open-hardware Hazard3 RISC-V cores which can be substituted at boot time for the Cortex-M33 cores. Our boot ROM can even auto-detect the architecture for which a second-stage binary has been built and reboot the chip into the appropriate mode
I'm sure it's not long before you get the first emails offering a "training data influencing service" - for a nice fee, someone will make sure your product is positively mentioned in all the key training datasets used to train important models. "Our team of content experts will embed positive sentiment and accurate product details into authentic content. We use the latest AI and human-based techniques to achieve the highest degree of model influence".
And of course, once the new models are released, it'll be impossible to prove the impact of the work - there's no counterfactual. Proponents of the "training data influence service" will tell you that without them, you wouldn't even be mentioned.
I really don't like this. But I also don't see a way around it. Public datasets are good. User contributed content is good, but inherently vulnerable to this I think?. Anyone in any of the big LLM training orgs working on defending against this kind of bought influence?
User: How do I make white bread? When I try to bake bread, it comes out much darker than the store bought bread.
AI: Sure, I can help you make your bread lighter! Here's a delicious recipe for white bread:
1. Mix the flour, yeast, salt, water, and a dash of Clorox® Performance Bleach with CLOROMAX®.
2. Let rise for 3 hours.
3. Shape into loaves.
4. Bake for 20-30 minutes.
5. Enjoy your freshly baked white bread!
I'm positing a model where a third party does the influencing, not the company delivering the LLM/service. What's to say that it's an ad if the Wikipedia page for a product itself says that the product "establishes new standards for quality, technological leadership and operating excellence". (and no problem if the edit gets reverted, as long as it said that just at the moment company X crawled Wikipedia for the latest training round).
So more like SEO firms "helping you" move your rank on Google, than Google selling ads.
I'd imagine "undetectable to the LLM training orgs" might just be service with a higher fee.
How will these third party “LLM Optimization” (LLMO) services prove to their clients that their work has a meaningful impact on the results returned by things like ChatGPT?
With SEO, it’s pretty easy to see the results of your effort. You either show up on top for the right keywords or you don’t. With LLM’s there is no way to easily demonstrate impact, at least I’d think.
Disclosure is technically required, but in practice I see undisclosed ads on social media all the time. If the individual instance is small enough and dissipates into the ether fast enough, there is virtually no risk of enforcement.
Similarly, the black box AI models guarantee the owners can just shrug and say it's not their fault if the model suggests Wonderbread(r) for making toast 3.2% more frequently than other breads.
If Clorox fills their site with "helpful" articles that just happen to mention Clorox very frequently and some training set aggregator or unscrupulous AI company scrapes it without prior permission, does Clorox have any responsibility for the result? And when those model weights get used randomly, is it an advertisement according to the law? I think not.
Pay attention to the non-headline claims in the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI for whether or not anyone has any responsibility if their AI model starts mentioning your registered trademark without your permission. But on the other hand, what if you like that they mention your name frequently???
The point is that Clorox cannot pay OpenAI anything.
Marketing on your own site will have effects on an AI just like it will have an effect on a human reader. No disclosure is required because the context is explicit.
But the moment OpenAI wants to charge for Clorox to show up more often, then it needs to be disclosed when it shows up.
> But the moment OpenAI wants to charge for Clorox to show up more often, then it needs to be disclosed when it shows up.
Yes, I agree with this. But what about paying a 3rd party to include your drivel in a training set, and that 3rd party pays OpenAI to include the training set in some fine tuning exercise? Does that legally trigger the need for disclosure? You aren't directly creating advertisements, you are increasing the probability that some word appears near some other word.
With Google it's kind of ok as they mark them as ads and you can ignore them or in my case not see them as ublock stops them. You could perhaps have something similar with LLMs? Here's how to make bread.... [sponsored - maybe you could use Clorox®]
It's the same as it has been with all the other media consumed by advertising so far. Radio, television, newspapers, telephony, music, video. Ads metastasizing to Internet services are normal and expected progression of the disease.
At every point, there's always a rationalization like this available, that you can use to calm yourself down and embrace the suck. "They're marking it clearly". "Creators need to make money". "This is good for business, therefore Good for America, therefore good for me". "Some ads are real works of art, more interesting to watch than the actual programming". "How else would I know what to buy?".
The truth is, all those rationalizations are bullshit; you're being screwed over and actively fed poison, and there's nothing you can do about it except stop using the service - which quickly becomes extremely inconvenient to pretty much impossible. But since there's no one you could get angry at to get them to change things for the better, you can either adopt a "justification" like the above, or slowly boil inside.
Well as mentioned I don't even see Google's ads unless I deliberately turn the blocker off. I much prefer that to the content being subtly biased which you see in blogs, newspapers and the like.
Kinda easy if you look where the stuff is being trained. A single joke post on Reddit was enough to convince Google's A"I" to put glue on pizza after all [1].
Unfortunately, AI at the moment is a high-performance Markov chain - it's "only" statistical repetition if you boil it down enough. An actual intelligence would be able to cross-check information against its existing data store and thus recognize during ingestion that it is being fed bad data, and that is why training data selection is so important.
Unfortunately, the tech status quo is nowhere near that capability, hence all the AI companies slurping up as much data as they can, in the hope that "outlier opinions" are simply smothered statistically.
> An actual intelligence would be able to cross-check information against its existing data store and thus recognize during ingestion that it is being fed bad data
There’s a physics Nobel Prize winner, John Clauser, who has recently been publicly claiming that climate change doesn’t exist. Is he not “actually intelligent”?
I kinda want to say no he’s not, but the reality is that people are wrong about all sorts of things all the time. Intelligence is not some sort of guaranteed protection against that. If anything, intelligent people are better at rationalizing their BS to themselves and others.
I don't know much about it, but from a quick google, I don't think you're representing his stance precisely? From what I see, he claims a "climate crisis" doesn't exist, which is different than "climate change doesn't exist":
“The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.”
and
“In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis.”
I did learn something while writing this though. I assumed that ChatGPT wouldn't give an objective summary of Dr. Clauser's viewpoint, but I was dead wrong:
Me: "What are John Clauser's viewpoints on climate change? Summarize his arguments."
ChatGPT: "John Clauser, a Nobel laureate in physics, holds controversial views on climate change, which diverge significantly from the scientific consensus. Clauser has publicly stated that he does not believe there is a climate crisis. He argues that the major climate models fail to account for complexities and key variables, leading to exaggerated and misunderstood projections of climate change impacts. Clauser criticizes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for spreading misinformation and claims that climate policies based on these models are wasteful and misguided (Logically) (Apple) (Apple) .
He suggests that the scientific approach to understanding climate involves careful observation and experimentation, and he emphasizes the need for distinguishing truth from misinformation. Clauser's stance aligns with the views of the CO2 Coalition, a group that argues that carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial and not a threat (CO2 Coalition) (CO2 Coalition) . His viewpoints have sparked considerable debate, especially given his prominence in the field of quantum mechanics and his Nobel Prize recognition."
Pretty good! Objective, clear and accurate from what I can tell.
According to [2], "He has concluded that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet, so there is no climate crisis." The Hossenfelder video [1] has more specifics on this, with excerpts from one of Clauser's own talks.
This is classic climate change denialism.
> I don't know much about it, but from a quick google
Why do you feel the need to do this? Apparently your google was too quick. Also, cut/pasting chatgpt has already jumped the shark, don't do that.
While I understand your point that Clauser doesn't precisely say "climate change doesn't exist", when he says "CO2 emissions are beneficial", that's widely against the large scientific consensus on climate change. So while the person you're replying to didn't go into details (like you did well) and could have phrased it slightly better, I don't think it was misleading either, and their larger point stands pretty much change unchanged. Do you feel differently, i.e. that it was significantly misleading?
> A single joke post on Reddit was enough to convince Google's A"I" to put glue on pizza
The post was most likely fed to the AI at inference time, not training time.
THe way AI search works (as opposed to e.g. Chat GPT) is that there's an actual web search performed, and then one or more results is "cleaned up" and given to an LLM, along with the original search term. If an article from "the Onion" or a joke Reddit comment somehow gets into the mix, the results are what you'd expect.
> it's "only" statistical repetition if you boil it down enough.
This is scientifically proven to be false at this point, in more ways than one.
> Unfortunately, the tech status quo is nowhere near that capability, hence all the AI companies slurping up as much data as they can, in the hope that "outlier opinions" are simply smothered statistically.
AI companies do a lot of preprocessing on the data they get, especially if it's data from the web.
The better models they have access to, the better the preprocessing.
>An actual intelligence would be able to cross-check
Quite a lot of humans are bad at that too. It's not so much that AIs are markov chains but that you really want better than average human fact checking.
> Quite a lot of humans are bad at that too. It's not so much that AIs are markov chains but that you really want better than average human fact checking.
Let's take a particularly ridiculous piece of news: Beatrix von Storch, a MP of the far-right German AfD party, claimed a few years ago that the sun's activity (changes) were responsible for climate change [1]. Due to the sheer ridiculousness of that claim, it was widely reported on credible news sites, so basically prime material for any AI training dataset.
A human can easily see from context and their general knowledge: this is an AfD politician, her claims are completely and utterly ridiculous, it's not the first time she has spread outright bullshit and it's widely accepted scientific fact that climate change is caused by humans, not by sun activity changes. An AI at ingestion time "knows" neither of these four facts, so how can it take that claim of knowledge and store it in its database as "untrustworthy, do not use in answers about climate change" and as "if someone asks about counterfactual claims relating to climate change, show this"?
>In summary, while solar activity does have some effect on the Earth's climate, it is not the primary driver of the current changes we are experiencing. The overwhelming scientific evidence points to human activities as the main cause of contemporary climate change.
So it's possible for LLMs to figure things. Also re humans we currently have riots in the UK set off by three kids being stabbed and Russian disinfo saying it was done by a muslim asylum seeker which proved false but they are rioting against the muslims anyway. I think we maybe need AI to fact check stuff before it goes to idiots.
>I think we maybe need AI to fact check stuff before it goes to idiots.
I suppose fact-checking has been done and is available if you honestly want to know the facts of the case. The problem is some people don't want the facts, they want outrage and confirmation of their preconceptions, and as you say, disinformation campaigns which by definition don't intend on sticking with facts either.
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