Four short links: 28 August 2020
Activity Watch, Natural Language Database Queries, Web Assembly, and Sci-Fi UI
- Activity Watch — Open source, privacy-first, cross-platform app that automatically tracks how you spend time on your devices.
- Natural Language Database Queries — An interesting comment thread on Hacker News. Sample comments: I’ve done some previous digging into natural language SQL queries — there’s a good amount of research around this. But the error rate is always too high for useful production deployment and the systems I’ve looked at never handled ambiguity well. The target user for this is someone who knows nothing about SQL so ambiguity is guaranteed. and I worked for Cleargraph, a startup which built a natural language query layer on top of RDBMSes and which we sold to Tableau. We reached the same conclusions as you: that such a system must properly handle ambiguous queries, and users need to explicitly understand the results they’re viewing.
- Hands-On Web Assembly — Simple tutorial for Wasm.
- Arwes — Futuristic Sci-Fi and Cyberpunk Graphical User Interface Framework for Web Apps. Click through, it’s worth it.
