Just last week they were talking about the future of Irelands energy generation, and the pressure between now and 2028 from data centers and EVs. Reopening moneypoint as a backup has been discussed. It's been kept as a oil fired backup station, but given the current surge in oil prices I could see it turning to coal again.
I really hope they just turn heavily toward renewables. We have enough offshore wind in Ireland to power most of the world, if we could just build enough turbines and harness it. We could become a net exporter of green power
My guess is HP makes such an enormous amount of money already from movies, games, toys, and other tie-ins, that they can't be bothered to chase down the odd digital infringement of a plain text copy of the original books.
I'm sure the scripts of Star Wars would be similarly ignored if they were used.
I think Microsoft employees should be smart enough to figure that "a globally beloved collection of seven books" (their words) is probably not free to use.
It is just very hard problem when you are very popular work. Trying to find and track and take down all copies of certain work online is constant fight. Sometimes things just slip especially if they are not that popular.
Something like Harry Potter might be shared every day. And I mean as pirate work distributed as new copy. Staying on top of that will be very hard work.
Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money.
And yet, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name Of The Wind is the same concept, and sold over a million copes,
Lev Grossman's The Magicians is again the same concept, sold millions, and was adapted into a 5 season TV series for SyFy.
If anything, the success of an idea only leads to a bigger appetite for that idea.
BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.
Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason.
Damn I had noticed a lot of series doing it, but I guess it's wider than I thought!
The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons
Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.
Magicians was one of the few series where it actually worked, I thought. I just recently watched the Star Trek Strange New Worlds musical ep and it was painful
Is TNotW really the same concept as Harry Potter? It has a university in it, which I guess is similar to a school, and after a while the main character ends up there, but it's a very different concept - it's classic high fantasy that includes a period of learning and study, whereas HP is primarily boarding school fiction with magical elements. Similarly, The Magicians, as I understand it, is also more about a university, and is perhaps closer in lineage to Buffy or Charmed than to Harry Potter - it has more of that focus on the interpersonal relationships between characters, and a more complex morality.
The better comparison is probably with Percy Jackson, which isn't quite the same concept (being an American series, where boarding school fiction isn't quite as well-known a genre) but matches the ages, sense of discovery, and relationships to authority figures far better.
This isn't directly relevant to your point, but I really find it wild that people see two stories that have magic and a school in them and go "look, it's the same thing", especially when the genres and tropes of the two books are so utterly different. For that matter, Harry Potter is also nothing like Earthsea, which is another common reference point. I wonder if Americans just don't have as much experience with boarding school fiction to be able to categorise Harry Potter as a series?
Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly.
Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to realise our ideas because someone somewhere has had "the same idea". They probably have had an idea which could be described in a similar fashion, but it doesn't really mean its the "same idea"
I probably stumbled a bit describing those books as the same concept when I should have put "same idea" in quotes
I think in that case, you're missing what the article is saying. It's not talking about building something new but not having people understand it. It's saying that anything new that you can build, someone else can build faster with AI.
To stretch the book analogy beyond breaking point, it would be like if Patrick Rothfuss released The Name of the Wind, and JK Rowling immediately put out "Harry Potter and the Kingkiller Chronicles, now with added Kvothe", and basically used her name and the Harry Potter brand to outcompete Rothfuss selling the same thing. (Obviously for books, you've got copyright, but there's no copyright for your favourite app idea.)
I think the extent to which that is actually true is hard to say, but I think it's a different point to the one you're arguing against here.
Your point came through clearly to me. Shared tropes or setting do not make identical stories and, in fact, often enhance them as a counterbalance or familiar thing to compare against.
A wise friend of mine once said, in regard to "ideas are nothing; execution is everything": you can tell a thousand artists to paint a portrait of an Italian woman with a countryside landscape behind her but, good or bad, none of them are the mona lisa.
Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon.
I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first step is to reach the Google Reader feature set minus social features.
I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.
API access is worth chasing. There was something I wanted to do with Feedly (I've already forgotten what it was) but once I saw their APIs were hidden behind some enterprise level plan, that was the end of that. If we're in a world where everyone has a personal AI agent, giving their agent an API key to their RSS sync account... that might have some interest.
Feedly seems hostile to third-party client access (ie mobile & desktop apps), so being friendlier towards RSS clients could be of interest.
Personalized AI feed is a good idea but you don't have all the personalized year of context that my Claude does. My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.
And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS. But that's me.
> I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.
Yes, enterprise is certainly where the money is (Feedly's plans start at $1600/month...), but as a solo dev working on a side-project, that's not an accessible market for me anyway. So I try to create a service that's simple and cheap.
> My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.
The idea would be basically: the feed reader know the user's interests because of the subscriptions, and knows the last time the user logged in. So it can filter what happened since then; it can also order the posts by relevance, allowing the user to catch up.
And in a second step, an agent could even write the posts dynamically, summarizing information gathered from the user's feed, possibly even adjusted to the user's level of knowledge and offering background info where needed.
> And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS.
There are some feeds that are more like a mixture of text and podcast. I usually read only the text, but sometimes it catches my interest and I want to listen to one or two posts. That's when I start hating the lack of podcast support in Feedly.
I'm using (self-hosted) Nextcloud News, what would your... service? Tool? Product? ... offer beyond what NN does? It is quite simple as well, offers an uncluttered interface, keeps my subscriptions as private as RSS subscriptions can be. I suspect you're targeting a different market from the one catered by self-hosted services like Nextcloud?
I am not familiar with Nextcloud News. In the first version, it probably won't offer much for you, besides having a catalog of feeds, the ability to search them, and subscribe with one click, which is usually not offered by non-cloud RSS readers.
For people who do not want to use self-hosted services (which generally includes me), it offers simplicity. Open the page, choose Google as auth provider, confirm, and you will get a friendly start page. Click on 'follow' on one of the feeds, and you can start reading immediately. The UI is more like Facebook or X, so basically, you just need to scroll. Either in a feed of your choice, or all your feeds. It's designed to work well on small mobile screens, tablets, and desktops, with great keyboard support on the latter. Larger screens use two or three columns.
Tough market. What’s your differentiator over Readwise? They are crushing it on the “power user feed reader”.
Best of luck though, I think this is a very promising space. (But my bet is you can do all the interesting stuff in vibe-coded thin UI + OSS pipeline.)
Simplicity. I can get you reading your first feed in under a minute. Also, I am not really thinking about monetization right now, but I am building a feed reader I want to use. I wouldn't want to spend $13 a month for it.
> thin UI + OSS pipeline
No, the UI isn't that thin. I am optimizing it to minimize my costs for operating it. Everything I can do inside the client is done inside the client. Interactions with the server are mostly limited to polling every 2 minutes for feed updates, and sending read markers after 3 seconds of inactivity. Feed data is stored on CDN, compressed.
It's probably an téaloḋ (an tÉalodh without the ponc, t-Éalú in modern orthography) in the original, which lines up with the other missing poncs I mentioned above.
"Imagine if your job was to sit at a fake desk all day and pretend to be annoyed by someone walking into your room."
Reminds me of some of the old tourist information places in Scotland before the internet was widely available. I was in Huntly, a small town and I was the only person in the office. I remember asking for information/a leaflet about George MacDonald's birthplace in Huntly, and when it was open etc, and getting told something like, "I wouldn't know about that, that's for people who are interested in that kind of thing."
I just replied by saying, "You might not be interested in it, but I am, that's why I'm asking."
She eventually dug out a badly made leaflet with a phone number from just under the desk, as if it was some great chore.
Her heart wasn't in that job. There wasn't much else to see in that town, other than a castle (which is pretty impressive TBF) and some whisky distilleries.
Be sure to ask for a tip for the "valuable service" you're providing.
(I accidentally ended up in what I can only describe as a beer automat some months ago. It was billed as some sort of friendly living room to the meeting organizers, and was loaded with propaganda pushing that premise.)
Look I think its great that it runs in the browser and all, but I don't want to live in a world where its normal for a website to download 2.5Gb in the background to run something
I recently dug into this as I was trying to benchmark the possibility of using Gemini Nano (Chrome's built in AI model) vs a server side solution for a sideproject.
Nano's stored in localstorage with shared access across sites (because Google), so users only need to download it once. Which I don't think is the case with Mistral, etc.
There's some other production stats around adoption, availability and performance that were interesting as well:
You have already gotten used to loading multiple megabytes of bytes just to display a static landing page. You'll get used to this as well... just give it some time :-D
It's obviously not something you'd want to happen _passively_ when visiting a web page, but if the alternative is installing an executable / using a package manager / etc., why not? At least the browser is a more secure sandboxed environment for running untrusted code than most peoples' native OS.
I really hope they just turn heavily toward renewables. We have enough offshore wind in Ireland to power most of the world, if we could just build enough turbines and harness it. We could become a net exporter of green power
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