Hi, I'm Bob

I currently work at canvas.xyz, investigating new web technology. Most of my time has been spent on Canvas, a framework for building decentralised web applications on top of merkle trees and libp2p. More recently, we've built a tool for analysing your Twitter archive with LLMs (and those of others, on Community Archive).

Thoughts

Very low-commitment, low-effort writing. If I have a thought that I want to link to from somewhere else, I post it here.

Toys

Small applications that I wrote or vibe-coded, that do something neat.

WordArt generator (Claude) - The world is full of presets and defaults. Back in the 90s and 00s, WordArt from Microsoft Office was everywhere. Now we see GPT Image 1 everywhere. The 5-over-1 and the large-panel-system building are examples in architecture, where the end product is directly shaped by systems of mass production, safety regulations and economic necessity. I wanted to see if Claude could replicate the style of contemporary supermarket flyers and promotional sidewalk signs (1, 2, 3, 4) from Southeast Asia, which make up a kind of "visual noise" of globalised shopping malls and commercial streets. I don't think I can claim any credit for this - it feels more like scratching the bark of a bush and watching a bud sprout there.
Trajectoid generator (Claude) - A trajectoid is a shape that traces a repeating path on a flat surface. It turns out that for a given repeating path, you can construct a shape that can be rolled along that path. This was proven in 2023! I think it's very cool that we are still discovering new shapes. I wanted to see what trajectoids would look like for different kinds of paths, such a straight lines, jagged lines, sinusoidal curves and chaotic wiggly scribbles.
Not interested bookmarklet (Claude) - copy this link with "Copy link address", then create a bookmark by right clicking your bookmark toolbar and selecting "Add Page...". When you are browsing the "For you" timeline on Twitter (formerly known as X), click the bookmarklet and you will be able to mark tweets as "Not interested" with just one click. This is really useful if you want to train Twitter's timeline algorithm to give you better content. It's really easy to create little tools like this with AI nowadays - imagine being able to scrape data, move page elements around, change colour schemes, etc. Maybe if you like something, you could then turn it into a browser extension. Really this is the same thing as userscripts, but I think there's a kind of curse on the web where any attempt to introduce a new abstraction over web browser eventually becomes doomed to obscurity. I don't know why. I think userscripts are a great idea. I also thought that RSS was a great idea. I think the aggressively non-generalisable, n=1 and unsystematic nature of vibe coding is something we should embrace. So I'm not even going to give this type of "tool" a name.