zomia.news

15mar2024

For now, it's positioned for story-writing, but from my perspective, it's a good alternative for AI-text-based adventures. Most people use it for gaming, not to write. It's like an open-world RPG with endless variability.

For the nearest feature, we will see how this model works in "general" gaming. It will be an interesting time.

04mar2024

FastUI it's easy way to create the admin page for a small script. Looks like the Django Admin for FastAPI applications.

In the abstract, FastUI is like the opposite of GraphQL but with the same goal — GraphQL lets frontend developers extend an application without any new backend development; FastUI lets backend developers extend an application without any new frontend development

3mar2024

Ente alternative photo hosting. Still a long way from Apple Photo, but cross-platform, privacy-centric and with a clear business model

25feb2024

JavaScript bloat in 2024

It's a painful review of the state of the modern web. Hard to believe that every time when I try to open the JIRA my browser downloads the 50 Mb of JSs.

10feb2024

The "sailplane problem of modern Image Generation AI". Right after appearing of model Image Generator AI have tried to generate the photorealistic image of the sailplane. But that was impossible 2 years ago and still impossible today (but lot better). That last attempts examples (DALL-E and MidJourney)

DALL-E MidJouney

29jan2024

Portable EPUB

Despite decades of advances in document rendering technology, most of the world's documents are stuck in the 1990s due to the limitations of PDF. Yet, modern document formats like HTML have yet to provide a competitive alternative to PDF. This post explores what prevents HTML documents from being portable, and I propose a way forward based on the EPUB format. To demonstrate my ideas, this post is presented using a prototype EPUB reading system

During my work in LitRes (Russia's largest ebook store) we had EPUB as an internal format for storing books in MyBook.RU. The main problem for us was validation: there's just too much things that you can do inside the EPUB, and the validation process was difficult. As a result we came to almost the same decision: we just cut off all the "suspicious" elements from the files and have our "Light EPUB" format.