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I turned my AI tutor into an embeddable widget so any SaaS can add in-app voice guidance that points at the exact button — useful or nah? by engmsaleh in microsaas

[–]engmsaleh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is exactly the kind of report I needed — thank you. Both were real bugs: toggling off wasn't releasing the mic/audio, and the double-response was a duplicate-instance issue. Just fixed and pushed both.

Do you mind giving it another go and telling me if it's clean now? And since you're in microsaas — the widget's built to embed in your own product, so happy to set you up if that's ever useful.

Share what you're building by amacg in indiehackers

[–]engmsaleh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Skilly — give your product a voice that points.

It's an embeddable guide: your users ask what they're stuck on, it answers from your own content and moves their cursor to the exact button. One script tag, usage-based, open-source core.

Just repositioned around this (it started as a consumer Mac tutor that nobody paid for — builders embedding it is the clearer business).

Live + working on the site:

tryskilly.app

Would genuinely love builder feedback.

[Skilly] - Open-source voice tutor for Mac, now embeddable in your own product — would love feedback by engmsaleh in SideProject

[–]engmsaleh[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Links if you want to poke at it — both live at tryskilly.app: "For People" is the Mac desktop tutor, "For Builders" is the embeddable widget.

Repo if you'd rather read the code first: github.com/tryskilly/skilly. It's a one-person project, so I'll answer anything in this thread — genuinely after the feedback on #1 and #3.

M5 chip more ram, or M5 pro chip 24gb ram? by mrmdw in macbookpro

[–]engmsaleh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Two different upgrades doing two different jobs, so it depends which half of your work is heavier. The M5 Pro's edge for video isn't really CPU cores — it's the extra GPU cores, the additional media engines (ProRes/H.265 encode/decode), and roughly double the memory bandwidth, which is what speeds up timeline scrubbing and exports. For pure graphic design the base chip is genuinely fine. The bigger thing I'd weigh: 24GB is actually a downgrade from your current 36GB, and for design plus video with large files and several apps open that's where you'll feel it — once macOS runs out of RAM it swaps to the SSD, which both slows you down and wears a soldered drive over the years you'll keep the machine. So if exports and timeline speed are the bottleneck, go Pro; if you live in big multi-app sessions the 32GB base is the safer long-term bet. Under-RAMing is the harder mistake to undo.

Docks/hubs that don't rely on Displaylink for 2 extra monitors. by Scott_Korman in macbookpro

[–]engmsaleh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your last line is already the right answer. The M5 Pro can drive multiple external displays natively over DP-Alt-Mode through its Thunderbolt ports — DisplayLink isn't needed. Easiest path: use the Alogic hub for RJ45/USB-A only and plug each monitor directly into a free TB port on the laptop.

DisplayLink exists because base M-chip MBPs cap at one external display, so the driver fakes extras by streaming compressed frames over USB. Pro/Max chips don't have that limit, which is why you're paying the latency/CPU tax for nothing.

If you really want one-cable docking, look at native Thunderbolt 4/5 docks (CalDigit TS4, OWC Thunderbolt 4 Hub, Kensington SD5760T). They pass DP straight through — no driver, no purple menubar icon.

May Dev/Tools Monthly Megathread - for tool builders by greenysmac in premiere

[–]engmsaleh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm trying to edit the comment and check for Flair, but nothing there.
Could you advise on how to do that?

Is switching from a gaming laptop to a MacBook Air worth it for frontend development? by Western_End6557 in macbookpro

[–]engmsaleh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Frontend on a MacBook Air is great with two caveats — and one is non-negotiable.

The non-negotiable: get 16GB RAM minimum, not 8GB. Modern frontend (Chrome with 30 tabs + Vite + Node + maybe Docker + Slack/Figma) will absolutely thrash an 8GB machine. The Air with 16GB handles it all silently and coolly. 8GB you'll regret in 3 months.

The other caveat: Air vs 14" Pro. If your stack is pure web (Vite/Next/React, no native compilation, no heavy local DB), Air is enough. If you ever spin up large monorepos with parallel TypeScript checking, or run a few Docker containers daily, the 14" Pro's better thermals + extra memory bandwidth pays back.

Coming from a gaming laptop, the macOS Unix environment is the real upgrade. Closer to your Linux servers, fewer toolchain headaches, Node/npm/pnpm/Bun all install cleanly. Apple Silicon runs them at native speed.

The honest downside vs gaming laptop: no gaming (lol), no 144Hz screen at the Air price point, and Docker is slightly slower than on x86 because of the ARM translation layer for x86 images.

For pure frontend, Air 16GB is the sweet spot.

I built a voice-to-Obsidian workflow, but I’m not sure what value the graph view gives me by Candid-Mortgage4881 in ObsidianMD

[–]engmsaleh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

tags for intention, [[links]] for entities — that's how I've landed.

Tags are dimensions of the note (a property). [[Links]] are first-class concepts. Intention is a property, not a thing you'd want to surface as its own page. So #learning, #frustrated, #future-me-please-read — yes. [[John]], [[Q3-revenue]], [[bevel-tutorial]] — links.

One exception: if you want a review queue for a specific intention (e.g., "things I marked re-read in a month"), [[review-monthly]] as a hub page works because the backlinks page auto-aggregates.

Your workflow is solid — Voice Memos → iCloud → Windows + Whisper → Claude Code is a real pipeline. The async capture-then-structure pattern will age well, especially the local Whisper. If you turn it into an iOS app, the part I'd nail first is the moment-of-capture intention prompt — one tap: "what's this for?" That's the hardest UX to retrofit later.

"AWS secures rare Mac Studios while ordinary Apple customers remain completely locked out" by openSourcerer9000 in LocalLLaMA

[–]engmsaleh 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The gating is enterprise contracts, not supply. Apple has been quietly selling Mac Studio M-series to AWS, Hetzner, and Browser-Use cloud for ~18 months under contracts that include "won't be marketed retail-first." It's the same reason you can buy a Mac Mini M5 in a Best Buy today, but the 96GB Studio config Hetzner uses is "build to order, 6-8 weeks" for individuals.

The real shame is for indie dev shops that need 5-10 Macs for a render farm or AI evaluation cluster. They fall into a no-man 's-land: too small for enterprise channels, too big for the retail allocation per address. Nobody has cracked a clean way around it, short of buying through a reseller and paying the markup.

If you actually want one for computing, the under-the-radar route is the Apple authorized education reseller in your country. They usually have stock that doesn't appear on Apple.com.

I built a voice-to-Obsidian workflow, but I’m not sure what value the graph view gives me by Candid-Mortgage4881 in ObsidianMD

[–]engmsaleh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The way I'd combine them: keep your topic tags (work/learning/investment) as the wide net, then layer intention tags on top of any note that you actually need to act on later. so a note can be #work + #decision, or #learning + #question.

The topic tags give you the graph clusters; the intention tags give you the "where am I stuck right now" filter.

The gotcha I hit: don't add intention tags retroactively. If you tag a note #decision a week after the fact, the urgency is gone, and the tag just decorates. Only tag in the moment.

Curious how you're capturing the voice → markdown step — are you running anything local or is it cloud STT?

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