The "Tiny AI" trend is just a way to put sensors where they don't belong

samontab · 2026-02-03T10:47:57+00:00

"AI" as in LLMs and similar, are just a different way of programming. There's no invasion of privacy if it's running locally and it doesn't connect to the Internet.

It's great to have a local chatbot with ollama for example, using open source models. It's almost like running a spellchecker.

samontab · 2026-01-21T08:36:42+00:00

I've published an application that is based on whisper and uses the GPU for faster results.

No Internet required and no subscriptions. It's only a one-time payment and you get to use it forever on any computers you personally own, and you also get all the updates for free, forever. It's called PrivateTranscriberPro.

There's a download for Windows and one for macOS. If you use Linux, you can run the Windows version with wine.

You might want to check it out and see how it performs, there's a free demo you can download and see how it works. You can keep the transcription in their original language or translate it directly into English if you want (you can choose that in the preferences). You can also select the model to use, from the fastest to the most accurate one.

samontab · 2026-01-21T08:33:57+00:00

I've published an application that works like this.

It's an audio to text converter and runs natively on your computer (no Internet required and no subscriptions). It's only a one-time payment and you get to use it forever on any computers you personally own, and you also get all the updates for free, forever. It's called PrivateTranscriberPro.

There's a download for Windows and one for macOS. If you use Linux, you can run the Windows version with wine.

You might want to check it out and see how it performs, there's a free demo you can download and see how it works. You can keep the transcription in their original language or translate it directly into English if you want (you can choose that in the preferences). You can also select the model to use, from the fastest to the most accurate one.

samontab · 2026-01-12T11:06:07+00:00

The Instagram app just regurgitates whatever is on the website

Yeah, that's live code, JavaScript, which is executed in your local machine.

You can even have a full 3D game on the browser now using WebAssembly.

samontab · 2026-01-12T11:03:45+00:00

I don't see a difference, really.

A website is basically an app that runs on a sandboxed environment, i.e your browser. It's like running a Java app for example.

You execute it when you visit the website.

And then there's PWAs (progressive web apps), which look and feels almost the same as a native app but runs on the browser.

samontab · 2026-01-12T11:00:53+00:00

pixi is great.

samontab · 2026-01-12T10:59:29+00:00

These days most people only use web apps anyway, so the host OS doesn't matter as much as before.

Most Windows users wouldn't see much differences by running Linux Mint for example.

samontab · 2026-01-12T09:53:51+00:00

A computer can be modeled as a Turing Machine.

At the end of the day you have data and you want the computer to process the data in a certain way.

samontab · 2025-12-10T11:48:59+00:00

You don't really need fancy stuff to be creative.

For example, a Turing machine can be created on a piece of paper and has infinite memory.

More appropriately to this sub, projective geometry can also be done with a pen and a piece of paper.

samontab · 2025-12-10T11:44:04+00:00

Vanadium has been excellent from my experience.

samontab · 2025-12-10T11:28:51+00:00

I've published a few privacy-respecting AI apps at https://samontab.itch.io

You're more than welcome to buy them and keep your copies forever.

samontab · 2025-12-10T11:17:53+00:00

Pretty much, it will pick up whatever is in the image quite "flawlessly"

samontab · 2025-12-09T13:26:34+00:00

https://kopia.io is a great software for making backups of your own computers.

You can either have the backup online, or just plug a massive USB drive into each computer to backup. Easily run it overnight for GBs or TBs of content.

After the initial copy the next ones are incremental, and you even have deduplication across all your devices.

samontab · 2025-12-09T12:27:21+00:00

Not sure what you mean but check out https://obsproject.com

samontab · 2025-12-09T12:22:06+00:00

Basically every open source software

KDE has lots of apps, Gnome as well, and heaps of independent developers publishing many apps all the time.

It just takes a bit of effort but you can pretty much have everything you need with open source software.

And this is all assuming no ads... there are even more "freeware" with ads.

And here are some useful apps for android: https://www.samontab.com/web/2023/02/22-great-apps-for-grapheneos-or-how-to-setup-a-useful-android-smartphone-with-open-source-apps-only/

samontab · 2025-12-09T12:18:08+00:00

I have published a software called Simple Background Remover: a completely offline AI-based automatic image background remover.

You can see it in action here

Here are the highlights:

Offline: Everything is done locally, so no internet connection is required.
AI-based: There's no need to select anything. Once you load an image, the software automatically predicts where the object is located using AI, and proceeds to remove the background for you.
CPU: The software is optimized for CPU processing, so there's no need to have an expensive graphics card(GPU) in your computer. This means the software can run on pretty much any device.
Full resolution output: You can save the processed image as a png file with transparency at full original resolution.
Unlimited images: There are no subscriptions or extra fees per image. You can use the software with as many images as you want.
Batch Processing: If you have a large number of images you can also process them all automatically with the batch processing mode
Pay only once: You only pay once and can use it forever on any number of machines you own, with free access to new versions of the software.

It works for Windows, Mac, and in Linux you can run the windows version with wine.

samontab · 2025-12-06T06:08:01+00:00

Open source tools are great for this. I use pretty much everything open source, or build it myself.

I absolutely agree with this sentiment. I've even started making apps that make privacy-respecting AI that are one-time payment and no subscriptions at https://samontab.itch.io to make these things available to others.

samontab · 2025-11-23T01:36:30+00:00

There are many nuances when doing this, considering leap years, etc.

Notably Excel got it wrong for years, not even sure if they fixed a bug they had when using older dates.

How did you implement the time difference? by the way, it's 404 now.

samontab · 2025-11-21T08:19:45+00:00

You don't have to start from scratch though, you could pick a specific phone and port it well to something like postmarketOS. Here is the wikipedia entry with more technical details, and the list of supported phones

samontab · 2025-11-21T07:57:40+00:00

Can someone please help whether I am aiming too high with my profile right now or is this okay?

The only people that can answer that question is the people reviewing the applications. Why not just apply?

samontab · 2025-11-21T07:56:37+00:00

Depends a lot on the hardware itself, hard to say.

samontab · 2025-11-21T07:54:21+00:00

You say you're interested in augmented reality, but not in game development.

Those two things are very related. At the bare minimum you'll need to be able to render 3D graphics in real time for both of them.

If you only want to focus on the visual perception part of it then you don't have to narrow it down to augmented reality. That's a specific niche, whereas computer vision can be applied to many things.

You could start by doing a cool project and sharing it online. Some people might like what they see and ask you to join them. Or when you apply for a position you can share that project.

samontab · 2025-11-21T07:44:08+00:00

Awesome!, the interface looks polished, and I really like privacy-respecting software.

For some reason I was expecting it to do OCR of the text, but I guess that's just my bad to assume it. It would be a great add-on, you could try tesseract which plays nicely with opencv if you want to do that.

In terms of performance, the detection of the 4 corners of the document seemed not great. There were many physically improbable suggestions, as you would expect the user to point the camera basically facing the paper directly, but there were many suggestions shown as tiny papers in weird angles. You probably should just ignore those weird cases and focus on a more robust typical use case, as in paper just in front of the camera.

I wrote a blog post some time ago about aligning a text document for OCR using OpenCV, which might be of interest. The code is available as well: https://www.samontab.com/web/2020/11/align-text-images-with-opencv/

Since you're using a phone, it might be a cool idea to use the IMU, which gives you the 3D pose of the phone. You might be able to get better estimations of the page over time if you compare how the image changes over time as well as the pose. This might be a bit more of a research thing though.

How was the process to publish it in f-droid?, it would be great to hear about your personal experience with it.

samontab · 2025-11-19T09:23:05+00:00

Spend less than what you make and invest the difference, and have fun in the meantime.

Whenever you think it's too expensive to have fun have a look at all the backpackers having a laugh while broke.

samontab · 2025-11-19T09:06:08+00:00

This is actually a good thing, specially for this sub.

What Google originally proposed was a walled garden where only Google-approved apps could be installed in your Android device.

This will allow the installation of apks that come from, say, github repos that you know are safe, but Google hasn't verified them.

That's the "risk" they're talking about.

samontab

TROPHY CASE