lazyjeff

This is a listing of best paper awards across 32 computer science conferences, for papers chosen in that year to be the "best" by committees in those conferences meant to be the broadest conferences in each subfield.

I use a single never-ending text file for this, because I'm tired of dealing with remembering formats or apps. I've written about it here: https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/

I've already made such a tool, and it works for any browser on Windows, and all the data is local -- yours. https://irchiver.com/

So I was thinking about how the web is not as permanent as it used to be. Between walled gardens, and dynamic content, it's hard to find things you saw. So I wanted a way to have a screenshot-based "archive.org" but for yourself, so that it works with non-public content too like a Facebook post or if it disappears like all the stuff on Google+.

Philosophically, I think almost everything we see and think about is in a web browser these days. Even private conversations with my friends, I often look up a few things about them. So I've been using irchiver myself to dogfood it, for almost 2 years now. And found it to be super useful already. For example, I've recovered important technical posts that someone deleted, paragraphs on text I lost when submitting a form that didn't save, or found a comic strip that I had at the tip of my tongue but got lost in google search.

And I think it's now possible because of strong+efficient screenshot compression and good OCR. There's an undocumented Win32 hack that lets you capture window content in a fast way (moreso that a typical BitBlt) so I used that to grab the images. And made a standard inverted index search engine for the content. Anyways, the webpage I put up for the project explains it as best as I can to a general audience [https://irchiver.com/].

In many ways, it's like the Rewind startup here. Except it just happens I did it for Windows, and they did it for MacOS and iPhone. And I care a lot about local storage of the original screenshots and text. Would love to hear others' thoughts.

I've been working on a similar system for a while called irchiver [https://irchiver.com/] but what I wanted from the start is for everything to be local and plain formatted, i.e. stored as .txt and .webp to be most accessible.

Coincidentally, I've only been building for Windows, so different from the platforms supported by Rewind. If anyone wants to collaborate, I'd be very open to it.

There's an open source project I was briefly involved in called SSVG [1] that renders the SVG as Canvas to speed it up drastically, especially on Chrome. It works as a simple one-line js drop in for many common visualization examples [2].

[1] https://ssvg.io/ [2] https://ssvg.io/examples

Before Rewind.ai launched, I had made a counterpart for Windows, but just for web browsers: https://irchiver.com/

Completely local, no network traffic at all.

I've had my ups and downs with peer review. I'm trying to collect stories of papers from ideation to publication, while also describing the struggle for my own papers.

I've written the backstories for 30 of my papers here: https://jeffhuang.com/struggle_for_each_paper/

Looking at my past experiences for all my papers, I can only conclude that the process is more nuanced than can be described in a tagline like "peer review is broken" or "publishing is random", so I'm interested in hearing everyone else's experiences too.

Some of what looks challenging here is handling fonts. SVG would be so much better if there was a way to do font embedding. Even a minimal set of fonts would be amazing. Or if operating systems or libraries for SVG support could all commit to supporting a common set of fonts, like browsers did for web safe fonts. Think of how clunky the web would have been without those.

Are you sure you recall correctly? The linked page recommends upgrading GIF to PNG, "the only reasonable alternative to paying the Unisys tax on the web is to upgrade graphics from GIF to PNG format", which makes sense because it's a lossless conversion. PNG was a new format back that, without much adoption. JPEG doesn't make sense as a substitute format for GIF, and would greatly increase the size and decrease the quality of files.

Spacemonger is probably the oldest piece of non-updated software I still use. I've been using it continuously for over 20 years, about the same length as I've been using Winamp 2, and just recently used it to clear out some large files to create a full-disk backup.

It still works blazing fast on hard drives that are 1000 times the size than the drives that existed when it was programmed, and nearly as well as 20+ years ago (there are some occasional crashes when removing some system protected files, but easy to just open it up and scan again). I never made the jump to Spacemonger 2 because in the early years that I started using it, I was in high school without a credit card.

I emailed the author in December 2020 to see if there was a way to enable HiDPI on it, since that's the only real flaw of it right now. He responded 3 months later with a very personal message that I really appreciated.