You know, I'm something of a browser extension creator myself
Control Panel for Twitter improves Twitter somewhat: https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter
Control Panel for YouTube improves YouTube somewhat: https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
Comments Owl for Hacker News makes it actually possible to follow chat threads here over time: https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news
AI Overview Hider for Google: https://soitis.dev/ai-overview-hider-for-google
- I'm selling browser extensions on the App Store, but the main money-maker is currently https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter
When Twitter killed off third-party apps, the browser extension I'd been developing ever since "New Twitter" launched in 2019 suddenly became one of the few ways to make Twitter more tolerable to use, and the number of users of the Chrome version tripled from 30k to 90k in a fortnight (mostly in Japan).
When they confirmed third-party apps had been killed on purpose and jacked up the price of the API to discourage new ones, I started selling it on the App Store the next week and it's made more than $500 per month ever since.
Before the end of the year I'm hoping to roll out a single paid subscription which works across all my extensions when you sign up for it, which enables syncing settings across all your browsers and devices, unlocks additional subscriber-only features, and will enable creation of extension-specific APIs if there are future features which require one. Between Control Panel for Twitter and https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube I have ~390,000 users, so, y'know, please like and subscribe.
That will _eventually_ include my free Hacker News extension ( https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news ) so things like new comment counts, user notes and muted users can sync across every browser and device you use Hacker News on.
If that takes off, I hope to make the App Store versions free and figure out how to give anyone who bought it 3 months of the subscription per extension they bought as a thank-you. If anyone's done something like that before, I'd be happy to hear about it via any communication method in my HN profile!
- I do Clues by Sam every day when I'm walking my dog before I start work, and I was particularly glad to have the daily mental workout this month, as I didn't have time for Advent of Code. Just bought both puzzle packs to support your great work!
- If people could get into the habit of using "AI*" when they explicitly mean "LLM" but they have to say "AI" because hype, that would be nice.
- You can also, more conveniently, plug an extension's URL into this viewer:
- They do, and it takes longer for updates to Recommended extensions to be reviewed as a result.
This is what the Firefox add-ons team sent to me when one of my extensions was invited to the Recommended program:
> If you’re interested in Control Panel for Twitter becoming a Firefox Recommended Extension there are a couple of conditions to consider:
> 1) Mozilla staff security experts manually review every new submission of all Recommended extensions; this ensures all Recommended extensions remain compliant with AMO’s privacy and security standards. Due to this rigorous monitoring you can expect slightly longer review wait times for new version submissions (up to two weeks in some cases, though it’s usually just a few days).
> 2) Developers agree to actively maintain their Recommended extension (i.e. make timely bug fixes and/or generally tend to its ongoing maintenance). Basically we don't want to include abandoned or otherwise decaying content, so if the day arrives you intend to no longer maintain Control Panel for Twitter, we simply ask you to communicate that to us so we can plan for its removal from the program.
- git-gui can do that too
- Makes me wish there was a cross-platform equivalent to HTML Applications [1]. They were hell to develop at the time, but being able to create single-text-file tools with a browser UI, file system and network access, and app automation via COM was amazing
- Then when you've taken an hour to be the first person to understand how their code works from top to bottom and point out obvious bugs, problems and design improvements (no, I don't think this component needs 8 useEffects added to it which deal exclusively with global state that's only relevant 2 layers down, which are effectively treating React components like an event handling system for data - don't believe people who tell you LLMs are good at React, if you see a useEffect with an obvious LLM comment above it, it's likely to be buggy or unnecessary), your questions about it are answered with an immediate flurry of commits and it's back to square one.
Who are we speeding up, exactly?
- Go vibe, lose drive
- All that time and effort that went into forcing Google+ everywhere and its legacy is just lots of people accidentally ending up with 2 YouTube accounts from when they were messing with that
- My daughter had an essay to write for her one of her uni modules this semester, and they're giving students access to whatever tool they're using to detect LLM-generated essays.
The thought of thousands of people having to do what she had to do is depressing. I was sitting in the room with her while she wrote it, submitted it for checking, "AI" detected! She found the only way to avoid this was to go over it again and again simplifying and dumbing it down to use very basic sentence structures which ended up reading like something from a primary schooler. The whole thing is ass-backwards.
- Maybe he accidentally forgot to accidentally
- I Have No Ability To Unread Things And I Must Unread
- > Now it is easy to ask an LLM and have the second LLM verify it
I genuinely can't tell when people are and aren't being serious any more.
- People telling you how to/how they use LLMs has become utterly boring, doesn't matter if it's some rando posting this isn't just X, it's Y slop purely for engagement, or someone you like and respect (your Addys and your Simons) putting the effort in because they want to educate/inform.
Boring.
- Low _usable_ information density is one of the main things I made Control Panel for YouTube [^0] to tackle, especially in Subscriptions.
On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a score of 1/6. Scroll down and you start getting into more watched videos, stream VODs, the unwanted Shorts shelf, thumbnails for Upcoming videos (i.e. videos which can't be watched), and videos from people I don't even subscribe to (via YouTube's recently-added Collaborations feature).
With everything in Control Panel for YouTube enabled and a minium of 5 videos per row configured, I have 15 unwatched or partially watched (up to a configurable %) videos every time. Same thing for Home, in which other things I don't want such as Mixes and Playlists can also be hidden.
It also tends to have fixes for the other things people rightfully complain about when YouTube comes up in these threads, such as (reads down the page) blocking ads and hiding promoted content, hiding Shorts everywhere, automatically switching to the original audio for auto-dubbed videos, hiding Related videos when they appear below the video pushing comments even further down, fixing the new oversized video controls and huge videos in the Related sidebar, etc. etc.
- I'm thinking of adding it next to the Tweet source when you focus a Tweet:
https://twitter.com/ControlPanelFT/status/199301008332080747...
- It's still there, they just stopped showing it in the UI. If you poke about in the React state of the Twitter UI, you can see it in the `tweets` entity cache (everything else is still Twitter under the hood too).
- [Everyone disliked that]
And not just from juniors