Bobby, a new voice assistant and Snowy successor

[edgy flame]

Samsung watches actually blur the app, im not sure what pixels do but I'm sure it's better

[karmic lion]

Pixels blur the app and put the time in front.

I wonder whether OnePlus has a harder time of it because of their aggressive offloading scheme.

[obtuse oriole]

Bobby, in addition to the wealth of knowledge available on my wrist, has also become the timer I use every day at work to know when my break is over. On the topic of apps you can't do without, I'd also argue that the RSS Reader is essential for me. Helps me catch up on things when I should be working. 😉

[celest pulsar]

Personally, I get most mileage out of the timer. Pedestrian navigation is also very convenient with turn notices on the wrist.

[karmic lion]

I have never enjoyed watch-based navigation, despite it being an obvious usecase

[celest pulsar]

I wouldn't want to set up the navigation on the watch

But getting guided by it is nice

[karmic lion]

My big pebble app of value was my own Caltrain app, which currently does not work. Need to get that behaving again.

And I guess bobby maybe but I still don't like talking to computers

And also my watch's mic is garbage.

[celest pulsar]

Another thing that would be useful is a rain alert

[wooden wedge]

screaming at a horse at your convenience

[celest pulsar]

I think that worked back in the days with buienradar

[karmic lion]

That's not really an app

Or even a watch feature, it is probably best done by just bridging a notification from your phone.

[celest pulsar]

Yes, but that's the point really...watches shine for notifications,...some of them...

Nav also boils down to notifications and so do timers

[karmic lion]

But we were talking about watch apps

Bridged notifications are a different feature

Incidentally you would be surprised how often people complain that their smartwatch shows notifications

[celest pulsar]

I'm talking about the kind of interaction I find useful when it comes to watches..
i.e. not surfing menus, not looking and fiddling for prolonged time
But instead getting alerted to relevant things.

Some apps provide that, others don't. Sometimes forwarded notifications provide it.

[karmic lion]

Apparently not a desirable feature

[wooden wedge]

to be fair, pebble app notifies about every started media playback and it's incredibly annoying

[karmic lion]

I am in this case referring to feedback on products that are actually functional

[wooden wedge]

sure

[karmic lion]

It would be nice if pebble didn't alert me to my silent notifications every ten minutes

It would also be nice if I didn't have a pile of those, silent notifications are an incoherent concept

It would also be nice if it didn't alert me to the currently playing music multiple times per track

But these are pebble specific problems that do not factor into this feedback

[wooden wedge]

I'm at least glad nothing leaks out of work profile while it's not active

[karmic lion]

I would like it if my calendar leaked out of work profile at all

Timeline is totally worthless to me

[wooden wedge]

but yeah, quiet time and night mode are not functional

I have a copy of work calendar in my google account for that reason

[karmic lion]

My work calendar is configured such that this is not possible

[wooden wedge]

it's a work calendar that only says "work" for every event though

[karmic lion]

Well I could have it say (busy) for everything

But that doesn't exactly make the timeline useful

[wooden wedge]

oh it's busy

it's very bad

[karmic lion]

What would make the timeline useful would be telling me which room I am supposed to go to

Unfortunately that takes more than the one word that fits on a pebble screen

[wooden wedge]

how hard is getting android to share work calendars with non work profile?

for an app

that's impossible to decode

[karmic lion]

Country, campus, building, floor, ??, room name, room capacity, room attributes

I've never figured out what the letter does

[wooden wedge]

A, C, E, S, Z

[karmic lion]

No idea

[wooden wedge]

does wearos do it?

[karmic lion]

No

[wooden wedge]

hmm

[karmic lion]

I think it requires the controlling enterprise to approve the app individually

[wooden wedge]

sounds like wearos would have the best chance of working then

[maiden forge]

Where did you get this gem?

[edgy flame]

https://oldschoolleather.com/

[maiden forge]

Tysm!

[weary ether]

Giant cuff ftw

[wooden wedge]

this isn't quite right

[coarse cedar]

or ...

[wooden wedge]

Import...

[coarse cedar]

Like all other AI language odels

[wooden wedge]

I also like how you can not see the middle of the sentence

why can't this be easy

I also like how it crashes the moment I get past the consent screen

[karmic lion]

😄

[wooden wedge]

in a way, it's an improvement

in other ways, there's no difference

[hidden plover]

odels

[karmic lion]

what is with the odels

do the rectangular ones also have that?

[wooden wedge]

nope

the m-is under the content indicator

because text wrapping

[karmic lion]

ah

it seems like that working correctly should be free, but perhaps it's not because of the weird text rendering

[wooden wedge]

yeah, I don't know why this doesn't work correctly ootb

using a frame to cut off the bottom works, so it's not exactly very difficult to fix

how does this even happen

[karmic lion]

height and width swapped?

[wooden wedge]

I mean, if I limited the width, it should just render in multiple lines, since I calculate the height of the title too now

and also, it would do ellipsis and not a dash

[karmic lion]

Given the hyphen it looks like it is trying to render multiple lines

[wooden wedge]

yeah...

[wooden wedge]

it's confusing because it keeps cutting the text short too

[wooden wedge]

I know why this is broken

you can't really do 2 text layers easily like this

fixing it would require rewriting this with text draw instead

I have a feeling the horse should be flipped on the round

[karmic lion]

the FormattedTextLayer is this thing.

and needs to work anyway because it's how every other screen with similar behaviour renders; this is weird because it predates that code

[wooden wedge]

yeah, but then the FormattedTextLayer would need to know the y value of where it is in the scroll

[karmic lion]

does it? the system perimeter should solve the problem

(by virtue of actually knowing that)

[wooden wedge]

hmm

[karmic lion]

though you may run into the indicator cutoff again

[wooden wedge]

well, I need to figure out how to use that

fundamentally moving text around is a pain

especially on the round, because now you actually have to wrap the text differently the moment you change its position

there is probably a bit less broken way to show this information

[edgy flame]

on the home screen?

[wooden wedge]

yeah

[edgy flame]

hmm

why's that?

[wooden wedge]

ignoring that I moved it a bit too far to the right, it seems like it would save some space if it fit under the action bar

also the bubble tail would make more sense

hmmm

[edgy flame]

true

[wooden wedge]

the fact that "You" and the time are not centered the same

[shell jetty]

excellent, more screens with paging!

[wooden wedge]

laying out text is so easy

[edgy flame]

have been thinking about how bobby's lie detector is genuinely a groundbreaking feature in the llm-assistant area

[coarse cedar]

and its just a second llm!

[wooden wedge]

strap an llm onto your llm

[coarse cedar]

honestly if it works it works, gemini flash lite isnt that expensive either

most is going to be spent on input tokens there

[edgy flame]

Gemini-android lies to me about what it's doing all the time

tool -use wise

Bobby actually is reliable enough with its tools that I haven't had the lie detector ever go off without asking it to lie, but it's a massive relief just knowing it is there and it would tell me and I don't have to go open fuckin Google tasks because the AI won't tell me it doesn't have permission to create tasks

ahem

[barren raptor]

It's kind of wild how one person created a better AI assistant in two weeks than any big corporation has done with a several hundred person team and millions of dollars.

[wooden wedge]

"two weeks"

ignoring that this project started in 2023

[coarse cedar]

still less time (in total) than other ai assistants

[wooden wedge]

especially people time

[edgy flame]

took a few years but yeah

Bobby has its issues but it is much more pleasant to use than the one on my phone

[wooden wedge]

they have a bobby on phone?

[coarse cedar]

i think shes talking about gemini 😭

like the phone assitant

not the llm

[wooden wedge]

what kind of horse is gemini?

[barren raptor]

oh yeah i forgot that it didn't start during the hackathon

[celest pulsar]

As in you ask it how it did something and that results in untrue answers?

[edgy flame]

it tells me it will use a tool, and it doesn't (or uses the wrong tool), and when i double check it it will insist that it did, in fact, use the tool

oh, this was a funny thread also: https://g.co/gemini/share/a4461e407e06

probably a YTM problem

i don't really use voice assistants for checking general knowledge questions; Google assistant broke my habit by getting less and less good at successfully answering, and I don't trust a LLM to tell me factual information without having to look it up anyway and double check. an AI assistant app is most useful to me for its tools and device integration

[celest pulsar]

I wonder how they would implement self-awareness into a stochastic token generator

[edgy flame]

i don't think you can

[celest pulsar]

Same

[edgy flame]

i don't think this is the path to actual non-human consciousness

but what do i know

and it's a touch off topic

[celest pulsar]

Afaik if you ask claude to do something and then ask how it did it, the second answer as absolutely nothing to do with the first

Just another prompt

[edgy flame]

humans do this also

[celest pulsar]

What I mean is, the processing does not even become part of the context

[wooden wedge]

what is a self awareness if not just a random words we tell ourselves

[edgy flame]

i read about some study in people whose brain hemispheres had been severed, where they'd ask part of the brain to pick an object, and the other half of the brain to explain why they had picked it, without the two knowing what the other was doing. the second half of the brain would confidently explain the reasoning behind a decision it did not make

anyway the world is wrong

[karmic lion]

granted it was a few weeks in 2023 and then a very long gap where nothing happened and then another few weeks

and a bunch of that second set of work was throwing away things done in the first set because they were no longer appropriate

[karmic lion]

@wooden wedge where are you at with round? I also started (a little bit) on round at some point and will probably get back to it eventually

But I don't particularly want to duplicate work

[wooden wedge]

I am barely anywhere

I have very little understanding of how the text flow features are supposed to work, that's my main issue

but that also means I can't get very far until I understand what I'm even doing

the only thing I managed to get anywhere were just adjustments to pixels in a couple places really

[edgy flame]

bug report: My friend asked Bobby to "write a quick sort implementation in rust" and it crashed my watch

[karmic lion]

Pebble doesn't support rust development so that tracks

[edgy flame]

she asked again and it is hanging

[karmic lion]

If it's bringing the whole watch down I don't know that there's much to be done

[edgy flame]

or, it timed out from quick launch before getting a response back

[karmic lion]

Worked for me

Extremely practical development experience

[edgy flame]

crashed my Tim's steel again, wtf

alright time to turn off and back on

[karmic lion]

Good idea

Bobby on my watch says:

I can't directly execute code or provide files. However, I can provide you with a Rust implementation of the quicksort algorithm:

fn quicksort<T: Ord>(arr: &mut [T]) {
    if arr.len() <= 1 {
        return;
    }

    let pivot_index = partition(arr);

    quicksort(&mut arr[0..pivot_index]);
    quicksort(&mut arr[pivot_index + 1..]);
}

fn partition<T: Ord>(arr: &mut [T]) -> usize {
    let len = arr.len();
    let pivot_index = len / 2;
    arr.swap(pivot_index, len - 1);

    let mut store_index = 0;
    for i in 0..len - 1 {
        if arr[i] <= arr[len - 1] {
            arr.swap(store_index, i);
            store_index += 1;
        }
    }

    arr.swap(store_index, len - 1);
    store_index
}

fn main() {
    let mut numbers = vec![4, 65, 2, -31, 0, 99, 83, 782, 1];

    println!("Before: {:?}", numbers);

    quicksort(&mut numbers);

    println!("After: {:?}", numbers);
}

This code defines a quicksort function that takes a mutable slice of elements that implement the Ord trait (meaning they can be compared). It recursively sorts the slice by partitioning it around a pivot element. The partition function chooses the middle element as the pivot, moves it to the end, and then rearranges the slice so that all elements less than or equal to the pivot are before it, and all elements greater than the pivot are after it. Finally, the main function demonstrates how to use the quicksort function.

[edgy flame]

fascinating

it responds to other prompts on my watch no clue what is happening here

[karmic lion]

your watch just doesn't like Rust.

[edgy flame]

pebble time stainless steel

[karmic lion]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

no major bugs

Was this one of the watches that crashes when it sets an appglance?

[edgy flame]

I think it may have been. I don't remember

[karmic lion]

it is known that the watches do start to misbehave more as they age. perhaps your watch has aged out of correct functionality.

[edgy flame]

perhaps the app glance thing worked properly in 2016

were there any watches that setting an image worked properly on?

[karmic lion]

no idea

I assume someone tested this feature at some point, though.

incidentally if all these random OS crashes are widespread hardware faults, that seems like another argument in favour of just using some new watches please.

[weary ether]

Sending to service failed

[karmic lion]

not much to be done there.

you can hold the select button to retry.

(when the last response is an error, your previous query is added to the list of predefined options)

[barren raptor]

@edgy flame do you have a language pack installed

In my experience, certain symbols cause the watch to crash when bobby says them with a language pack installed

[edgy flame]

yes I do, I have the English + Japanese characters pack installed

[obtuse oriole]

Big shoutouts from Eric in the new video! One might infer that Bobby functionality will be specifically tested against with the new app, which makes me happy.

[wooden wedge]

I wonder how well bobby can work if the app disconnects from the watch every half a minute

[edgy flame]

it's a really good stress test that covers a lot of ground in terms of sdk things

the fact that cobble has problems with it, and it brings these subtle hardware problems to attention, makes that clear

[wooden wedge]

at this point cobble only really has bobby problems because of the lack of support for location in the pebblekitjs

[edgy flame]

oh yeah? i remember it having some inexplicable problems with feedback reporting

i dont think anything in cobble changed but i wasnt really paying attention

[wooden wedge]

it started working at some point

[edgy flame]

it just did that

[wooden wedge]

apparently

[karmic lion]

bobby can now verbally update settings

new lies dropped

[south edge]

Katharine

[bobby-assistant:main] 3 new commits

9f5289c Add the UV index to the daily forecast. - Katharine
989c296 Add weather channel attribution. - Katharine
111ead5 Add ability to verbally change settings. - Katharine

[karmic lion]

I mostly did this so when I've wiped my settings yet again I can just tell it to use celsius please

[south edge]

Katharine

[bobby-assistant:main] 1 new commit

f0297d9 Questions aren't assertions. - Katharine

[wooden wedge]

gear icon!

[upbeat garden]

it is a test case yeah

[weary ether]

Would sports and news be doable for Bobby?

[wooden wedge]

simply have the news be notable enough to end up as a wikipedia source 😄

[edgy flame]

we should make a Wikipedia page for rebble

we're a footnote on pebble's wiki page

[barren raptor]

I'm not sure that Rebble would be notable enough to meet the requirements for a Wikipedia page

like, what would it actually say

[edgy flame]

that's.. hmm

I think it is notable that rebble has kept Pebble services going for longer than pebble did

we are also a 501c4 non-profit, and we pay grants to people for Pebble infrastructural development, or we used to anyway

touché

[barren raptor]

It's notable, but not much about rebble has actually been written in places wikipedia considers trustworthy

like, an article would pretty much just say "Rebble is a foundation that provides web services for discontinued Pebble smartwatches" and like a list of features

which isn't a good wikipedia article

[weary ether]

Well, I thought that Katharine had said that Bobby can consume any thing that was wikimedia

I just saw the maps complication in real life for the first time and it is so good looking

[wooden wedge]

mediawiki != wikimedia

mediawiki is the software, wikimedia is the foundation

and afaik, bobby is only connected to a single mediawiki instance, which is wikipedia

wikipedia is run by wikimedia though

so are a bunch of other mediawikis

I hope this is not too confusing

[edgy flame]

normal for software

[wooden wedge]

I have confused myself writing it multiple times

[wooden wedge]

somebody should really develop a good mapping software that doesn't require native pebblekit and then make use of complications whenever they come out

it sounds hella painful to actually get that working because most mapping apis cost quite a bit

[hollow rivet]

Still not as bad as Wordpress the idea vs. Wordpress the service 😭

[wooden wedge]

wtf is wordpress the idea?

[hollow rivet]

The OSS

[wooden wedge]

oh sure

[edgy flame]

different again from biblical wordpress

[wooden wedge]

there is also wordpress the company

[edgy flame]

the royal wordpress

[weary ether]

right - meant to say mediawiki

re:

and LCP you suggested a particular gaming wiki

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Sites_using_MediaWiki/en

but that doesn't really answer the sports / news question

so yeah IDK

sports seems like a perfect widget

[weary ether]

xD

[rough cliff]

https://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page maybe?

[karmic lion]

Technically two: https://github.com/pebble-dev/bobby-assistant/blob/f0297d9bf3c530601efc3b9aecb7b7b8cc38af4a/service/assistant/functions/wikipedia.go#L43

[wooden wedge]

oh yeah, that's an important addition

[karmic lion]

There's an assumption made that's never explicitly stated: to work in practice, the wiki must be popular enough that Gemini can guess article titles effectively

And also have heard of the wiki

[wooden wedge]

fair

I was gonna ask why no mlp wiki of some kind, but it seems the migration from fandom of that wiki is happening like over the last 3 days, so that might take a moment

[karmic lion]

I was not aware the was happening

Granted the last time I looked at that wiki was many years ago

I hope the ridiculous, multi-thousand entry List of Ponies makes it

[wooden wedge]

oh, I might be mistaken, though it's not entirely clear what that state of mlp wikis is exactly

there's a few of them

I found at least 4 not even looking for one

[karmic lion]

That tracks

[wooden wedge]

oh I found a very long list

[karmic lion]

List of ponies seems broken for me

Sad

It was constructed in JavaScript on the client by reading all the sublists

Now I just get the list of lists

[wooden wedge]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17UQlCalDMbM9LQqPv25UwW7pZk6n1L6A7MPLqRL2ODU/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.4ikd36ot2pwk

that's a lot of wikis

[karmic lion]

https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_ponies was the page

[wooden wedge]

https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_ponies/full

there's a helpful link to display the full list

[karmic lion]

Hurrah

This is going to crash my phone browser.

[wooden wedge]

the "a new generation" designs are so weird and kinda creepy

[karmic lion]

Yes

They look (even) closer to dogs

[karmic lion]

A lot of the new generation ones suffer from being terribly rendered, too

They did the film and then IIRC dissolved the studio that did that completely, punted it to another studio for a TV series, and gave them neither time nor budget.

The ones taken from the film generally look less bad.

[wooden wedge]

yeah,that's fine

[karmic lion]

They do have the advantage that it's actually possible for them to physically exist

[wooden wedge]

oh that's cute, the figurines of friendship is magic cast on the shelf

[karmic lion]

The FiM approach of character designs that cannot exist in three dimensions was interesting for what is functionally a toy advert

[wooden wedge]

I love that

[wooden wedge]

soul over profits >:D

I guess the idea of that new series is more akin to the world being actually modern though

[karmic lion]

Yes

Apparently the kids these days need the ponies to have tiktok

Which they do

(not branded, mind)

They took the approach of setting it in the (indeterminately) distant future but nominally the same world, which really didn't work out for them

Thus the figures on the shelf

[wooden wedge]

I have no idea what the opinion of the fandom on this entire shift is, I haven't been particularly involved in a decade probably

kinda wild to think about how long it has been actually

[karmic lion]

As with all things, split.

[wooden wedge]

yeah

[karmic lion]

Mostly negative

Then the mostly negative contingent largely disappeared

Which makes sense

(I would be in the mostly negative camp I suppose)

The whole thing was cancelled last year so I guess it didn't really work out

[wooden wedge]

oh was it

[karmic lion]

Yup

Along the way some even more dubiously conceived G6 stuff leaked but that never went anywhere.

[wooden wedge]

I feel like that's kinda how mlp has been for a while since the original series, it doesn't end up working out for them, until they shifted to fim

[karmic lion]

(apparently the G6 strategy was to take (the name and design of) three main characters from G4, three from G5, and stick them in a summer camp or something)

I stopped paying almost any attention years ago so I don't really know what's up these days.

[wooden wedge]

I keep forgetting what the actual original ponies looked like

that is very horse

[karmic lion]

Yes

[wooden wedge]

oh my god, pony life looks so weird

this is a crime I think

no wonder they did a redo of the series a year later >:D

I guess I might watch some of these on the weekend and see what it's about

[karmic lion]

I think Pony Life was always intended as essentially an intermission

But it sure is very weird.

[urban solstice]

My god

[rough cliff]

???

I thought there were like 9?

[karmic lion]

it is an exhaustive list.

[rough cliff]

I am obviously not well versed in the pony universe 😄

[wooden wedge]

I can name more than 9 from the top of my head

I would have said that most people can name more than that, but I feel like that would be a bit of https://xkcd.com/2501/

[karmic lion]

I like how some of them have titles

[wooden wedge]

even though I'm not much of an expert

[karmic lion]

"that sounds like a title from a game"

"ah, it is"

although the wiki and the card disagree

maybe there's another card where he's sad

[wooden wedge]

he has fabulous hair

[rough cliff]

His hair gives off powdered wig vibes 😄

[karmic lion]

given the name and the note "see Weather Control Pegasi", I'm going to assume it's just like that

[wooden wedge]

the entire universe is wild

is there a list of humans on that wiki btw?

a list of dragons?

[karmic lion]

no clue

[wooden wedge]

https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_non-pony_characters

[karmic lion]

https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Equestria_Girls_characters is where most of the humans are hiding

though there is also, separately, a list of non-pony humans

[wooden wedge]

huh

[karmic lion]

honestly in retrospect it is wild that this cartoon managed to run for almost a decade as a single series and largely coherent universe

[wooden wedge]

the concept of two twilights confuses me

[karmic lion]

well there's Twilight Sparkle (pony) and Twilight Sparkle (from the human dimension), and also Twilight Sparkle (from the mirror dimension) and Twilight Sparkle (evil clone)

[wooden wedge]

4 twilights then

I watched this a long time ago at this point

[karmic lion]

I think the mirror dimension one may be restricted to the comics. the evil clone only lasts a few episodes before being brutally turned into a log.

[wooden wedge]

uh huh

well, I need to seriously catch up

[karmic lion]

you can tell the other two apart because of the glasses (as seen in this regrettably mid-blink screenshot I found on google)

and also because they mostly exist in different series and almost never interact.

anyway this sort of diversion is why a decade ago the Pebble slack had a #ponies channel

…# ponies

as you can see, this one does too, it's just harder to get to.

[wooden wedge]

at that time, mlp was a bit more of a current topic at least

it was a huge thing

[karmic lion]

it was

now it is not so much

we can't even get ten thousand people together in a convention centre any more 😦

…though on that topic, I still need to figure out whether I'm going to Everfree this year.

apparently someone wants me on their panel

[wooden wedge]

I'm sure covid didn't help this

[karmic lion]

(everfree, for general context: https://everfreenw.com )

[karmic lion]

not remotely, but the big con decided it was done and shut down in 2019 anyway, and then all the organisers have spent the subsequent time being unable to believe their luck on that timing

in 2018 they got 4500 people or something, down from a peak of 9800 or so. in 2019 they made it back over 10,000 for the last year and were absolutely not prepared to be that popular.

[wooden wedge]

I was going to attend a pony event in prague last year, but I happened to leave the country for unrelated reasons without realizing I would miss out

[karmic lion]

then there was a big bounce for everyone else in 2020 except they were all cancelled and the thing just disappeared

[karmic lion]

I was showing the guy who runs that event around my office last week

[wooden wedge]

idk why but pony events avoid me a lot of the time

I was also planning to attend in warsaw a few years earlier

it's a curse I bet

[wooden wedge]

that's really fun

[karmic lion]

I ran some online stuff with him in 2020/2021

[wooden wedge]

hell yeah

I dislike running online events

probably for the reason that I usually do worldwide events that happent to run for 24 hours and there's no way I can stay up that long

[karmic lion]

I certainly tired of it after running them at a rapid clip

https://ponyfest.horse/3.0/staff/ look it's me. and also all the other people who helped.

[wooden wedge]

that's really cool

[karmic lion]

it was great, back in early 2020 it was so easy to get Special Guests to do these things.

[wooden wedge]

not that surprising

[karmic lion]

Running those things took up basically all my time for most of a year. It was fun. I don't really want to do it again.

we mostly didn't do 24 hour things, though: https://ponyfest.horse/3.0/schedule/

[wooden wedge]

https://suno.pona.la/2021/tenpo/

oh yeah, this logo, I wonder what was the inspiration

[karmic lion]

haha

[wooden wedge]

(it makes perfect sense in toki pona since the word for sun and day is the same)

[karmic lion]

I left that group years ago, but apparently they still use the software I wrote, which is wild

partly it's wild because someone other than me managed to figure out how to run it

it was not especially easy to use.

[wooden wedge]

I wrote that schedule site and it's such a pain to make a json for it

but every time we get somebody complaining that this schedule is so much nicer

so we have to bring it back

[karmic lion]

I did try to make our schedules very easy to deal with

There's a service that parses a Google Sheet and converts that into the JSON that the schedule uses

[wooden wedge]

at some point I gave up and made an exporter from google sheets

[karmic lion]

and then the same data is pulled everywhere else so that e.g. the stream pages all show what's currently streaming, it's used on the overlays, etc.

[wooden wedge]

it still kinda sucks though, because it will not work unless you have all the events ordered correctly

[karmic lion]

the clever part was that the google sheet was read live, and every client that read it refreshed it regularly, so we could adjust the schedule for reality on the fly and have it update everywhere

[wooden wedge]

ah yeah, I wrote a discord bot and an overlay for that schema too

[wooden wedge]

sadly, I didn't make it that smooth, you had to run the schedule update manually, but everything else updated automatically based on that

[wooden wedge]

I need to rewrite that website, it's a pile of the worst js in existence

[karmic lion]

this was the sheet

[wooden wedge]

that's really cool

I wish the date on our schedule was well formatted

we have unix timestamps there for some reason now

I just parsed the 11:30-12:30 thing into time periods since that's what the script expects though

fairly sure it takes number of minutes

at some point it used the number of 5 minute increments

[karmic lion]

also this was great: https://youtu.be/r8Mrmrli6YY?si=do2jXh4bP72fHA2F&t=670

(that links into an intermission, but you can skip around for actual content)

the 2D game integration was a wild adventure

[wooden wedge]

yeah, that's really cool

live music is always my favourite part of things like that

though that being said, I attend linguistic conferences thinly vailed as a way to have fun

[south edge]

Katharine

[bobby-assistant:main] 3 new commits

d54428b Fix daily forecast UV lookup. - Katharine
8a92b68 Fix some settings bugs. - Katharine
1a8a267 Add wind speed to daily and hourly forecasts. - Katharine

[wooden wedge]

is there wind direction available?

[karmic lion]

I have that information but have not plumbed it through

available in both bearings and cardinal directions

I would probably give the model the cardinal directions because intuitively "SSW" feels easier for it to deal with than 194.

do you have a use case?

[wooden wedge]

idk, I'm asking because I feel like the wind speed usually comes with the direction

I'm sure it's useful if you sail or something

[karmic lion]

I do not think Bobby is an appropriate navigational resource for sailors

[wooden wedge]

yet

[south edge]

Katharine

[bobby-assistant:main] 1 new commit

3aca6b9 Add wind direction, too. - Katharine

[karmic lion]

tada

incidentally, attempting to just hook it up to strategywiki has not had useful results.

evidently not popular enough for it to just know what to do

[karmic lion]

woo

I did a thing

anyway this feature provided by popular demand (of @edgy flame and nobody else)

it'll do routes by car, bike, foot, or transit

it can give you step by step directions if you ask for them but that doesn't seem very practical.

I still probably need to set up some method to save special destinations like 'home' or 'work'

[obtuse oriole]

Bobby keeps getting brainier and brainier. 🤘

[karmic lion]

pebble development is the worst.

nothing works and then your watch reboots for no reason

and developing a voice assistant when the microphone is so bad that I can't tell what I'm saying, let alone the computer, is a ridiculous exercise in futility

[south edge]

Katharine

[bobby-assistant:routing] 1 new commit

e3187dd Add ability to provide routing information. - Katharine

[karmic lion]

whee.

[south edge]

Katharine

[bobby-assistant] Branch routing was force-pushed to `68bd422`

Compare changes

[quasi steeple]

Hell yeah, that's awesome

[edgy flame]

wooooooo thank you so muuuuuch

this is amazing

[weary ether]

Wow this is sweet!!

[barren raptor]

She says, while continuing to try and succeed

this is awesome

[urban solstice]

Such is the life of a software engineer. It is love, it is pain every step of the way. (But sometimes, it's not, and that's nice)

[upbeat nacelle]

I would ❤️ to see more of the beautiful artwork across pebble os

[wooden wedge]

from bobby or in bobby

[karmic lion]

whee, traces

[karmic lion]

and there goes my watch randomly rebooting

love it when it does that

is this somehow my fault? who can say

is there any plausible way to figure out why it happens and avoid it? not really.

all we know is that the pebble firmware has no major bugs

[wooden wedge]

thankfully, otherwise selling new products based on it would require you to do some development

[karmic lion]

route map no longer has giant pins on it.

Wish I could afford the memory for the line to be a different colour

[acoustic wolf]

app crashes also seem to reboot the watch

[karmic lion]

That is generally false.

[acoustic wolf]

I've noticed it a lot

on different apps, not just bobby

[karmic lion]

I have crashed many an app and the watch almost never reboots in the process.

[karmic lion]

and there goes the watch rebooting again

I don't know why I am bothering to develop anything for such an unstable platform.

I guess users will just have to deal with their watch sometimes abruptly rebooting when they ask bobby a question

because that is just wholly beyond my control.

and then also deal with the android app bug where if the watch reboots it just leaves the previous instance of the JS running, reuslting in the app being in an inconsistent state when next launched

[acoustic wolf]

I wonder if you can run bobby on a bigboard and get the coredump

swans has one

snowy_bb but monochrome

[upbeat garden]

snowy doesn't have bt yet on the OSS firmware though

[acoustic wolf]

who said anything about OSS firmware

his bb runs pebbleOS 3.0.2

oh that probably is a problem

oh well

[upbeat garden]

coredump annoying to use if you dont have elf with all the nice debug data

[karmic lion]

how do you end up with a monochrome snowy_bb

[acoustic wolf]

rev B

rev C was colour

most of the rev C's are dead too, the FPGA isn't flashed

[karmic lion]

targeting a nonexistent device might alsobe a problem.

[acoustic wolf]

it is a real platform

[karmic lion]

monochrome snowy is not a real platform in any meaningful sense

certainly not one bobby expects to exist.

I have a pile of bigboards, though I think my snowy one currently has a round screen attached.

or possibly I gave it to joshua, but I think that was a different one

[acoustic wolf]

I think mine was rev C

and dead

I'll get to find out on monday

[south edge]

Katharine

[bobby-assistant:routing] 10 new commits

0c09c91 routing: actually look up the name of the desti... - Katharine
b60797b Use the correct quota cost for calculating routes. - Katharine
08bb38f Charge against quota for map generation. - Katharine
14e8f63 Add trace spans for maps. - Katharine
a6509ca Use circles instead of pins to mark route line ... - Katharine

Katharine

[bobby-assistant:main] 11 new commits

68bd422 Add ability to provide routing information. - Katharine
0c09c91 routing: actually look up the name of the desti... - Katharine
b60797b Use the correct quota cost for calculating routes. - Katharine
08bb38f Charge against quota for map generation. - Katharine
14e8f63 Add trace spans for maps. - Katharine

[karmic lion]

okay!

I have shipped the routing feature on the server

no client change needed

you can ask it questions like "how long would it take to drive to McDonald's"?

or more complicated questions like "give me transit directions to Google Building CL3 starting on Monday at 9am"

[wooden wedge]

that's really cool

it does work rather well

[karmic lion]

and it should provide a little map showing the route

[wooden wedge]

it does

[karmic lion]

I probably still need some sort of favourite location system though.

[weary ether]

This app is amazing!

The transit stuff is honestly super helpful

The natural language feel of the information is so nice

[weary ether]

It works extremely well

Taking transit on a Sunday meant irregular schedules this morning and so on the way out the door hoping to catch the next train I asked Bobby when it was. Got an accurate answer with a real time snapshot of my location, the walking route, and a walk time estimate.

[rough cliff]

Bobby transit is magical

It just tells me when the next train to wherever is

Without giving me a 15 page essay on how to use Google Maps

[coarse cedar]

gave me the route and directions to my uni campus, awesome!

[wooden wedge]

oh boy, we are gonna run out of the free api queries in no time

[karmic lion]

🎉

Glad it's useful

[karmic lion]

I've noticed Gemini is suddenly capable of doing things without writing an essay about them

Like this

[barren raptor]

They're using Bobby code, obviously.

They do technically own it

[karmic lion]

It's true, Bobby is a Google project

[fervent steppe]

My 10 year old Pebble is smarter than my iPhone 15 Pro.

[barren raptor]

Bobby continues to be the best virtual assistant

[rough cliff]

Pff

It's amazing what can happen when you build a good product

(/s)

[fervent steppe]

and thus begins the transformation of Rebble to an AI First company

[rough cliff]

I think it is hilarious that one person built an assistant app that is wildly more useful than the app (which uses the same technology!) provided by a multi-trillion dollar company.

[rough cliff]

™️

[barren raptor]

the only thing I wish Bobby (well, Rebble really) could do is understand my language so I can use these features without having to spell place names

...actually, it's listed as supported on google's site... will it just understand me if i use auto?

ah, right. it crashes on cyrillic chracters. i forgot about that part.

[wooden wedge]

if somebody fixes the major bugs in the firmware that doesn't have major bugs, bobby might become useful even if you try using cyrillic

[barren raptor]

I'm really hoping that all these bugs either magically go away on core devices or that the new interest they bring will make them easier to debug

[wooden wedge]

I don't believe in magic fixing bugs really

[barren raptor]

There's still some uncertainty if these truly are bugs, since as far as I can tell none of the issues occur on all watches

Katharine's "minor hardware faults" theory is still technically possible even if I doubt it

[wooden wedge]

is there a watch that doesn't have an issue with cyrillic?

[barren raptor]

I don't know how many people have tried, but there was another case with other symbols that crashed on some watches but not others which seems related?

Might be nice if someone installs the Cyrillic language pack and gives it a shot

[karmic lion]

I think the Cyrillic bug is universal.

I think we even knew that happened when pebble was still around

[barren raptor]

are you sure? I've only seen Bobby do it. Is there something else that would trigger a similar thing?

[karmic lion]

A reason certain language packs never officially existed was because they would cause watches to reboot occasionally

But I'm not sure, otherwise I wouldn't have said "I think"

[barren raptor]

oh interesting

[wooden wedge]

it crashes only if bobby responds in russian it seems

it doesn't happen if I speak russian

which I don't do well because it keeps thinking I speak polish

on the account I'm polish, it's not that far off

[barren raptor]

How feasible is selfbuilding bobby? I'm curious if I can prompt engineer them into responding only with latin characters even if the query is in Cyrillic

[wooden wedge]

if it responds in english though, it's fine

[karmic lion]

You could probably just set the response language to English and avoid the problem a chunk of the time

Though not if it tries to name a place

[barren raptor]

And Rebble has suddenly decided that I speak Greek.

And hilariously, Bobby claims not to understand me.

[karmic lion]

sometimes it decides that it's not going to deal with non-english input

I don't know what's up with that

[wooden wedge]

yay, another crash

I asked it what moscow is in cyrillic alphabet

it's rather annoying that it can't use this set of characters

oh wait, spalding has a different pebble logo on boot, huh

[barren raptor]

It's very odd, because Cyrillic isn't that weird as far as alphabets go

it behaves pretty much like latin with different symbols, it doesn't have compound characters or weird formatting or anything like that

[wooden wedge]

pebble doesn't think so

I could see if maybe it's a fault of the language pack itself

[coarse cedar]

computer pebble says no

[wooden wedge]

it's not that hard to make a new one

I would just have to isolate the unicode ranges and then generate a few sets of fonts from noto I guess

[barren raptor]

that would be interesting actually!

[wooden wedge]

it is generally harder because my old way of doing it was broken by my distro deciding to no longer ship python 2

I had a modified sdk that would output any font it generated as files I could use for this kinda thing

nothing really stopping me from doing that again tbf

[coarse cedar]

Just use pypy!

[wooden wedge]

yeeah

my system is slowly just becoming an assembly of hacks

[rough cliff]

What distro do you have?

[wooden wedge]

tumbleweed

[rough cliff]

I know pyenv will just built python + pip from source

[rough cliff]

Ah. I would have suggested using deadsnakes but not sure if it supports plain Debian

[wooden wedge]

no relation to debian!

[rough cliff]

correction: tumbleweed is not debian

[rough cliff]

It sure sounds like a Debian name!

[wooden wedge]

it's an english word for a plant

it could be any of them really

[rough cliff]

Fair enough

Anyway, I would give pyenv a shot

It also has a feature that when you inevitably destroy your python environment (you will, it's python) you can destroy the installation and build again

[wooden wedge]

well, I have a working setup yet again

it was relatively easy, I just linked some stuff together

my emulator is wrecked though

[karmic lion]

I'm not aware of a Toy Story character called Tumbleweed

[wooden wedge]

I'm sure they are coming in toy story 6

[rough cliff]

Are they actually toy story characters? That's funny

[karmic lion]

Debian codenames are all Toy Story characters

It's important to have a theme

[rough cliff]

That's fun

I never noticed ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[karmic lion]

Apparently the one after the next one will be Forky, so they're keeping their list of options up to date

[rough cliff]

I've only ever seen the first toy story so I'm totally unaware of any new characters 😅

[karmic lion]

Disappointing

[wooden wedge]

well, my pypkjs is broken though

ImportError: No module named pypkjs.PyV8.linux64._PyV8, fun

there is an .so of that name there, but apparently python doesn't wanna use that?

[obtuse oriole]

Would it help for the system prompt to avoid responding using Cyrillic characters, since it'll crash the watch due to a bug? (Bobby is already told that it's running on a Pebble, so crashing the device it's running on would be interpreted as a bad thing.)

[karmic lion]

I tried telling it this and if you tell it that and also to respond in a Cyrillic language it does it anyway

Even if you point out that the device will crash and the user will be sad

[quasi steeple]

Is it worth filtering out Cyrillic characters server side?

[karmic lion]

I could transliterate them, though that requires correctly choosing one of the thirteen possible systems for doing so.

I do not have the knowledge to make that choice, nor the confidence that any such choice is both useful and wholly uncontroversial.

[karmic lion]

So I'm pondering putting a one time "what's new" popup in after certain updates.

The question is: is it too disruptive to show this popup on a quick launch? If I don't I suspect many users would never see it, but if I do then I am delaying them from their task.

(and if they never see it then they may never learn of handy new features)

I suppose they would already be delayed because by definition this popup would always be preceded by the app install progress bar

So maybe justifying that bar is alright.

[quasi steeple]

Those are good points, but I'd rather have a gibberish answer than the watch crash. Could return an error message "the response contains unsupported Cyrillic characters" or something

[karmic lion]

For most people, Cyrillic has no negative impact, you just get squares

For the people for whom it does crash, refusing to answer seems exactly as useful as crashing

If I'm going to have a special workaround for an OS bug affecting almost nobody, I'd rather it be a useful one.

[quasi steeple]

I love reading change logs for software I actively like using.
Windows update? Gross
Bobby update? Tell me more
I vote yes, but I'm also a big nerd and am probability in the minority. Does it need to be a pop up? Can you just insert it into the message history?

[karmic lion]

Putting it in the message flow, where it doesn't really belong, seems more confusing

If it's a popup you can just press one button and then it's gone forever

(probably I'd make both back and select dismiss it)

Having a nice list of then in the menu somewhere to go back and look would be nice, but feels like wasted code space, so is unlikely.

[quasi steeple]

Definitely fair points. Though I'd add an error message is less frustrating than a crash

[karmic lion]

It's true

But what would be better would be for people at relevant context to explain the available decisions.

Preferably leading to a workaround that doesn't turn out to be deeply insulting to some set of people or just illegible.

[quasi steeple]

I don't think it would be too confusing to have a message from bobby saying "hey I got smarter and can do x now!", it is supposed to be conversational. It would also allow you to finish your task immediately and read it at your convenience.

[acoustic wolf]

I wonder if you could make bobby send its version to the conversation and then reply back with changelog

[wooden wedge]

the js is very inconsistent version wise apparently

as in, the c code can be different version compared to js code

[karmic lion]

Which sure is exciting

[karmic lion]

it does occur to me that I have no way to test these update messages

since I would only show them on an update that isn't the first install

but sideloading on Android always counts as a first install

I wonder whether pypkjs is less broken

looks like it

so I can test in the emulator

[fervent steppe]

hm, there’s no way to self-AVRCP on iOS, right?

a future pkjs could otherwise learn to remote control other music player apps and read their databases, which could be a neat tool for bobby

[karmic lion]

I am reasonably confident there isn't, but there is a convenient Bluetooth device just hanging around.

(Granted if you're not doing classic then this is not so easy)

[fervent steppe]

indeed, you get only AMS over BLE

[karmic lion]

Actually the one time I actually tried to implement anything involving AVRCP I spent half a day staring at completely uninformative Bluetooth documents and then implemented the volume control in the pebble app instead

(I think this is no longer permitted)

It is possible on iOS to read the user's Apple Music database and control playback, so this is in principle a possible if perhaps over-specialised thing to build

(It is also technically achievable for Spotify, but legally prohibited)

[fervent steppe]

ah, that would be good enough for me

since I, like a user of modern technology who does not like it to have any functionality, have all my music locally and absolutely do not stream music

[karmic lion]

now I guess you just need to get this functionality into the iOS app and pebblekit js

[fervent steppe]

exactly

luckily, the iOS app will be completely open source, except for all of the things that make it an app, so that'll be easy to do

[karmic lion]

🎉

[fervent steppe]

mission failed successfully

[fervent steppe]

it seems bobby.pbw gets confused if there is no phone connection

my phone dropped off while I was talking to it, and when I asked it to start dictation from the home screen, I got a blank screen with an action nub, and that was all

it also heard shenzhen bay checkpoint as a request for directions by jetpack, which it did not seem to be able to do. but I blame my Pebble 2 Titanium for that one

[coarse cedar]

Got the Idea that maybe for stuff like home assistant we could add MCP Support to Bobby? https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/mcp_server/

[sage laurel]

Yes please, that would unlock so much functionality in Bobby!

[quasi steeple]

Finally got a working pebble time, I've signed up for a rebble subscription but I get a crash when trying to use dictation. Sending an example prompt works though

'05-17 04:00:01.841 1577 1577 E Pbl : [WatchVoiceSession] Session 20: Failed transition to PROCESSING state from LISTENING
05-17 04:00:26.101 1577 1577 E Pbl : [NuanceConfig] Unable to determine URL for locale: eng-USA
05-17 04:00:26.101 1577 1577 E Pbl : [NuanceConfig] Falling back to default, hard-coded endpoint: pebble-ncs-eng-USA.nuancemobility.net
05-17 04:00:26.126 1577 1577 E Pbl : [NuanceConfig] Unable to determine URL for locale: eng-USA
05-17 04:00:26.126 1577 1577 E Pbl : [NuanceConfig] Falling back to default, hard-coded endpoint: pebble-ncs-eng-USA.nuancemobility.net
05-17 04:00:26.126 1577 1577 W Pbl : [WatchVoiceSession] Session 21: Illegal attempt to transition from state LISTENING to state PROCESSING. Stack trace: [dalvik.system.VMStack.getThreadStackTrace(Native Method), java.lang.Thread.getStackTrace(Thread.java:1955), com.getpebble.android.framework.p.n$c.verifyTransition(SourceFile:85), com.getpebble.android.framework.p.n.c(SourceFile:370), com.getpebble.android.framework.p.n$6$2.run(SourceFile:259), android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:991), android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:102), android.os.Looper.loopOnce(Looper.java:232), android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:317), android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:8973), java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method), com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:591), com.android.internal.os.ExecInit.main(ExecInit.java:50), com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit.nativeFinishInit(Native Method), com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit.main(RuntimeInit.java:369)]
05-17 04:00:26.126 1577 1577 E Pbl : [WatchVoiceSession] Session 21: Failed transition to PROCESSING state from LISTENING
05-17 04:00:52.352 1577 1577 E Pbl : [NuanceConfig] Unable to determine URL for locale: eng-USA
05-17 04:00:52.353 1577 1577 E'

Any ideas?

I'm using the latest grapheneOS

I'm also on hotel WiFi so its possible they're blocking something

No clip actually makes it to the voice debugging webpage

[shell jetty]

can you go into the options and set the dictation language to auto? 🤔

[quasi steeple]

Yeah the eng-USA not working is weird. I'll try now

OK, so the setting page for voice language was blank

I force closed the app, cleared the cache, and restarted it, which let me set the language to 'English (United States)'

Its working now!

[shell jetty]

mission accomplished!

[hollow rivet]

Bobby sometimes gets a little temperamental if you try to use it right after signing up for web services

[quasi steeple]

Understandable, I'd be freaked out by a stranger too

[quasi steeple]

Appreciate the sanity check

[kind halo]

are there any plans to have bobby be able to interact with other apps?

[wooden wedge]

what do you have in mind?

[kind halo]

I'm planning to create an app for our local public transport service
and I thought it would be neat, if the user could ask Bobby for when a specific tram leaves

which could open the app with that tramline's information

[wooden wedge]

bobby can already do that apparently

I asked it "when does the next bus # leave to x" and it told me the time and showed me a map

[kind halo]

but that's Google Maps integration, isn't it?

[wooden wedge]

yes

pebble apps can't really interact with each other like that though

you can't open another app and for sending data between apps unless you do it outside of the context of the sdk, it's not possible either

user made integrations would be interesting, and probably possible to do at least on the server side, but that's not something that's being considered as far as I know

[kind halo]

sad... oh well

[edgy flame]

it would be amazing if we were able to do that

I'd love if Bobby could set alarms in the system app, or switch my watch face

[wooden wedge]

I was thinking about user integrations on server side, though that sounds difficult to implement

I was thinking specifically in the context of home automation stuff

you would have to do quite a lot of trips to make it work, and I'm not sure how installing additional integrations would even work

there would also need to be some generic way to do things that bobby currently does in a very specific way, like drawing images or creating notices with custom icons

[weary ether]

Bobby API

[wooden wedge]

bapi

[karmic lion]

This is the question to which MCP is the generic answer

[wooden wedge]

that would be fun

[mortal mantle]

If you use Android and the Home Assistant Companion App you can use notification commands to call various intents for other apps on your phone (https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notification-commands/#broadcast-intent). For example: all Alarm apps in Android should have exposed intents for controlling alarms so you can easily automate that. Would be cool if the Pebble app supported some handy intents (launching app on watch, changing watch face, toggling quiet mode, etc).

[wooden wedge]

that is assuming that the firmware has any kind of support that that sort of thing

which some of it it does since it's just blobdb storage

[mellow plaza]

Any chance of having the ability to send the voice dications in Bobby to a API endpoint via an HTTP request? There's an app which used to do this but it's not compatible on my P2 and no idea if it still works anyway. https://apps.rebble.io/en_US/application/566423c99be95ecaee000023

[hollow rivet]

You could just try adding Diorite to the supported platforms list and building?

[mellow plaza]

cheers might give that a go, haven't got round to any pebble development yet but need to get stuck in

[hollow rivet]

Oh if you don't have the SDK set up I can build it for you (I assume you've got a server you can test this with?)

[mellow plaza]

Nope haven't got round to installing the SDK yet. If it's trivial to build it then that would be great thanks. Yup I've got a server to test

[hollow rivet]

Here you go! It installs on my P2, I don't have a server set up to test it though

You can use the Sideload Helper app on F-Droid on Android, not sure about iPhone

[mellow plaza]

that's great thanks @hollow rivet , installed sideload helper and the app now works a treat on my P2HR, just need to get my sever side script up and running now which I'll do later this evening, intending on using it to quickly add new todoist tasks. Thanks again for your help!

[wooden wedge]

if it's related to time related stuff, you can also add pins to the timeline and have a possibility to ping http endpoint from the timeline

https://developer.rebble.io/developer.pebble.com/guides/pebble-timeline/pin-structure/index.html#http-actions

[mellow plaza]

thanks, yeah I currently use a server script and the timeline token to push todoist tasks to my timeline

haven't got round to creating a "complete task" timeline action yet but will eventually

[wooden wedge]

I should probably do that for myself and google tasks

[mellow plaza]

Was a quick and easy solution for getting 4 of my most important tasks easily viewable on pebble. @hollow rivet was able to fix a broken old app called "my data" which fetches json from a custom url, so I'll be switching to that now. https://apps.rebble.io/en_US/application/53b0607c94943f8e710001e2

[silent meadow]

Hi guys, just installed the Bobby app after bringing my old pebble time back to life. However it seems I can't get any response after recording a question. Is there a support thread you can point me out to?

[wooden wedge]

can you long press in a thread where that happens and report the thread? I don't remeber if there has to be a response for that to work

[deft quail]

Just learned about this project. Seems super cool, but I have a round pebble :_(
Just wanted to voice interest for a round port at some point. ❤️

[karmic lion]

There does, otherwise there's nothing to report.

[karmic lion]

What does it actually do after you try asking a question?

[south edge]

Katharine

[bobby-assistant:main] 1 new commit

fa3c874 Add one-time release note display for 1.4. - Katharine

[karmic lion]

it cost 440 bytes of code space to have release notes, incidentally, since we're counting.

[karmic lion]

I guess it's around time to finally ship this update

if I can remember what is actualy in the update

someone on the github issues has noted that bobby will fairly reliably cause the pebble to reset if asked for "the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight"

which I can in fact reproduce

[hollow rivet]

Damnit why did I try that 😑

[karmic lion]

did it cause your pebble to reset? 😄

it doesn't cause this, however, if you don't dictate the question

discuss

so whether this causes the watch to fall over is apparently a function of whether a dictation session exists

because that makes sense.

[hollow rivet]

Huh. I asked it, it brought up the calculation widget then froze and restarted

[karmic lion]

yup, that's what it does

it's actually dying trying to show you the result in a number widget

the ultimate message to the watch that kills it is {"HIGHLIGHT_WIDGET":1,"HIGHLIGHT_WIDGET_PRIMARY":"1,802,614,041,067","HIGHLIGHT_WIDGET_SECONDARY":"furlongs per fortnight"}

[hollow rivet]

Huh. It's not an overflow issue, is it?

[karmic lion]

shouldn't be

the watch doesn't ever process anything as a number

the fact that it doesn't repro unless you use a real dictation session means I can't do it in an emulator

[hollow rivet]

Asking it what 1 trillion plus 1 is results in a similar crash

Oops it... unpaired my watch??

[karmic lion]

My guess would be that it's exploding while it measures text to figure out the font size

that or it's actually crashing rendering the overflow ellipsis

if you crash it three times in fifteen minutes the watch will factory reset

[hollow rivet]

Oh lol

[karmic lion]

you can reset the counter by turning off the watch from the settings menu

I wonder whether bobby loading every size of system font is somehow the problem.

(which is free for bobby because system fonts don't cost app memory. but maybe it's not free for the kernel.)

[hollow rivet]

Yeah looks like you're right about the width thing. It crashes at 100 billion and longer

[karmic lion]

this may be the latin version of the cyrillic crash

[hollow rivet]

Anything shorter fits in 1 line

[karmic lion]

I don't think wrapping is the problem

it can deal with it if you don't start a dictation session first

[hollow rivet]

Huh. Maybe it's just a coincidence then?

[karmic lion]

I'm guessing the offender is this:

data->number_font = fonts_get_system_font(FONT_KEY_LECO_32_BOLD_NUMBERS);
data->number_height = 32;
size = graphics_text_layout_get_content_size(widget->number, data->number_font, GRect(0, 0, bounds.size.w + 100, bounds.size.h), GTextOverflowModeTrailingEllipsis, GTextAlignmentLeft);
if (size.w > inset_bounds.size.w) {
  data->number_font = fonts_get_system_font(FONT_KEY_LECO_26_BOLD_NUMBERS_AM_PM);
  data->number_height = 26;
  size = graphics_text_layout_get_content_size(widget->number, data->number_font, GRect(0, 0, bounds.size.w + 100, bounds.size.h), GTextOverflowModeTrailingEllipsis, GTextAlignmentLeft);
  if (size.w > inset_bounds.size.w) {
    data->number_font = fonts_get_system_font(FONT_KEY_LECO_20_BOLD_NUMBERS);
    data->number_height = 20;
    size = graphics_text_layout_get_content_size(widget->number, data->number_font, GRect(0, 0, bounds.size.w + 100, bounds.size.h), GTextOverflowModeTrailingEllipsis, GTextAlignmentLeft);
    if (size.w > inset_bounds.size.w) {
      data->fallback_mode = true;
      data->number_font = fonts_get_system_font(FONT_KEY_GOTHIC_24_BOLD);
      size = graphics_text_layout_get_content_size(widget->number, data->number_font, GRect(0, 0, inset_bounds.size.w, bounds.size.h + 100), GTextOverflowModeWordWrap, GTextAlignmentLeft);
      data->number_height = size.h;
    }
  }
}

hm, that was longer than I expected.

it starts with the largest font, then if it overflows it keeps trying smaller ones

The fact that having a dictation session apparently matters feels like it implies the kernel is running out of a resource and keeling over

if it were the app running out of a resource then it shouldn't take down the system

it doesn't crash if the response comes in scientific notation

which bypasses that whole sequence

(it fails the prv_is_sufficiently_numeric check at the top)

well what am I supposed to do about that

yeah, if I skip the font size checking then it doesn't crash

another pebble text rendering bug, apparently

no major bugs.

[hollow rivet]

Does it crash if you immediately select a font size approximated from the string length?

[karmic lion]

presumably it would not.

but it would be nice if anything this fucking OS provides actually worked

anything at all

just once

would be nice

[hollow rivet]

Yeah...

[karmic lion]

I would be happy to clean up my font usage after I was done with them but that's not an available option

[hollow rivet]

Love that loading system fonts can crash the whole system lol

[karmic lion]

it's exciting!

[hollow rivet]

You can't just free them?

[hollow rivet]

Keeps you on your toes

[karmic lion]

it's not really new though, loading cyrillic fonts in bobby always crashes the system

[karmic lion]

no, you can only unload custom fonts

[hollow rivet]

Yippee

[karmic lion]

technically the type system allows you to pass a system font into the unload method but who knows what that would actually do

[hollow rivet]

Could be fun 👀

[karmic lion]

fairly reasonably, the app crashes.

instead of actually measuring the text I guess I can just do it by length

though I'll have to round down if I don't want to risk answers being truncated

meh.

my enthusiasm for working on bobby has once again been suitably damped by the joys of pebble os

[hollow rivet]

Are you able to cache a reference to all the system fonts beforehand? Instead of calling get_system_font each time?

[karmic lion]

The system caches them

Me caching them all wouldn't make a difference

[karmic lion]

for those curious, Bobby uses the following fonts:

    FONT_KEY_GOTHIC_14,
    FONT_KEY_GOTHIC_18,
    FONT_KEY_GOTHIC_18_BOLD,
    FONT_KEY_GOTHIC_24,
    FONT_KEY_GOTHIC_24_BOLD,
    FONT_KEY_GOTHIC_28_BOLD,
    FONT_KEY_LECO_20_BOLD_NUMBERS,
    FONT_KEY_LECO_26_BOLD_NUMBERS_AM_PM,
    FONT_KEY_LECO_32_BOLD_NUMBERS,
    FONT_KEY_LECO_36_BOLD_NUMBERS,

loading them upfront makes no difference

It wouldn't surprise me at all if this is the same as the Cyrillic crash though

Or at least closely related

(but I can probably work around this one, while the cyrillic crash remains intractable)

[silent meadow]

After listening, a progress bar shows up and when it's done elaborating an error screen shows up saying "Erorr. Retry" and then starts listening again

[karmic lion]

That's not actually Bobby, that's the system dictation UI saying it failed

Have you a) subscribed to Rebble, and also b) having subscribed to Rebble, gone to the dictation language setting in the pebble app on your phone and selected the correct language?

(if the list of languages is empty, or only lists one option, you will need to redo boot - https://help.rebble.io/boot/)

[silent meadow]

I solved by re-selecting the right dictation lamguage on my phone, thanks!

I was wondering, how much time does it take for a reminder set by Bobby to show up in the timeline?

[karmic lion]

It should show up within thirty minutes.

[wooden wedge]

bobby crossed borders into another timezone

[static jackal]

Unrelated question - does your Nokia run android and connect to the pebble or do you have a separate smartphone?

[wooden wedge]

I have a separate smartphone, this phone runs s30+

[coarse cedar]

I asked bobby 1/0.6 and it crashed my watch

[karmic lion]

This is probably the same as the very large number crash

It tries measuring the number in a bunch of system fonts and the kernel runs out of memory or something in the process

[wooden wedge]

it's a shame that there was no reserved space for system features in ram so that this wouldn't be as much of a problem

that being said, it's an embedded device so I'm also not really that surprised

though, the documentation should probably have some mention of memory penalty for using these

[karmic lion]

It shouldn't be possible to crash the system like this

The function call should fail instead

[wooden wedge]

I have a feeling this won't get addressed if the new watches have much more memory

though it also won't be a problem there

[karmic lion]

The new F platform, whatever it is, does not have more memory

[wooden wedge]

that's highly disappointing, but I guess expected

[karmic lion]

It is very disappointing

New bobby features are going to have to be emery exclusive

Unless someone finally implements xip for apps.

[wooden wedge]

I wish somebody worked on extending the apis

[weary ether]

Bobby being super helpful lately

would it be difficult to add a way to save / recall conversations?

[karmic lion]

What specifically are you looking for here?

(the short answer is probably "anything that needs watch UI is infeasible because bobby is pretty much out of code space", but maybe that doesn't apply here)

[hollow rivet]

Just make all the variable names shorter. Easy 😎

[weary ether]

anything it said that I need to reference in the future

because I have zero short term working memory xD

but, if I had it do a calculation for me I'd like for it to write that number down

I guess it's more like notes

I want to write down, semi-permanently, Bobby's response

I could just switch apps I guess

but in the long-hold menu maybe there could be a 'add to notes' option

and Bobby's last message is added to notes

and then, on the main screen, like with the other feature, the user could browse the notes and maybe even start a conversation with them

mini-threads

sounds like a lot of engineering now that I'm talking it out

[rain plinth]

Sorry if this is obvious or discussed before, but if the new firmware exposes more APIs for inter-app communication (alarms, timers, notes, timeline, etc) would that help free up space for Bobby, not having to write duplicates of these functions?

[karmic lion]

It may

[wooden wedge]

alright, I actually got the consent window working

it pages correctly at this point

I also made a button indicator that matches the default one

it's a shame this wasn't exposed in pebble.h https://github.com/pebble-dev/pebble-firmware/blob/main/src/fw/applib/ui/action_button.c

idk why but holding a button in the emulator doesn't seem to work?

[covert ingot]

It does not

[edgy flame]

it might be keyboard repeat on the host machine

[wooden wedge]

that's what I assumed

it's a shame that wasn't covered though

[edgy flame]

i think you're right about having bobby face towards the left on round, have them lean out from behind the actionbar and put the version in the 7:30 range

this is so so cool

[wooden wedge]

yeah, that does require a bit more work though

I'm trying to understand why there is no icons in the menu layer on round, but that's not working out for me

[wooden wedge]

it does reflow properly, but it's not exactly paging

[weary ether]

@shell jetty get ready pal

[wooden wedge]

I wouldn't hold my breath, I have no idea how to make the formatted text layer work

[obtuse oriole]

This looks fantastic!

[shell jetty]

I had that part working in my build! (But, like nothing else hah)

[wooden wedge]

yeah, I had some trouble with it myself

the biggest issue for me is still the formatted text layer

I think we should try to work on it together or something

[edgy flame]

how does paging work in regular textlayers?

[wooden wedge]

https://github.com/pebble-dev/pebble-firmware/blob/2161d7d58000f4fecc9f4907fbd1eb574859e4cd/src/fw/applib/ui/text_layer.c#L240 looks like it uses layout caching

I should be able to just rip stuff out of the firmware, but I have a feeling there must be an easier way

[hazy crag]

Just dropped a message re:Bobbie on the Help channel :
Any issues with Bobbie's timeline integration? Last few times I've used it over the last couple of weeks, I've had no reminder come through.
If I ask Bobbie to "Show my reminders", it does display them.
(and loving the idea about notes!)

[karmic lion]

Have you been able to see the pin on your timeline?

A few people have complained that the pin shows up but they never see the notification

Though I'm not sure whether this is actually it not working, or the notification just not being very noticeable

(and if it is not working I don't know what to do about it - it should work in theory, and does work for me)

[coarse cedar]

Feature Idea: transit support (i.e. "when does the next train depart")
There is this cool API I recently found https://transitous.org/api/

[karmic lion]

Could be interesting, though it'd be important not to conflict with or contradict the existing transit routing feature

[coarse cedar]

Oh yeah I completely forgot about that

[hazy crag]

Thanks for replying. No, no pin shows, but it does know about the reminders. And it did work.
I'll maybe try reinstalling, etc.

[karmic lion]

Hm, odd

[hazy crag]

I've done nothing - nothing - and it seems to be working now.
It didn't even grant me the fantasy of thinking I'd fixed it. Harrumph.
Many thanks anyway.

[karmic lion]

I still can't get Bobby to stop randomly crashing the OS when trying to show numbers and at this point I have given up on trying to achieve anything

Pebble OS is not fit for any purpose, I'm done, goodbye.

just a miserable development experience.

(it is entirely plausible that this happens because bobby is doing something wrong. sadly, crashing the OS in the process does not make this easy to debug.)

[wooden wedge]

I wish it was easier to debug stuff like that

I wonder what analytics would look like if you had info of how often bobby ends up crashing people's watches

[karmic lion]

You can do it in the emulator if you have full debug symbols

Though it's not currently possible to build an emulator firmware where the dictation APIs function

[wooden wedge]

I wonder how hard it would be to forward the computer's mic to qemu

surely not impossible

[karmic lion]

The pebble tool has a feature supplying dictation content

It works on the official emulator firmware, but you can't build a firmware with working dictation. Or couldn't. Perhaps that's fixed by now given that working dictation is supposed to be shipping imminently.

If they use bobby as a test app it sort of implies they can dictate to it

[wooden wedge]

well bobby doesn't require you to dictate anymore

you can just "What's the weather like" and "Yes", "Yes", "No"

(assuming you can long press which is not that easy with an emulator)

[hollow rivet]

IIRC it doesn't crash without dictation

[karmic lion]

I think it depends on what exactly you are causing to crash

There are multiple ways bobby can take down the system

(and even more in features I built and then disabled)

But you're right for at least some of them

[karmic lion]

mostly I'm just annoyed that I thought I had a workaround for one of them and apparently didn't help at all

time to build bobby for wear os

[shell jetty]

my vote is for bobby for ios, bobby feels like what-siri-is-supposed-to-be

[karmic lion]

I am in a decade long fight with apple developer relations over what my name is and where I live

Though this apparently doesn't stop me releasing apps

Could be a fun (if slightly pointless) project

[barren raptor]

Bobby for Android

we can have Gemini but good

that being said, if bobby is to make the jump off Pebbles, they need a voice

[shell jetty]

disagree, the magic of bobby is that it doesn't talk to you

though i guess you could just use the phone's built in TTS engine

[karmic lion]

Bobby would definitely have a voice on platforms with speakers

Though presumably it would be optional

[edgy flame]

a new axis on the gender expression field to play with

what would Bobby sound like

[hollow rivet]

My vote is normal speech synthesis run through an RVC model trained on horse noises

[karmic lion]

I did some vibe coding

[hollow rivet]

What's the UI made in?

[karmic lion]

It's React (and a web app)

[hollow rivet]

Ah nice

[karmic lion]

(no frameworks, just HTML and CSS)

[hollow rivet]

Isn't React a framework?

[karmic lion]

well yes, but it doesn't give you any UI

[hollow rivet]

Ah, true

[karmic lion]

just fancy ways to generate some tags

[hollow rivet]

Apparently it's a "library"

Which I guess makes sense

[karmic lion]

I would probably consider it a framework

but not a UI one

[hollow rivet]

Well it does nice stuff for updating UI components when values change, etc.

[hollow rivet]

Fair enough

[karmic lion]

it doesn't actually provide any UI components, though

[hollow rivet]

Yup. I realise I asked about specifically UI frameworks 😅

[karmic lion]

I have also cheated because it has my token hardcoded in it

though the model did all the UI and also all the comms and I just told it what to do.

it's also quite terrible but I guess I've achieved basically what I wanted.

[weary ether]

It doesn't crash that much honestly, at least not for me

[shell jetty]

with react native, i suppose "bobby for mobile" could exist based on this

[karmic lion]

The real problem with bobby for mobile is that it makes no sense for Rebble

It has nothing to do with watches, or really even anything Rebble stands for philosophically

I am not sure a pivot into mediocre chatbots is the right future for Rebble

(I have actually found myself using Gemini on my phone all the time now and it is vastly superior to Bobby)

Although when you ask it to set a timer, the little widget doesn't count down in real time

So that's a nice touch for bobby

[barren raptor]

it is not better than Bobby in the most impotant metric - cuteness

[karmic lion]

True

[shell jetty]

i was thinking less of rebble and more of your future glorious AI startup 💰 📈

[karmic lion]

I will take one billion dollars please

[wooden wedge]

that's so much taxes to pay...

[barren raptor]

pretty sure the billion dollars come with a complimentary course on tax evasion

[wooden wedge]

that's fucked up

[rain plinth]

Yeah I think that bill just passed...

[sick apex]

so I have a feature request

I'm guessing that Bobby having a voice is probably on the roadmap for the C2D and CT2, yeah?

Whenever that becomes a thing, would it be possible to have different sounding voices?

like have Bobby be a british man or an australian woman or sound like my dad or something

I think that would be neat

just putting the idea out there ig

[novel fiber]

When I ask Bobby about the weather without telling him where, the system tells me to activate location services ("Standortdienste" in German, I don't know the English term). Is it something that I have to configure somewhere or is it some limitation of Bobby?

[barren raptor]

You can give Bobby access to your location in the app's settings in the pebble app on your phone

(your phone also needs to have location on and the pebble app needs to be able to use it)

[novel fiber]

I just checked: I already allowed the location sharing in Bobby and the pebble app is allowed to access the location as well. Also the phone claims that the Pebble app just has accessed the location. Also the weather app on the Pebble shows me the correct city. I use several Pebbles and switch between them from time to time. Could that cause an issue?

[barren raptor]

shouldn't, no - that all sounds like it should work

[novel fiber]

Can I activate some setting to generate a log that could provide some help?

[covert ingot]

Yes, you can tell Bobby to submit feedback

I think you can also long press select

[fair dagger]

Does Bobby still work currently now that developer Katharine is gone?

[humble owl]

yep

rebble will continue to maintain it, it's our web services after all

bobby is very close to the size limit for a pebble app though, so probably don't expect too many new features

[fair dagger]

Okay. Thank you for the reassurance. As long as it can set a timer, I'm okay.

[shell jetty]

does this mean rebble would be vetting code contributions? perhaps this means the various attempts at porting it to round could get merged 🤔

[fervent steppe]

yes, if there's a PR to get it running well on Round, we would definitely take it

I don't know if one ever made it across the line to running well

but we will review and merge as appropriate

[shell jetty]

yeah, i think IIRC both me and @wooden wedge made incomplete attempts at porting it, but i might give it another go

[wooden wedge]

yeah

[wooden wedge]

@shell jetty https://github.com/pebble-dev/bobby-assistant/compare/main...hellcp:bobby-assistant:round
and this is my list of things I didn't push because they were broken, but I think I identified everything remaining:

• converse/report_window.c
• converse/segments/info_layer.c
• converse/segments/message_layer.c
• converse/segments/segment_layer.c
• converse/segments/widgets/number.c
• converse/segments/widgets/timer.c
• converse/segments/widgets/weather_current.c
• converse/segments/widgets/weather_multi_day.c
• converse/segments/widgets/weather_single_day.c
• converse/session_window.c
• menus/about_window.c
• menus/feedback_window.c
• menus/legal_window.c
• util/formatted_text_layer.c
• util/result_window.c

I assume your branch might have some things done that I haven't done because I didn't want to deal with rebasing at all

[shell jetty]

ah excellent, thanks for uploading! i'll have to go set up the classic app on my test android device to try this out

[wooden wedge]

I can give you permissions to push stuff to this repo if you want

so that we can collaborate on this a little bit better

[shell jetty]

oh good idea! though might be a while before i can get something meaningful to push

[wooden wedge]

cool, you should have gotten an email with an invite

[shell jetty]

got it! i am hyped for BOBBY ROUND EDITION

[round helm]

Is there any way to get Bobby working on the Core Beta app? I know that the voice input is not working but, at least have ability to add your own prompts or use the current ones?