Indie Dev Weekly #3

A week of AI explosion

Yo, it's been an insane week for AI! Ever since the ChatGBT API was released, tons of products have sprung up. It's clear that many text-based applications are going to be shaken up. For me, the most useful ChatGBT application right now is translation - I've been localizing app strings, updating documents, and even my weekly reports have been translated through it and posted on my blog.

It's kind of freaky how the movie "Her" is becoming more and more realistic.

People are saying that AI's arrival is going to cause a lot of job loss, especially for programmers. I think that people who can handle Prompt (Prompter) in the future, will be just like programmers who use different coding languages to develop, except they'll be able to use natural language to make the computer execute commands and operations. Programming languages have to strictly adhere to grammar and an environment in order to run, but Prompt is more similar to human language, and even if there are some errors, AI can understand them and correct them. Not only that, but AI can handle a wider range of fields, so future Prompters might be able to deploy a website or an online art exhibition in just a few sentences, and who knows? They might even be able to create a planetary engine with just a few words.

Right now, AI is mainly being used online. Once it starts being integrated with offline industries, it's going to be a completely different game.

Minimal Diary(App Store)

All my development work this week has gone into the iOS version of my minimalist diary app. I've been having trouble getting 1.7.3 to publish because loading the most critical entries still has some issues. I spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem by using async/await to load entries, but then a lot of bugs started appearing on the main diary list page. It wouldn't immediately update when adding, deleting or modifying entries, so it took a lot of time to fix.

I did solve one problem though - an issue where the app kept crashing. I hope it's a permanent fix, or else I'll have to make compromises.

There's also been an issue in the beta group where users reported that two ordinary buttons at the top of the editing page often didn't work. I even asked ChatGBT about it, but we couldn't find a solution. It's weird because I've never replicated the problem, so the only solution was to enlarge the clickable area as a compromise.

There were a lot of other things I wanted to do this week but didn't get accomplished because of various reasons, including:

• Adding a loading prompt to the picture selector.
• Using iOS16's PhotosPicker.
• Finding the cause of the crash when selecting tags.

Minimal Diary(Google Play)

I also submitted a new version of my app (1.1.1) for Android this week, and it got approved on Google Play, Vivo, Oppo and Huawei, but Xiaomi rejected it. I spent a week communicating with the reviewer, but it was still not okay. Ugh!

I've already finished developing a bunch of features for 1.2.0, and next week, I'll be testing and localizing it, hoping to submit it for approval.

Stable Diffusion

I've also been trying out Stable Diffusion (SD) this week, and I've spent more time on that than on development (okay, it might be because I wanted to escape after facing so many bugs). I followed a tutorial on Colab at first, and it actually worked out pretty well. The next day, I tried using an app called DiffusionBee, but I kept encountering errors when adding other models, and the functionality was relatively simple, so I gave up. In the end, I just deployed the SD's web UI on my M1 Pro MBP and spent almost two days playing around with it. My laptop was running at full capacity, it was insane.

After two days of trying and learning, I finally understood the basics of SD's operation and the meaning of various parameters. So I spent some time generating an image of my dream work environment: a studio by the sea.

Sleep

My sleep has been terrible this week, and it's really affecting my work. The first time was because I stayed up late playing with SD, which made my eyes and brain really tired, and I was basically out of commission the next day. I even took naps in the morning and afternoon, but I still felt lethargic.

The second time was because my child had a fever and I didn't sleep at all, I even went to the hospital in the middle of the night, which made me really tired the next day. I could fall asleep at any time.

I remember five years ago, I used to go to bed after 2 AM every day, and it didn't affect me at all. Last year, I watched the World Cup, and I only watched three matches that went into a penalty shoot-out... I wasn't able to recover until the evening the next day.

Now that my child is starting school and I have to wake up at 7 AM every day, if I sleep around 1 AM every night, my sleep time won't even be six hours.

You always have to compromise between your interests and reality.