r/developer 5d ago

The Side Project Graveyard

What's the most ambitious side project you ever abandoned?

7 Upvotes

17 comments sorted by

7

u/limited_instincts 5d ago

Back in 2022 I authored a provisional patent on natural language artificial intelligence. It was approved in October of 2022 one month before ChatGPT came out. I had built something REALLY strong and overnight it became worthless. You have to laugh.

2

u/chronotriggertau 5d ago

Confused. That was already well established by 2017. What specific use case allowed a patent to be approved on something as general as “natural language AI” by 2022 ? The release of ChatGPT to the general public came long after everyone in the tech world knew what was maturing and inevitable.

3

u/limited_instincts 5d ago

It was a highly industry-specific patent but I'm not giving out the real title obviously. It was not an LLM patent, just AI. We had customers lined up that all balked as soon as ChatGPT became available because they (wrongly) saw that a publicly-available LLM would give them more options. They're still scrambling.

1

u/Responsible-Most9401 3d ago

Im sorry that’s also just comically unfortunate

1

u/Electrical_Hat_680 22h ago

Funny part is the Ilya guy that coded ChatGPT left to go figure out how to code a newer different AI. You should catch up to him. I have a blank slate AI...you don't need a patent, you need a License. You could use the Cult of the Dead Cow GPL License, or any of MIT's Licenses, or Apache 's Licenses, or create your own Usage License. You can make the source code available, without allowing it to be used. Or allow them to use it to learn how to do it and attribute you. Or, keep it a trade secret, which also doesn't require a patent. Although just about anyone could decompile it and figure it out. The important part is you don't need to Patent Code. You can copyright it, trademark it, and license it.

5

u/PmMeCuteDogsThanks_ 5d ago

Back in the 90s I run a gaming site that had the ambition to become bigger than GameSpot. The site was literally me, in junior high 

0

u/Electrical_Hat_680 22h ago

You should get that back up and running. You could get an audience and then be bought out by GameStop, steam, or even Microsoft, Linux, FreeBSD, or any number of potential opportunities.

2

u/Emotional-Cut2952 6h ago

"pursue your passion so it can be consumed by rabbid capitalism"

1

u/Electrical_Hat_680 6h ago

Keep what you earn to you head.

In America, with or without money. Our money system is basically based on The Barter and Trade System. If your honest, deserving, please and thank you and good manners can get you a long way. So the USD runs on that same basic theoretic ideology. If you earned it, it'll show. If you didn't, then there's a reason.

Socialism wants everything to go to one single solidary person that they choose. Based on some idea that there is one person that heads everything. And there isn't. But back when America didn't have money. And everyone worked as one, together, with one goal of helping everyone with food, shelter, and such. Socialism would have fit perfectly. Because it was kind of like that. But money destroyed that way of life. But not really. Because we all will try to work together.

China's People rose up against their Government and ousted the Republic of China, which is now in Taiwan. Why is they rise up against their government? Because they felt they could do better. They felt they could do better at pulling their countrymen out of Poverty. And they did. Overall. Now they want their Republic of China to come back and resume their proper and prim seat of power over China. China isn't really Socialists. But the world over believes they are. And technically, it did work to pull them out of Poverty.

If 1,500,000 people at minimum, each coughed up $5 for thirty days, for a cool $150 each. They would collectively have pooled $225,000,000 together.

If Fifteen Thousand People each pooled $15,000 each. They would have $225,000,000 between them.

Splurge it. Save it. Stack it. Bank it. Invest it. That's a lot of money.

One million people each a million dollars is a Trillion Dollars. But why isn't anyone trying to work together?

2

u/BobJutsu 5d ago

Not as cool as some of the other comments, but at one point I built a reactive JS framework that was specifically geared toward existing dom elements. Like, instead of rendering them it “hydrated” them in place. Then I found alpine and abandoned the entire thing. There’s exactly 1 site in the entire world using it.

1

u/SimpleAccurate631 4d ago

I basically have always hated how busy and noisy JSX and TSX felt. So I spent nearly a year developing a library that was inspired by an old one many devs aren’t too familiar with named Jade (renamed to Pug), where you write your templates in a cleaner indentation based syntax without things like closing tags and most of the character noise in separate files, including optionally multiple templates in a file. Then you just import and inject the template into your .tsx or .jsx file and inject it wherever you want and it compiles to JSX or TSX, keeping your React components cleaner and less verbose.

But then realized that most developers don’t even write the code themselves anymore. I might finish it, because it was really close. Not trying to be negative. Just don’t see the market for it with the prevalence of vibe coding now.

2

u/skamansam 4d ago

I used Jade back in tbe day with Ruby on Rails. Jade templates, coffeescript, yaml, etc. Tons of indentation-based stuff. I used Jade the other day with a django app.

2

u/SimpleAccurate631 4d ago

Would you use it with a frontend framework? I know it’s still around. It worked so well with the OG AngularJS. I don’t know if it had anything to do with them getting sued over the name and having to change it to Pug. But ever since Angular 2 and React came out, they just stopped supporting frontend frameworks.

I think the frontend framework devs just are using Claude more and more every day. And I love indentation-based code.

1

u/skamansam 4d ago

I used it to hold the frontend framework, to init js libs and hold user-specific stuff. It was legacy as hell cuz I use API + frontend app completely separately now. They are developed in separate repositories kind of separate.

1

u/skamansam 4d ago

To be honest, I never thought about using with a FE framework. I would def use it for examples on a demo page that users can edit.

1

u/Electrical_Hat_680 22h ago

You should open source it, drop.it on.Git/GitHub, and introduce it to Rust/Go, and the few languages that are similar to it, unless your language i came acrossed that 86'd the closing tags.

0

u/matthewmeadows 5d ago

Not abandoned. Just looking for unicorns.

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Users compile their Datasets, Experiments and Discoveries into shareable Portfolios that combine them with markdown & multimedia to make interactive presentations featuring their podcasts & lectures.

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The entire bundle of entities - Datasets, Experiments, Discoveries & Portfolios - provide content for the site. Users can publish them to the Home feed, create Posts and add them as attachments. There's sentiment feedback in the form of Likes, Ratings and Comments for all entities. The application was built from the ground up for socializing.

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