We are opening up advertisement posts if they present novel data or aggregation of data in a well thought out and respectful format

Last week I made a meta post and got very little input, so I can only go off what was the highest upvoted or most agreed upon comment as a mandate for the sub. I do admit this does align with my personal beliefs for what is best for the sub as well, and if there is enough community backlash, of course I will always be open to reversing the decision.

My thinking is that we can incentive these app makers to make rich, and valuable contributions to this sub, in exchange for visibility for their app.

The format that will be allowed is to have the flair [Ad] in the title, but in exchange they must present some novel research, data aggregation, or otherwise valuable contribution to the sub. App name can be posted throughout the post body, app photos can be shared if directly relevant to the research, I will delete posts without comment if app photos are shown without being directly related to the post.

This cannot be "I tracked x personal data for y days", it must be substantive outside of their personal experience.

If they are using data tracked from their app their users must be explicitly aware that their data is being used for research and displayed either individually or in aggregate. This will be an immediate ban, and I will recommend a ban to our sister subs if we find out you are sharing user data without their understanding.

I have to admit this will increase my workload significantly as I will have to read and evaluate each one of these posts manually, whereas now I can just skim for app names or links and delete.

As usual I am open to changing this policy if it becomes clear the community is not getting value from these posts.

reddit.com
u/Mescallan — 4 days ago

Meta Thread: Community Thoughts on high effort posts from app makers?

Hey everyone,

We had an incident yesterday where a branded account ( literally "u/___App") made a rather well researched and high effort post about sleep trackers, aggregating data that is not otherwise available in a single location outside of their research.

There was references to their app, and discussion in the comments about the app, these are two things in which the community has been pretty clear, from my perspective, as crossing a red line. I do my best to enforce the rules as representative of community sentiment in these contexts. The post got reported, and I had mod mail asking why it was allowed to stay up, while others were taken down, so I took the post down.

What do you think I should have done in this situation?

I can rewrite the rules to allow references to monetized apps in substantive posts, but that would also open them up to a judgement call on my part. We can keep our strict "no references to apps or monetization" rule or loosen it up in favor of community engagement.

Also if you have any feedback on the way the subreddit is being moderated please contact me directly or drop a comment here. I am currently 10 time zones away from US time, and I am the only active mod as far as I know, so I admit that a few things slip through the cracks sometimes.

reddit.com
u/Mescallan — 7 days ago

Anyone with experience buying J305/ Gieger Muller tubes?

I'm working on muonsortes.com (any feedback on the website is welcome), which is an e-ink smart clock that uses gieger tubes in an array to filter for muons/high energy sub atomic particles to create RNG and trigger events on the device.

I've ordered tubes from two manufacturers on Aliexpress and 3 out of 10 tubes have died on me, two of them were definitely from over-volting with a cheap HV booster, but one just died naturally. I'm not getting any good answers when I search or chat with AI on how to find a reputable manufacturer. If anyone has a personal recommendation or advice on how to generally find a source for goods like this it would be much appreciated.

u/Mescallan — 18 days ago

I wrote an article on switching away from local LLMs in favor of traditional NLP techniques

It's a bit light on details relative to this subreddit standards, but feel free to AMA about NLP on apple devices, or low resource computers.

open.substack.com
u/Mescallan — 29 days ago
▲ 267 r/ClaudeAI

I'm also working on an e-ink smart clock that can handle multiple agent messages and notifications

This is an early beta build, but the idea is a smart clock with a built in muon detector random events/cosmic oracle experience/ procedurally generated clock faces/cozy games. Pictured is my personal dashboard layout with a bunch of fun api sources and my agent inbox. The "agent waiting" flashes to get my attention. It also supports any number of agent inboxes or notifications.

The firmware and schematics will be open source so hopefully users with coding agents can fully customize it and take advantage of the sensor suite for whatever purposes they want.

more info at muonsortes.com, aiming for a kickstarter q3/q4

u/Mescallan — 2 months ago

What would make you try a new tracking app?

Hey,

I'm not going to post the app here, but I've been developing an on-device NLP (natural language processing) stack for about 2 years, focused on turning journal entries into a lifestyle dataset. In its current form, users record 10-second voice notes throughout the day that get automatically categorized and saved (100% locally) into a rich lifestyle dataset.

I'm struggling to get traction because I'm competing with 10,000 low-effort, vibe-coded, cloud-processing, narrow tracking apps. I'm very confident this project solves a real pain point in a way those other apps don't handle well.

The people in this community are exactly who I built the app for. I use it to quantify changes from my supplement stack, dial in my weekly exercise volume against energy levels, and so on.

I've posted here a few times with mixed reviews, but I'd like to step back and ask directly: what are you looking for in a lifestyle logging app? What would a killer feature be for you? Any advice from a past project of your own?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

reddit.com
u/Mescallan — 2 months ago

I made a muon detector and I'd like to use to as a source of randomness for generative art, looking for advice.

The inputs are 4x geiger tubes that produce 20-40 "chirps" per minute each, then each tube pair will filter for muons (when a pair chirp within a specified time span it's almost certainly a sub atomic particle passing through both, with muons being the overwhelmingly most common), which gives me six pairs. Each pair is at a different angle, so it's sampling a different direction of the sky. Muons are also essentially a chirp. I can use any of these 10 channels with a modulo counter to generate numbers based on the detection time, or sample the time between detections or any combination of tubes and such. (I also have a temp/humid/pressure air sensor that I'm using temp as a mod wheel)

I have been producing music for a long time, so my first instinct was to make some ambient/procedural music/sound scapes, which was fun, but honestly not anything I would listen to without the context of the universe playing the instrument. I feel like there are a lot of interesting things I could do with Touch Designer and stuff like that, but i'm not even sure where to start. Any advice is appriciated.

reddit.com
u/Mescallan — 2 months ago

Short voice notes -> categorized lifestyle database -> rich analytics; 100% local processing, no AI

I've spent the last two years working on a NLP (natural language processing) stack to categorize journal entries to create a lifestyle database for users to make informed health and fitness decisions. I spent all of 2025 grinding away on process efficiency and making it more robust, it went from >10 minutes for a full journal entry to >200ms a sentence, running fully on device (~180mb of ram).

This unlocked a new workflow, using short voice notes throughout the day instead of batch processing journal entries. The stack learns from user corrections so it never makes the same mistake twice, and users can define any shorthand or weird language they want and it will use that for it's categorization going forward.

I released the first version of the iPhone beta a few days ago and I'm looking for more beta testers. Because I don't collect any usage statistics, or see any user data (outside of Apple's testflight analytics) I am reliant on beta users to help me soften the edges and refine the NLP stack.

Sign up today: tinh.io (iOS, MacOS)

u/Mescallan — 2 months ago
▲ 39 r/generative+1 crossposts

Using a muon detector as a midi instrument

The detector is comprised of 4 Geiger-Muller tubes, when a pair of tubes fire within a few microseconds, it's almost certainly a sub-atomic particle passing through both of them at near the speed of light.

The pitched stabs are gamma radiation in my room, each tube is assigned a different note in the scale. The large pads are muons/coincidence pairs, 4 tubes gives me six detection channels. The angle of each individual pair of tubes is different, so some notes are more common than others.

I am posting a full write up of the instrument on this project's website: muonsortes.com

u/Mescallan — 3 months ago

Just checking in with the sub, how do you all feel things are going?

Hello, I started moderating this sub a few months ago and went very strict on anything that smelled like an advertisement. In my last check in with the sub it seemed like most people were okay with some ads making it through as long they weren't clearly AI spam, so I loosened up a bit.

I just want to check in with you guys and see if the sub has any feedback. I went on vacation for the last week or so and it looks like a handful of ads made it through, with ~30% not getting reported (normally you guys are on top of reports and I appreciate that).

My plan this week is to introduce two new weekly threads, one where we share our dashboard or data around an interesting insight and the other specifically to discuss analytic methods.

Other than this, I'm open to any feedback about the direction of the sub or whatever you want to bring to my attention.

reddit.com
u/Mescallan — 3 months ago