r/AI_Application

Generic packing lists are almost always useless. they don't care if it's monsoon season or if you're actually planning to hike — they just give you a generic list of t-shirts and socks. I got tired of manually checking weather patterns and luggage weights every time i moved countries, so i built a dynamic generator.

The tool covers 130+ countries and factors in destination-specific climate data, gender, and specific activities. the logic splits everything into essentials, clothing, electronics, toiletries, health, and carry-on items. it also estimates the total weight of your gear, which is usually the part where people mess up.

It is completely free. I am looking for blunt feedback on the logic for multi-activity trips — specifically if the balance between "essentials" and "other items" feels right for your region.

https://pack-lightly.com/tool/packing-list-generator/

I’ve been learning Korean for a few months now, but I live somewhere with basically no Korean speakers around me, so speaking practice has been the hardest part for me.

I can study grammar and vocab on my own, but actually getting myself to speak out loud is a different story. I’ve been trying a mix of things, and one of the apps I’ve been using Issen for speaking practice. It’s been helpful just because it gives me a way actually to say things out loud instead of only studying silently.

I’m still figuring out what’s worth sticking with long term, though. The main thing I’m looking for is something that helps with speaking consistency when you don’t have a real conversation partner nearby. At this point I’m mostly trying to build the habit of talking every day without feeling totally stuck.

What’s working for everyone else here? If you’ve been learning Korean solo, I’d love to hear what you actually use for speaking practice and what felt useful versus what got old fast.

hysics-Informed Neural Networks are interesting because they break the standard ML paradigm: instead of approximating an unknown function from data alone, they exploit a known PDE constraint that the solution must satisfy. In principle this should make them converge faster and generalize better.

In practice the loss function makes them notoriously hard to train. The loss is a weighted sum of multiple terms (PDE residual, boundary conditions, initial conditions, data), each with different scales and gradient magnitudes. Several papers have characterized what goes wrong:

Wang, Teng & Perdikaris (2021) showed empirically and theoretically that during training, the gradients from different loss components become severely imbalanced. The optimizer follows whichever loss has the loudest gradient, regardless of which one matters most.

Wang, Yu & Perdikaris (2022) used Neural Tangent Kernel theory to show that the PDE residual term has much smaller eigenvalues than the boundary loss. The network learns boundaries quickly and interior physics slowly — often it never catches up.

Krishnapriyan et al. (NeurIPS 2021) demonstrated that even on simple PDEs like the convection equation, PINNs systematically fail to converge as the convection coefficient grows. This is on textbook problems with reasonable hyperparameters.

Mitigations exist (adaptive loss weighting, causal training, curriculum approaches, architectural fixes that hard-code boundary conditions) but none has fully solved the problem.

I wrote a longer version with full references and applications here: https://cristobalsantana.substack.com/p/the-pinn-loss-function-where-physics

Curious if anyone here has dealt with these training pathologies in production and what worked for you.

I'm currently at Founders Inc. in San Francisco (in the Canopy program), and have worked on AI agents for retail traders and investors.

I realized a basic problem that has not been addressed is that broker apps do not allow users to set alerts on a percentage variation of their entire portfolio. And even if they did, if a trader uses multiple brokers (which they often do), then there's no existing way to be alerted about your portfolio across all brokers.

So I thought I'd start by solving that issue. I'm going to make it compatible with more and more brokers and neobanks over the next few weeks.

Been working on Pipecat recently.

Originally I started it because I was tired of rebuilding the same AI workflow logic every time I experimented with agents/tools. So I made a visual builder where you can connect blocks, APIs, prompts, memory, etc and expose the workflow as an endpoint.

While building it, I tried using it for ecommerce support and that became a whole second product on its own.

So now there are basically 2 sides to it:

1. a builder platform for creating AI workflows/agents
2. an AI assistant stores can embed on their site with one line of code

The store assistant can now recommend products accd to the queries , can add products to cart from the chat itself and checkout too. It can also handle support queries with human handoff.

One thing I didn’t expect was how useful the analytics side became. Seeing what customers repeatedly ask gives stores a pretty good idea of what confuses people or what they should probably explain better.

Stack:

Frontend : Nextjs

Backend : FastAPI

Datbases : PostgreSQL

Redis for caching

Still very much figuring things out as I go and adding new things

Would love feedback from people building in this space.

For Builders :https://app.pipecat.in

For Store Owners: https://app.pipecat.in/ecomm

For blogs on how to use : https://app.pipecat.in/blogs

So I've been preparing for IELTS for the past few months and honestly the reading and writing sections felt manageable with enough practice. But the speaking section was a completely different story. Every time I tried to practice out loud my brain just froze. I knew the words, I understood the questions, but forming a coherent spoken answer under any kind of pressure felt impossible.

I should mention I'm not a native English speaker and I'm still learning. So the speaking pressure wasn't just about IELTS format, it was also just about speaking English confidently in general. I had no consistent way to practice. I couldn't afford a tutor every single day, and my friends weren't exactly lining up to do IELTS speaking mock tests with me at 7am. I tried recording myself and playing it back which helped a little but there was no feedback, no way to know if what I was saying actually made sense or sounded natural.

That's when I started using Issen. I saw it mentioned a few times across different language and exam prep communities so I figured I'd try it. It's basically an AI speaking tool where you just talk and it gives you real feedback in real time. No scheduling, no awkward silences, no feeling embarrassed in front of a real person. I started doing 15–20 minutes every morning before my regular study session.

After about three weeks something genuinely shifted. I stopped freezing mid-answer. My responses started feeling more structured. I wasn't searching for words as desperately as before. I also started using it to just refine how I express things in English, not just for exam practice but for general fluency too. Tbh I wasn't expecting it to make that big a difference that fast.

I still combined it with other prep, reading sample answers, doing timed writing practice, watching IELTS speaking examples on YouTube. But for the specific problem of "I understand everything but I can't speak smoothly," Issen was the thing that actually moved the needle.

If you're in the same spot, a non-native speaker preparing for IELTS or any other language exam and the speaking section feels like a wall, it's worth trying. Even just 15 minutes a day of low-pressure speaking practice adds up faster than you'd expect.

This one is for all the broke college CS students out there <3

If you're like me, you don't want to pay $20 a month for claude code :(

It's an amazing tool I love, but a recurring expense is the last thing I need. That's why I find myself jumping from tool to tool, using the daily or monthly free tier limits and constantly having to find new free tools.

That's where "AI For Brokies" comes in. Just a simple github repo with a readme file of some free AI tools you can use for building :)

https://github.com/Joe-Huber/AI-For-Brokies

The actual building behind this project was mostly the automatic tool adder, following an issue format! If you want to see it in action, please drop an issue explaining a tool you use and see the bot do it's magic!

Please feel free to leave a star! ⭐️ (pretty please) You can use it to save the list of tools for whenever you run out of credits!