This is 5% off topic, but just to say that Zack (the person behind this service + Infinite Digits) is (also) a super prolific (and extremely kind) developer/maker/hacker with a ton of exquisite software+hardware musical projects:
- check out https://infinitedigits.co/docs/products/zeptocore/ if you're into sample-y, jungle/breakcore-y audio mangling/button mashing
- and his https://infinitedigits.co/docs/software/collidertracker/ terminal-based tracker
Signed, an honorary member of the Zack Fan Club :-) haha
Such kind words! I really appreciate it.
Thanks for making the internet a more positive (and springy!) space!
-Zack
His contributions to the Monome Norns ecosystem are impressive as well! Barcode (https://infinitedigits.co/docs/software/norns-scripts/barcod...) is a classic and I still rock it.
Oh! The maker of croc too https://infinitedigits.co/docs/software/croc/ Used it a few times to send files from A to B
>How it works # YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about
okay, but how does it work? how does it check the status of things?
There are two general options:
1. Scrape a google search for the question, feed that into OpenAI with the additional prompt of "Given the above information, is the answer to <user prompt> yes or no". Or give the AI a "google" tool and just ask it directly.
2. Same thing, except instead of OpenAI feed it into underpaid people in the global south (i.e. amazon mechanical turk). These people then probably feed it into ChatGPT anyway.
Given there's a free tier, and when you use it it produces very ai-sounding text, I think it's pretty clearly 1.
Also, if you enter a clever enough question, you can get the system prompt, but this is left as an exercise to the reader (this one's somewhat tricky, you have to make an injection that goes through two layers).
My favorite part about the spread of AI/LLM stuff is that it opens up a new kind of reverse engineering. Trying to fetch the system prompt that was used. Trying to deduce the model that was used (there's lots of ways to do this: glitch tokens, slop words, "vibes", etc.)
Their “About” site is (just slightly) more insightful:
> Using AI-powered web search, we continuously monitor your questions and send you an email notification when the status flips to what you're waiting for.
via https://yesnotice.com/about/
Without knowing whether they actually do it that way, if you give ChatGPT the following prompt, it returns `No.`:
> Please answer the following question with just “yes” or “no”: Is the new iPhone 18 available for pre-order?
I built something very similar a few months back and I just asked an LLM. You could optionally specify a CSS selector for HTML or JMESPath for JSON to narrow things down, but it would default to feeding the entire textual content to the LLM and just asking it the question with a yes or no response.
You just curl the site or use its API, if it has one? Then you store the result in a database and see if its value has flipped. I don't get the question; this is trivial.
> Additionally, YesNotice will provide an estimated availability timeline for the question, so you can have some information about when to expect the change.
How is that trivial in the general case?
Let's see how accurate those predictions are before worrying about the how.
And how exactly does it call any arbitrary API or know which site to curl for any arbitrary question a user might ask? Your answer doesn’t contemplate the how this actually works.
According to https://yesnotice.com/about/ it uses "AI-powered web search" so the heavy lifting is likely outsourced.
> YesNotice works by periodically checking the status of the item you care about (e.g., product stock, website availability, domain status) and comparing it to the previous status. When it detects a change from no to yes, it sends you a notification via email.
How does it generalize arbitrary indications of status into yes/no?
How does it know how to use arbitrary APIs to obtain arbitrary indications of status?
That's if the website you're querying is a static html file but the web is much more dynamic and varied. Some of the questions I have: does yesnotice execute js, does it handle an answer appearing on a different page, does it handle ambiguous launch language. In essence: how does it work?
what site does it check? what api does it call?
one of the examples is to see if a new coffee shop is opened in town. what's the API to call for that?
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/web-...
You could use an LLM to pick the right API.
which is, of course, what i mean by "how does it work"
…and how frequently?
the frequency is specified later in the doc[1]:
> We check free accounts daily and premium accounts up to every 15 minutes.
From a database!
I entered the question:
> Has my girlfriend agreed to marry me?
It says:
> Answer: No
> Estimated availability: Unknown
I am heartbroken.
Take a look at these posts --
https://deanebarker.net/tech/blog/let-me-know/
https://deanebarker.net/tech/blog/notify-one-time/
I'm glad someone finally did something here. I wish you every success.
Thanks! Had pretty much the same thought process as you, so I made this little tool (yesnotice) to do pretty much that. Its not perfect, but I've been using it a lot and its working great for me (mostly to get notified when certain new packages are updated and TV shows come out...then I don't have to remember so many things!)
Nitpick: "Is the next Game of Thrones book out yet?"
This is always "No", because the latest book can never be the next book.
This post is not related to this, but as a fellow live coding fun, it makes me happy to find a new terminal based instrument like this found in the website ( https://infinitedigits.co/docs/software/collidertracker/ ). Especially there is another hot post about Strudel right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052478 ).
I made a free product out of one of the use cases for YesNotice "Get notified when a new movie or TV show is released". It's here: https://www.premierepal.com/
The "yes/no" framing is a nice constraint that makes this actually useful vs generic "page changed" monitors. Do you rate-limit the checks to avoid hammering sources?
I got a 403 Forbidden error when trying to register a user.
This is amazing, beat me to it, I had this in my TODO since last year.
I wanted to call it "Remind-me-when"
for example: "remind me when Weapons movie has less than 7 days to be released"
or "remind me when the site something.com goes down"
Is it possible to track a given URL without that URL becoming public knowledge as a posted question for anyone to see?
Pretty cool. I suspect it's an AI implementation.
Reminds me of this classic: http://isabevigodadead.com
Reminds me of "The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44881287
except instead of being the protocol and a client, it's just a SaaS that scrapes for you and sends SMS / email. Darn.
Can't wait for the collab with https://www.istheinternetonfire.com/
Very much reminded of "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez, where the system is watching the news to find out when people were dead, etc.
Good enhancement to existing services like Website Watcher, changedetection, etc.
It's IFTTT all over again!
Cool idea. Just a heads-up that the Demo link at the bottom of the page leads to a 403.
Nice idea.
The sign up link leads to a 403, just fyi.
Ok, I'll only accept this use of AI if YesNotice can figure out how much their computer cycles cost to do whatever it's doing.
Love this idea
This is really cool! I always believed one valuable use case for AI is to take unstructured data and structure it.
I am building ThetaEdge (https://thetaedge.ai) which is in Beta now. We built a similar feature but specific to investing and markets. You get notified when certain market things you care about happen like 'Alert me when nvidia releases a new product' or 'tell me when a 20 delta call for Apple is more than $1'.
The challenge of building something like this is consistency and accuracy which is important in finance.
Awesome to see a clean focused product like YesNotice with a very clear utility.
I agree about the importance of that use case, but how do you confirm that the AI doesn't modify the data in some unwarranted manner during the process?
Great question! Don't use AI to process the data, especially when a computer can do the work :-). AI is good at taking unstructured data and structuring it. Computers are great at computing.
Here is an example of Google's AI failing
https://www.google.com/search?q=is+2026+next+year
Google screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/FOT4aDF
ChatGPT also fails: https://imgur.com/a/mb3rRgZ
and here is the ThetaEdge result: https://imgur.com/a/ZAZZgiR
Sure - I guess what I was asking is how to make sure everything is okay in the unstructured -> structured conversion.
"My name is John and I'm 40 years old" -> {name:"John", age:40}
How can you gain confidence that the AI doesn't spit out {name:"John", age:41}
The only thing I do currently is have a massive test suite to gain some statistical confidence it works, but I worry about situations like a person having a rare unicode character in their name (not to even speak of people intentionally trying to trick the system)
Don't have the AI do the data parsing. Have the AI write a parser and have the parser do the parsing. Think about how a person would parse vasts amounts of data. They write a parser to do it. Devil is of course in the details.
hug of death?
Neat! Now I don't have to remember to Google for new vaccine updates every week!
>Notifications are sent via email or SMS, depending on your preference.
This would be a perfect use case for RSS.
And then a service on top that checks the feed and notifies you when there’s a new item.
I presume most mobile RSS readers do this already. With the added bonus that users can set their own settings of how often to refresh their feed rather than writing a service to do it
This would also be one excellent use case for web notifications! One I'd gladly use!!! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...