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Dave Anderson @danderson@hachyderm.io
9mo
The state of the web as an application platform makes me a bit sad. In particular, I assumed that scanning barcodes was an extremely solved problem by now.

The reality seems to be that google's old zxing library, and its various ports to javascript is still the best we have. And all the ports are abandonware to various degrees.

Meanwhile, if you're happy to say fuck the web, android and iOS will both be pleased to provide you with "vision APIs" that include barcode scanning. Available as native APIs only, enjoy your nothing in the browser.

Chrome has implemented an experimental "shape detection API" that plugs into native vision APIs to provide barcode scanning and face detection, and is publishing drafts through W3C. Unfortunately it's been 5 years and the other browsers don't seem to give a fuck. Sadly it seems nobody's managed to pitch it just right as an AI feature, that'd get Mozilla and Apple all frothy in the underpants... But, alas.

It's all a bit depressing, really. When zxing was released I remember feeling such optimism for the future of computers, that reasonably fancy image processing were becoming commodity tools. But looking back, seems like it was the high point.
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Dave Anderson @danderson@hachyderm.io
9mo
On a less depressing note, I saw that a couple of the libraries were talking about torch support, and went "oh wow do browsers have APIs to attach pytorch models to video streams or something?

... They mean torch as in flashlight, as in have a button in the UI to turn on the phone's flashlight.

Amusing example of the evolution of language I guess, that when I see "torch" I no longer think of a torch.
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Dave Anderson @danderson@hachyderm.io
9mo
Meanwhile, I thought "you know, rust compiled to wasm would be pretty great as the heavy duty image crunching backend for a portable barcode library"... and that's how I discovered that wasm for rust is also abandonware and got mass-archived a few months ago, and the entire web is now a bunch of "wasm is great for rust, see how easy it is to do wasm in rust!" all linking to 404s and dead projects.

I'm having a sad day.

[Edit: what was archived is the remains of the "rustwasm" working group, which was long defunct. I'm told that rust is still a good way to build wasm stuff, via rustc's wasm target and wasm-bindgen to generate JS glue]
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walnut 🌱 @walnut@thesoftestpaws.net
9mo
@danderson
I've never actually used rust for wasm, but it seems like there are still people building support for compiling rust to wasm (and using wasm in rust, and making a wasm runtime in rust) blog.rust-lang.org/2024/11/26/wasip2-tier-2/

github.com/bytecodealliance/cargo-component
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