Adam Lui

An organizer called "Rapha" spammed me an invite to join this 4-week program, promising cash prizes and mentorship. But it turned out, unlike real accelerators, they don't pay you up-front, you have to "win" from one of a few grants from select partners (among 100 entrants so most people get nothing, like a carrot on a stick to get you to participate) Also, the methods used by "Ralpha" are so spammy, eventually even program emails would go to Spam box. This is also reflected in the caliber of cohort members. Since rather than being as selective as possible like most accelerators (he is spamming for goal of 500 participants instead of just 100 this time) most members do nothing, while others are outright crazy (one told me Chinese eat cats in DM, granted they were banned when I reported it) The organizers really don't know what they're doing or talking about. It really shows in the way they give bad advice. For example, in one week's "lesson" Rapha strangely advises builders to not go to sites like social media or Hacker News to gain user insight (terrible advice obviously, and here he is posting it on Product Hunt!) What was more bizarre, they started copying me from my notes I was using to submit updates! For example, in one note, I put as to-do "reach out for user insight on Discord" (and assigned it to a colleague). Rapha then reversed his original instruction advising "go where builders are" (i.e. contradicted original bad advice after spying on my project notes) More examples of the leeching... after spamming people to use their failing Betallion platform (for builders to get beta testers), I added all my open source projects to support it, then they started copying my app icon logos! For example, chatgpt.js had a rainbow background, so they changed Backdrop to have the same. YouTube Classic had pixelated scheme, so they pixelated their logos. Even the web pages they were adding would borrow sectioned color elements from chatgpt.js.org... Another conspicuous act of leechery, because I added the URLs of some of my projcets like chatgptwidescreen.com and chatgptinfinity.com, they noticed the way I build products connect to each other very harmoniously. That's when they abandoned the betallion.com and 100.builders domains, now it's called backdropbuild.com and backdropbeta.com like my domain structure (since they thought my promotion of "chatgpt" is how I got OpenAI funding, so they are trying to promote "backdrop" which 100.builders does not do at all) It was like every day I would discover some new thing they copied, no matter how trivial. From the very beginning it did not stop. The earliest example... I applied and called my teammate a "partner in crime" in the application. After acceptance, in the intro video Rapha markets himself as his co-founder's "partner in crime"! Also the weekly "missions" were quite ridiculous. For example, the entire 1st week's "mission" was build a readme! That's right, an entire 25% of the hackathon is spent on creating a document, rather than building your world-changing thing... (no wonder half the participants dropped out, only 50 projects got built out of 100 entered) It really was quite bizarre how much bad guidance was given (and no one is all the wiser, since these builders are quite noob andt cannot tell bad from good advice unlike me) and how consistently they relied on my weekly progress updates to shape actually better guidance (another example, I was adding new features like hotcakes, so they stopped focusing on unproductively pressuring the builders to build completed projects i.e. minimal features are suffice) It's almost like I was being used to teach them + builders for free, and got literally nothing out of it...

The site has been down for what feels like over a week now. After two weeks of inactivity, they confiscate your points (of which I have over $100 accumulated) so I have a bad feeling about this...

The UI progressively grows worse with update (which are slow to release). What used to be simple, clean navigation has grown into a bloated mess. The mobile experience is even worse...

Although understandably buggy due to the open-source nature of the software, Shotcut is very powerful relative to the cost (free)

Bootleg Photoshop but in web browser. Very effective. Familiar keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl + T to transform are lost to browser ones though.

I know of no other Windows media player that allows endless looping from A to B. I use VLC for this feature alone.

The best hotkey automation for Windows, hands down.

Superior algorithms + less ads than Spotify = SoundCloud forever (seriously, the auto-play never gets reckless, you can leave it playing forever it's that good)

This tool is so versatile, sometimes after mass edits using VS Code, I still use GitHub Desktop for its superior diff analysis to make the commit.

So powerful at keeping my multiple repos in sync!

Although Sublime is my workhorse for being light-weight, sometimes you need a gas guzzling luxury SUV for intense tasks like mass-replacing code across multiple files. VS Code is this SUV, and does not fail to deliver in times of need.

The most beautiful code editor, bar none!

This review is based on the only Mozilla product I use, Firefox. While I initially switched from Chromium browsers years ago (because FF just loaded pages faster), I cannot recommend FF anymore, because it often renders JS so inefficiently now, the user experience becoming laggy as a result.

Indispensable for accurate translation (although ChatGPT is becoming increasingly more useful, especially for multiple languages at a time) that excels in Chinese especially

I use the simple web editor to write vanilla JS that uses regex to powerfully return appropriate fetch requests to chatgpt.js based on URL! Very useful & free!

This review is for Spaceship.com, which just launched on PH today (but cannot be reviewed as separate product from Namecheap.com) The UI is quite unintuitive & clunky to use. It's as if a product manager told the programmers to try and give off an "edgy" vibe, but the cost was user experience. For example, config pages like DNS settings (typically well-organized on other registrars as children of pages on a master domain list) are awkwardly intermingled w/ these parent pages on a cluttered "launchpad" page, where they are called "apps" instead. Why is this confusing? Imagine a task as simple as just viewing all your domains. You nav to the Launchpad, only to find not one, but *two* apps that serve this purpose: Domain Portfolio and Domain List. As you open each one, nothing gets less confusing. DNS settings go in one, while privacy settings go in other. (Why this arbitrarty division of settings? What is the reward for memorizing which belongs in where?) Even trivial pages like Payment Methods are awkwardly labeled an "app"! This really showcases the adage, just because something can be done, doesn't make it a good idea. It really is as if a PM somewhere got a raise for pitching "Let's make the same thing as Namecheap.com already, but make the design pretty & everything into apps! UX doesn't matter, surely humans are superficial!" But site utility ends up suffering, load times are awful, things are hard to find, and it just subliminally conditions me to use my go-to registrars Clouflare or Porkbun the next time I need a domain. While the affordable (but likely introductory) prices are what drew me to register 3 domains w/ them (chatgptautorefresh.com + chatgptinfinity.com + gptbrah.com), this site cannot be recommended for the poor user experience. There is nothing Namecheap.com doesn't do already & at similar price. 11/1/2923 update: After using it for some months, I am now upgrading to 5-stars due to their new status as cheapest registrar + the UI is actually very useful for speedy operations like mass transfer of domains

It is like a super-nerfed ChatGPT (ask it a coding question, you'll regret it)

Despite the very user-unfriendly recent wave of UI changes, GitHub is essential to collaboration & staying productive while building my apps.