https://laboratory.love

Last year PlasticList discovered that 86% of food products they tested contain plastic chemicals—including 100% of baby food tested. The EU just lowered their "safe" BPA limit by 20,000x. Meanwhile, the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe.

This seemed like a solvable problem.

Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent testing of specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid's snacks, whatever you're curious about.

Here's how it works: Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, get detailed lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn't reach its funding goal within 365 days, automatic refund. All results are published openly. Laboratory.love uses the same methodology as PlasticList.org, which found plastic chemicals in everything from prenatal vitamins to ice cream. But instead of researchers choosing what to test, you do.

The bigger picture: Companies respond to market pressure. Transparency creates that pressure. When consumers have data, supply chains get cleaner.

Technical details: Laboratory.love works with ISO 17025-accredited labs, test three samples from different production lots, detect chemicals down to parts per billion. The testing protocol is public.

You can browse products, add your own, or just follow specific items you're curious about: https://laboratory.love

I'm building Mochi, a small programming language with a custom VM and a focus on querying structured data (CSV, JSON, and eventually graph) in a unified and lightweight way.

It started as an experiment in writing LINQ-style queries over real datasets and grew into a full language with:

- declarative queries built into the language

- a register-based VM designed for analysis and optimization

- an intermediate representation with liveness analysis, constant folding, and dead code elimination

- static type inference, inline tests, and golden snapshot support

Example:

  type Person {
    name: string
    age: int
  }

  let people = load "people.yaml" as Person

  let adults = from p in people
             where p.age >= 18
             select { name: p.name, age: p.age }

  for a in adults {
    print(a.name, "is", a.age)
  }

  save adults to "adults.json"

Happy to chat if you're into VMs, query engines, or DSLs.

- The encoder ring which works like an LED mouse, but in reverse: Fully reverse-engineered and on its own demo PCB

- The faceplate PCB, which does the actual control of the thermostat wires, has been laid out, but the first version missed a really-obvious problem involving the behavior on power-on with certain of the GPIO pins from the ESP32, so I've got rev 3 on order from the PCB manufacturer.

Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting October 25, 2025. You will still be able to access temperature, mode, schedules, and settings directly on the thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, these thermostats will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Home app controls, and Google will end support for other connected features like Home/Away Assist. It has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.

My film got screened at the Academy Award-qualifying Bali International Film Festival and the Marina Del Rey Film Festival in the past month. It will be screening next month in New York City at the Asian American International Film Festival.

I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

* OSINT (r00m101 just beat me to it by launching...)

* Research into recommendation algorithms, advertising placement algorithms, etc

* Marketing (ad libraries, detailed analysis of content given data not even exposed to the mobile app due to some interesting side channels, things like trend analysis, etc)

* Market research for products

* Sales teams can use it to find exact mentions of other products. Eg: selling crash reporting software? Look up your target accounts' brands and find examples of complaints.

Plus a few more with more imagination.

So I'm working on a site that allows user access to some of the read-only functions available here. Coming soon :tm:. Been really fun building it all in Rust, though :) If you're interested in anything here, email in profile.

[0]: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

https://airdefense.dev/

From a dev perspective this area has a ton of super interesting algorithmic / math / data structure applications, and computational geometry has always been special to me. It's a lot of fun to work on.

If anyone here is interested in this as a user, I'd love for any feedback or comments, here or you can email me directly: tyler@vexlio.com.

Some pages the HN crowd might be interested in:

* https://vexlio.com/blog/making-diagrams-with-syntax-highligh... * https://vexlio.com/solutions/state-diagram-maker/ * https://vexlio.com/blog/speed-up-your-overleaf-workflow-fast...