jerryliu12 (u/jerryliu12)

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

requilence · 3 months ago

Great project! I’ve had a similar experience with Rewind and the related privacy concerns. A quick thought: if I recall correctly, Rewind performs OCR locally, so it only needs to send textual data. Since you’re focusing on macOS, you could rely on VNRecognizeTextRequest and skip the extra OCR complexity. It might also help to detect and mask sensitive information with lightweight models (e.g., BERT), especially when leveraging cloud-based AI.

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

Woah didn't know about VNRecognizeTextRequest, that's super cool thanks for flagging!

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

zbrw · 3 months ago

Any insights on qwen-3 omni yet?

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

Looks awesome, but a 30B model is too big. Vast majority of people probably have 32GB of RAM or less unfortunately.

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

olex · 3 months ago

Pretty nice. How does it handle multiple displays? I've set it up with local Ollama, and it seems to only record and analyze one of my two secondary displays. It would be ideal if I can select which one is used if the recording is limited to a single display, or even better if it can record and analyze the entire multi-monitor desktop surface.

edit Nvm, it seems it always records the display that is currently in focus. That is probably the better way to handle it, since it automatically solves the "ignore what's shown but not interacted with on secondary displays" problem.

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

Yep, you figured out how it works! That was the easiest solution I could come up with. I'm sure theres additional context on other screens but this was a good 90/10 solution.

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

graeme · 3 months ago

Would be helpful to have a screenshot test tool alongside the api test tool. The app didn't create an application support folder yet. Possibly not enough time has passed but would be great to be able to troubleshoot sooner.

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

Thanks, yeah I do need to flesh out the debugging options. In the menu bar you can click the Dayflow icon which should allow you to view the recordings folder. The sqlite db is in that folder too if you want to poke around there as well.

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

mellosouls · 3 months ago

Congrats on a nice looking app that will be very useful for individuals (though potentially misused by toxic managers).

Kudos particularly for the efforts you've gone to on explaining privacy implications.

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

Thanks! Wanted to build something I'd personally be comfortable using.

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

xp84 · 3 months ago

Very cool idea. When using the Gemini option, what kind of cost would be expected to be incurred? I'd be satisfied by knowing the approximate number of tokens one would expect to be consumed by processing an hour of these recordings, and which specific model is being used.

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

Gemini 2.5 Pro is pretty expensive, mostly because videos take up a lot of tokens. It's roughly 1 million input tokens/hr, with a relatively insignificant amount of output tokens. Fortunately, Gemini has a very generous free tier, which is more than enough to cover daily usage. If you set up one paid project (and just don't consume any tokens), you can still use the free tier on a different project, and they can't train on your data.

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

yewenjie · 3 months ago

I would not be comfortable sending my bank info passwords and all sorts of other sensitive data that I input and see on my screen to Gemini. How much is the qualitative performance difference with a local model?

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

If I had to put a grade on my own experience and evals, Gemini 2.5 pro produces A- results and qwen2.5vl is maybe like B-/C+. Obviously everything's nondetermistic, so it's hard to guarantee a level of quality.

I'm reading through papers that suggest it should be possible to get SOTA performance on local models via distillation, and that's what I'll experiment with next.

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

anyg · 3 months ago

Couldn't we get a low-res version of this info by tracking the active window using a cli tool? For linux, there are several options. Not sure about Mac.

Another approach is to run OCR on 1FPS screenshots. Everything runs locally without draining the battery like an LLM would.

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

You definitely could! I think it would just be harder to get good semantic understanding of what you did during a segment of time without LLMs.

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

zeroq · 3 months ago

On one hand I'm super enthusiastic about your project.

This could help battle procrastination, organize your time in a long run, bill your clients more efficiently, etc. 20 years younger, hyper productive me would kill for such product.

But then I recall when I accidently suggested TimeRescue to my boss at one time, and suddenly he was skimming though everyones daily logs to see if they're spending 100% of their times in business facing apps.

When I first heard about "covid mouse mover devices" that faked activity for remote workers I thought it was a joke. Seriously.

But I'm afraid this is the dystopian future. Employers constantly looking at your screen and getting spreadsheets with your daily effort.

Overall, very disturbing product.

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

Yea, honestly I would hate if people used this to track _other_ people, especially bosses. I wanted to build something that gave people more agency to do more with their precious time, but there definitely is a fine line here.

jerryliu12 commented on Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day github.com/JerryZLiu/Dayf... · Posted by u/jerryliu12

laurieg · 3 months ago

Really nice! I currently use ActivityWatch for tracking tasks on PC.

Some things I would like to be able to do with software like this:

- Identify the 'spark' of a distraction. For example, opening my email inbox to read a specific email also shows me many unrelated emails. These can easily be the cause of a 5-15 minute distraction. This information is often actionable. I installed browser plugins to hide my youtube suggested videos and my distractions went down. I made sure to close all unused windows to avoid catching a glimpse of unrelated work.

- Identify repeated tasks, and the cadence of those tasks. Do I manually make an invoice once a week for a particular edge case? Is the process basically identical every time. Could this be automated?

- How was I feeling before, during and after a task. (This is a very broad and intentionally not well-defined question, but I think it has the most promise for improving procrastination and task initiation).

jerryliu12 · 3 months ago

Yep, helping people understand their distraction patterns would be an amazing feature. I find myself doing the same thing, funnily enough I also have that same Youtube extension.