
Show HN: Plottico Tracker extension – plot numbers from any site in real-time - grandrew
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/plottico-tracker-pro/hjfkpgknlchgabgfhknaedgodmnhieep
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grandrew
Hi guys! Some weeks ago I announced the plotti.co microservice - the easiest
way to embed web live plots with the simplest API, here comes the second part
of the service and the full story behind it.

I am announcing the Plottico Tracker Pro chrome extension - its purpose is to
track values on websites or SaaS services and send the updates to plotti.co.
Think of it as a specialized web scraping product - built for monitoring and
controlling processes only. You can directly track data from like google
analytics, cloudflare stats, your hosting provider, or almost any other public
or password-protected web application. Finally, no code at all is required to
plot my server CPU load and data caps as my VPS provider admin panel shows it.

So what is plottico? Plottico is the way we win the fight against machines.

Guys, we are facing the potential existential risk from artificial
intelligence, no joke! Last year we saw a growing serious concern about safety
of intelligent systems with some great names like Stephen Hawking and Elon
Musk joining the efforts to draw attention to the problem. A few months ago I
watched a Davos’16 conference panel on the state of Artificial Intelligence.
Man, they had it almost the top topic for the whole panel!

So, I came up with this idea last summer but it crystallized only a few weeks
ago: no matter how much everything is intelligent and automated - the final
decision is still made by humans. It is us, who benefit from all the systems
and machines and I want to make sure I have control over it. And how do you
control something if a single person can no longer understand how the whole
system works? How do you make sure everything is going right?

That is why NASA has its famous control room with all the key telemetry in one
place, so do the nuclear plants, large factories, even subways and VISA has
its control room. This is the idea behind plottico: to provide an easy way to
monitor activities all over the scattered systems and subsystems, either for
science, business, hobby or personal life.

And I take a strict approach: when everything is going in the direction of
making the APIs and software more complex, plottico’s mission is to
continuously make a simpler, cleaner product, with interfaces and code that
are more comprehensible by humans having either technical or non-technical
background.

So here is the tool that helps to monitor data from any source accessible from
the web.

To make tracking more robust, I’ve implemented what I called the “entropy
window selector” - it is a selector based on sift4 string-difference algorithm
and aims to detect the correct textnode with tracked number even if it changes
its position, IDs or CSS path.

And of course the extension is GPL, and as usual is an early beta - so feel
free to throw tomatoes at me, I am prepared with a bug tracker :)

Currently I am looking for an investor and a team of civilian volunteers who
are not afraid to take this fight with machines face-to-face. Human
intelligence strikes back!

