Someone debuted a tool very similar to one I was working on except with the added bonuses of having an awesome publicity stunt, better name recognition, some novel features, and a company that someone has heard of backing it.  People I’ve told responded as if I lost a child to measles or whooping cough and I thank them for their courtesy but, much like someone kicking over your sand castle or someone coming up with a similar song hook, it at least tells me that I was on the right track (or they shared my wrong one).

Briefly, I had something neat to work on that was mine.  I do again but it isn’t mine in the same way as this one will require more collaboration and involves a lot of me tugging on people’s pant legs and saying “what’s a good algorithm I can use to find the K-th nearest neighbor within an arbitrary point cloud in 4-space?”