I believe Tom Riddle’s diary from Harry Potter was each a magical diary and a Horcrux. Tom Riddle experimented with each sort of darkish magic, so a diary that writes again feels proper at house in his assortment. Developer Maxime Rivest recreated that concept by hacking the reMarkable Paper Professional E Ink pill right into a diary that solutions handwritten questions with assist from AI. He shared the demo on X on July 5, and it has since topped 2 million views. So what’s Rivest’s trick? (Assuming he isn’t additionally utilizing Horcrux magic.)
You write a query by hand, the pill acknowledges the handwriting, sends it to an AI mannequin, erases the ink, and animates a reply onto the identical web page. Rivest, who posts as @MaximeRivest, credited the response era to Fable, and by July 6 he’d printed a work-in-progress GitHub repo known as “Riddle” for anybody comfy with Linux and SSH to attempt it themselves. He mentioned a beginner-friendly model is coming as soon as he’s assured the setup received’t journey folks up.
None of Rivest’s methods works and not using a setting most reMarkable house owners by no means contact. Rivest defined in a reply to podcaster Matthew Berman that the pill has a developer mode that turns it into, in his phrases, “a Linux field with a particular show and inputs channel.” As soon as that’s flipped on, he lets coding brokers hook up with the machine over SSH to experiment.
That’s a significant element for anybody who owns a reMarkable and didn’t notice the {hardware} was this open. The tablets are constructed on a monochrome E Ink show and a reasonably modest processor, not precisely a platform you’d affiliate with working AI-triggered animations. However the developer-mode entry apparently offers Rivest sufficient management over enter and show to intercept handwriting and redraw the display screen programmatically, which is what makes the fading-and-reappearing textual content trick potential.
Rivest’s different reply, a quip about needing to place “Claude code into it now,” comes throughout as a joke about extending the undertaking quite than a concrete announcement, and nothing within the thread confirms a particular subsequent integration past that.
From diary to dictation: the voice app follow-up
After the unique put up, Rivest shared a second construct, an Android app that turns a telephone right into a microphone for the E Ink pill. The setup lets him dictate textual content earlier than enhancing it by hand on the pill’s paper-like floor. He mentioned the app was made with “gpt-5.6-sol” and that combining voice enter with pen-and-paper enhancing produced a writing really feel he described as particular.
This one comes with no Harry Potter framing, and Rivest was upfront about that shift. He mentioned the broader aim behind each tasks is a guess that pairing E Ink shows with AI can produce a meaningfully higher type of human-computer interplay than what’s on telephones and laptops in the present day. Two very totally different demos, a diary that talks again and a voice-to-page dictation software, each level on the similar underlying thesis quite than a single product he’s constructing towards.
Rivest’s passion undertaking arrives proper as reMarkable itself has been including AI to its lineup. The corporate’s Paper Pure pill already ships with AI-assisted assembly notes that pull agenda particulars from calendar invitations and summarize motion objects afterward. As well as, a bunch of digital notebooks, together with reMarkable’s, now use AI to transform handwriting into textual content. Amazon’s competing Kindle Scribe goes additional with a built-in AI chatbot for querying notes and books.
Not one of the official reMarkable AI options work the best way Rivest’s hack does, although. The corporate’s instruments function throughout the interface reMarkable ships, producing summaries or transcriptions the consumer requests. Rivest’s model hijacks the writing floor itself, erasing what the consumer wrote and changing it with generated textual content designed to appear like the pill is responding unprompted. That’s a good distance previous a productiveness function and nearer to the sort of ambient-AI experiment that developer-mode tinkering makes potential on {hardware} not designed for it.
Earlier than you go
Rivest’s GitHub repo is a piece in progress, and he hasn’t mentioned when a wider, beginner-friendly launch may arrive. The X thread doesn’t specify what the precise round-trip latency appears to be like like between writing a query and getting an animated reply or how reliably the handwriting recognition holds up exterior a demo clip.
It’s additionally value noting that turning on developer mode is the sort of step that may have an effect on your machine’s guarantee, one thing neither Rivest’s posts nor the protection round them deal with.
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Grigor Baklajyan is a copywriter overlaying know-how at Gadget Circulation. His contributions embrace product critiques, shopping for guides, how-to articles, and extra.
