> Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would work for that meeting; check a box to accept that invitation; etc.
This reminds me of those predictions from 1900 about the year 2000, when they thought we'd all live in enormous skyscrapers and get around by flying cars. Instead we moved out to suburbs because improved logistics systems meant we could buy things from suburban shopping centres rather than having to go into city centres. Revolution, not evolution.
Surely the real advantage of an 'actually good AI' would be getting the AI to do the work itself, rather than just allowing the work to be done in a format with which the human is more comfortable. The underlying problem is that there are too many things vying for our attention.
Don’t think of it as work, but of what a human would want to spend time doing. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788736, a commentor describes how his kids love using the “paper computer” prototype he built. They are not working, they are playing and learning and experimenting and creating. Things that humans like to do.
To some degree, that's what one had w/ Apple's Newton Intelligence on the MessagePad --- it was "just" fancy pattern-matching, but mostly it worked, and the UI and implementation were quite good, and it kept me organized all through college.
Mentioning the Newton may be anathema to the discussion (it seems to bring up the usual jokes, etc.) but I was thinking too that the Macintosh (or the Xerox Alto if you like, or the Mother of All Demos) tried to move us in that direction by "skeuomorphising" the computer interface—make it look like the more familiar "real world". The Newton pushed further. It seems to have been on the mind of at least a few people at Apple.
It sounds like the author is on the same track, has the same mindset. And I like.
I am also reminded of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. It is not exactly what the author describes but, if the book had a computer backend, it also divorces the user from the computer interface we have come to know. Perhaps for me some future (better) local LLM within such a book is what I want. A kind of companion I ask questions of…
(I mean I suppose I should just do what was posted a day or to ago to the Ask HN: and put a local LLM behind a messaging app and I could just converse with it wherever I am. Tangent: I am kind of fascinated by the idea of a personal LLM that has context stretching back to my earliest days—were I to have started conversing with this synthetic companion at a young age. Imagine the lifetime of context where the LLM knows my habits, how I've changed over the years. I suppose this is nightmare fuel for a number of you.)
Other copies of the Primer do have a computer backend.
There are basically three versions of the book:
1) The ones developed for a few rich kids. These are partially automated, but backed by gig workers. They get what we might call (if you'll pardon the term) "Actually Indians" AI (augmented by the regular type).
2) The one our protagonist gets. This is one of the books from #1, but the distinctive feature here is that an early gig worker (the book calls these "'ractors" when they're doing this kind of work) the protagonist draws takes a special interest in her and intentionally keeps drawing jobs for her over a period of several years. This continuity and personal care by a single real person is what sets it apart and makes her experience so excellent.
3) The mass-market version that's entirely computerized, no human touch. This version brainwashes a fuckload of kids into becoming the "mouse army", and that's really all we see as far as what it can do: something really bad (if convenient for our protagonist).
The message of the book is 100% the opposite of "automated learning-books are amazing". It's "tech for learning sucks ass and/or is outright dangerous if you rely only on it, and a real human tutor who cares about a kid is the best thing around even in a crazy high-tech future-world".
Charles de Lint had an intelligent book in his fantasy novel _Jack the Giant Killer_ (or maybe its sequel) --- I've tried doing the conversing/chatting thing w/ an LLM a couple of times, but always got annoyed more than amused.
What's the point? LLMs tend towards the mean/average --- I want better in my life and interactions --- it's useful when I need an example DXF or similar rote task, but my current project is a woodworking joint which has no precedent.
Yes, the skeumorphism angle is an interesting one, and one which is surprisingly absent in the _ur_ description of a stylus equipped computing device, the slates/tablets from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ --- this sort of thing seems to be coming back around --- a recent Kindle Scribe firmware update add shape recognition. I'd be _very_ pleased if my new Kindle Scribe Coloursoft could fully become a replacement for my Newton....
I think you're right that the use case for an LLM is still rather niche. It's perhaps still worth exploring though as they may well improve over time.
Regardless, I have still found them useful. Diagnosing the problems with a car is maybe an esoteric example but is still useful.
For many months now I have been working through learning about and implementing a hobbyist analog computer with LLM as engineer-confidant. I already knew the basics of op-amps and analog computing but was surprised at a lot of the new things I discovered only by way of the LLM saying (for example), "Hey, here's a nice way to get your reference voltages…" and the project benefited from it (and I learned about a new chip/device/technique).
Yes, they do work well as a stand-in for the "competent technician with skill in the pertinent art and and fully aware of all prior art" (to use wording like to the patent application standard).
But it's only going to allow you to avail oneself of prior art/techniques.
Because it was a profit making venture for car companies. Suburbs are horrifically inefficient, they survive by the twisted "communism" of cannibalizing the dense urban tax bases to support the sprawling, expensive to service and maintain, isolating flatlands.
Not so fast: I would say that the move to suburbs was initially driven by a thirst for homeownership with luxurious lawns, coupled with electric streetcars and other rail-based transport.
It was only later that the almighty combustion engine and tire companies forcibly replaced streetcars with buses and trucks, that cars began their hegemonic domination of suburbia. The National Highway System decrees didn't hurt, either, but highways were built in the USA with an ulterior motive of national defense.
It also happened during a period where cities were polluted, noisy, and the middle-class housing was largely cramped tenements. Basically all of this has been/is being mitigated these days. City-center housing now looks more like luxury loft living than tenements (though this gives us a big problem with ‘missing middle’ housing where there’s very little housing available that is suitable for families where everything is decrepit slums or luxury 1 and 2 bedroom condos). Pollution has been largely mitigated with catalytic converters and, now, EVs. And electrification helps deal with noise pollution as well through getting rid of engine noise (especially for motorized appliances like leaf-blowers).
Meanwhile, traffic and the stigma around drunk driving (which wasn’t nearly as strong or strictly enforced before the 90s), have quickly taken much of the bloom off the rose of car-dependent lifestyles. I predict the growth of micromobility options will continue to make cities even more attractive as well by improving coverage for areas where transit can’t go and generally improve the throughput of city streets and reduce the space needed for parking cars for people who live within “not-quite walking but feels silly to drive” distance.
The big gap in the US at least is simply a lack of cities! Everything is still concentrated in a handful of legacy urban centers that survived the waves of “urban renewal” and it’s simply too expensive to house all the people who want to live there without turning them into Hong Kong sized megalopolises, which starts to introduce new problems from overwhelming density. “Urban” development patterns need to expand out to more of the country to take demand pressure off the 5 or 6 American cities with decent mass transit.
This comment section will inevitably fill up with comments from people who have exactly the same thing to say, namely, that internet censorship is bad. That opinion has transcended the good-take-bad-take dichotomy: it's entered the pantheon of ideas that are seamlessly dumped into any mildly-related discussion and act as an impediment to any more interesting ideas.
Here's a more interesting idea: because the pornography that's banned by this bill is made mainly in the US and Eastern Europe, and because it's distributed by businesses that are also located outside the UK, the UK has negligible ability to impose regulations that differ from other jurisdictions on the dividing line between legal and illegal pornography. The age verification system was imposable because there are very few websites that span the porn/not-porn divide, but this new bill regulates at too fine a level to enforce.
As with most laws that are "useless in practice", this just opening the door and preparing/numbing the public to laws that will further extent control and censorship on internet and everywhere else.
You are absolutely right! It takes incredible bravery to admit that if we cannot solve the problem in totality then incremental improvements are useless.
Every government is preparing for the Third World War, which requires controlling the information infrastructure to enable domestic counterintelligence operations.
TFA provides insight into what’s going on behind the scenes, and has sparked an interesting discussion. It’s not the nonsense you get on /r/politics, where everyone behaves as though they’re auditioning for the writers’ room on one of those late night chat shows.
That's far too hyperbolic. Abject failures don't lead to state or power collapse. Look at how many wars the Romans lost, and far more catastrophically too.
From the article: "The crisis strengthened Nasser's standing and led to international humiliation for the British—with historians arguing that it signified the end of its role as a superpower—as well as the French amid the Cold War."
Australia and the UK both have a similar business environment to the Swiss model (but without the superior bandwidth) due to the way that their government-owned telephone monopolies were privatised: Telecom Australia (now called Telstra) and British Telecom (now called BT) were required to allow their newly-formed competitors to sell services over their networks (for appropriate maintenance fees, of course).
The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.
Australia is still pretty messy, Telstra was privatised and pretty much stopped upgrading their network for years around the 24 mb ADSL level
Eventually we had a forward thinking prime Minister create a new company that started running fibre to homes and wholesaling it to non government businesses but they lost power and fibre to the home became fibre to the neighbourhood running the last bit over existing phone lines
Eventually it was returned to fibre to the home as upgrading existing lines to run shitty 100mb connections was actually much more expensive than just running fibre
We're only now starting to get to the point where fibre is fairly available when it could have been ten years ago
They stopped upgrading their network because government was publicly implying they'd do something nationally on broadband.
Before then, they were rolling out fast internet. Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
Today, the Australian government continues to stomp on the neck of the free market. Numerous initiatives for faster and better privately operated fiber wholesale networks have been sunk by the government, including TPG and others.
TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.
> TPG wanted to roll out faster AND cheaper fiber in the inner city. Government said no thanks, we'll keep NBN with abysmal upload speeds to protect our investment.
Allowing other networks to take away the easiest, highest margin customers would break the NBN. It would likely lead us back to an unfit for purpose, "Free Market" situation, that further disadvantages rural, regional, and remote communities.
> Telstra's cable network (aka. BigPond Ultimate at the time) could do 100Mbps fifteen years ago!
Mhmm, it was great. But at what cost, you had on most plans a 1GB monthly cap.
And then when I went to an ISDN connection they wanted 9c per megabyte. To be fair, they would let you do things like join their squid proxy caching hierarchy, but bleh.
I disagree, Sol Trujillo became ceo of Telstra in 2005 and immediately started cutting everything to the bone, Kevin Rudd didn't even get into power until 2007 and the NBN wasn't announced until 2009, fairly large gap there
We've had the same issue in the Netherlands as the UK (telecom getting free infrastructure), and the end result is them blocking every fiber connection for years and then buying up all of the ones trying when it suited them. And the cable companies had a freebie for decades because they got most of their infra for free without the "share space" requirement (because only a major part, and not all, was funded by municipalities and it took a while to get them all in one company), and the cable companies decided not to invest in anything. And now we have the fiber-to-the-bottom where they are installing as fast as they can, but only with a governmental monopoly in place with dubious sharing agreements.
Due to "competition" and "fare ride" my soon to be (it's taken over 4 years and likely will take forever..) fiber will cost me 22 euro/month more than if I would have gotten the cable from across the road ... but the companies have "exclusive" rights since they would not have "financed" it otherwise (the quotes are all marketing bs).
In the UK, they split the infra provider (Openreach) from the consumer company (BT). So it's no longer BT giving access to the other providers.
In theory, BT has no special access to the infra at all, and they're on a level playing field with other providers.
That may not be perfectly true in practice, but my impression is there are no large differences between providers on the same infra. Choosing between providers mostly comes down to packaging and customer service in the end.
The UK could have had it decades ago, but the Thatcher government didn't allow it. Instead the UK gave permission to a couple of companies to dig up the streets and lay infrastructure in places of their choice. Those companies later merged into one shitty company called Virgin Media. The places they targeted were easy, dense neighbourhoods. BT, on the other hand, was required to provide everyone in the country with a phone line, no matter how remote. Today Virgin Media offers asymmetric gigabit and it's still the only choice for many because real fibre rollout is happening at a glacial pace. They also get people to sign 18 month contracts which aren't terminated if you move house. In some places, like mine, existing conduit means some ISPs are allowed to run their own fibre and these are some of the best connections available today. But most ISPs still get you to sign 18 month or longer contracts. The shitty ones, like Virgin Media won't even terminate your contract if you move to place they don't supply.
> The US and German models are consequences of just yelling 'Free market!' without stopping to think about what's actually being sold in that market, and how to encourage genuine competition.
The point of a system is what it does. In America, it fosters centralization of wealth on a massive scale. That’s the point, not some unexpected side effect of the theory nobody saw coming.
Petrolheads often say that electric cars have no soul. It’s because ‘soul’ is used to mean rough edges that we find endearing. Things that are perfect recede into the background and become invisible, and while that can be very desirable, it’s hard to form opinions about such things.
I think it’s less about the fact that the drivetrain is electric — it’s more that modern cars no longer have analog gauges, no hand-stitched surfaces, none of that tactile craftsmanship. Last year I saw a beautiful Ferrari, and when I looked into the cockpit, there was a touchscreen staring back at me. The whole car loses its character because of something like that. One software update and your dashboard looks completely different.
Soul, drama, spectacle. All that noise and smells target nostalgia. Its hard to handle cognitive dissonance of Lambo being slower than a cheap Smart fridge on wheels
To me it’s an anthropomorphic reaction to things that generate heat, that rumble and roar or you mistake their weird “I am the only one who knows how to start this” quirks.
I never give a name to a car until I’ve done something substantial to it and it rewarded me with a decent trip in return. My wife’s Subaru will likely never have a name because I haven’t cut myself fixing it or replaced anything major.
> But one can imagine a different version of this scene: a future humanity similarly excavating remains of corporate hallways that have since crumbled, wondering what life could have been like at the turn of the 20th century. What might our strange office spaces look like to the humans of the 2100s? What might they eventually look like to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who may only know these environments through the ominous “Backrooms” or the goofy hijinks of “The Office”?
Not sure if you're asking honestly or just going for comedy but, no.
"Backrooms" are liminal spaces that exist outside the geometry of our world. It comes from video games, where if you enabled developer modes to let you pass through the normal level geometry, sometimes you'd find leftover/unused rooms and hallways that players cannot normally access.
"Backrooms" don't just come from videogames. They are meant to represent liminal spaces like "endless" cubical farms and conference rooms and the back offices of movie studios or any other modern business. (Even the idea that on the backside of the cool theme park structure that seems so otherworldly is just a couple of boring janitor's closets and hallways for staff/crew to navigate between shifts.) The videogames building "unused" rooms like this were in part trying for verisimilitude to these sort of "just around the corner" spaces that exist in so many buildings. Often as a joke. It was a part of the humor of Duke Nukem. It was a key part to the humor of Portal. It was the entire basis of The Stanley Parable.
I think we can argue that real world places that inspired our fantasy Dungeons were similar liminal spaces: the creepy basement hallways that connected staff/crew (servants) access to other parts of the building(s) above. The multi-use spaces below that are most remembered in pop culture for such uses as torture and imprisonment, but were also often staging grounds for much more boring household logistics tasks (storage), and even equivalents to conference rooms, janitor closets, and "offices".
The concept did not originate in videogames. The whole thing started from a 4chan post where someone posted a photo of a yellow interior. Then, in 2022, Kane Parsons created a viral YouTube video based on that post. You can see it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo . The video game adaptations all came later.
Yes it did. "noclipping out of reality" is a metaphor that is nonsense outside the context of videogame worlds. The 4chan copypasta that popularized the Backrooms meme doesn't mention video games but that particular post is not the origin of the backrooms concept.
There are literal backrooms you can noclip into existing in games that that predate that 4chan post by several years
I've had dreams like this - I think a lot of people have - where you find yourself trapped in a space, an office or a mall or wherever, one common version seems to be a public bathroom - and you keep moving through an endless maze of doors that lead nowhere.
The article has it wrong, this was a archetype of the human collective unconscious well before 4chan turned it into a meme.
Which article is wrongm Both the article and Wikipedia entry focus on The Backrooms which are a type of liminal space. Yes, liminal spaces have existed in fiction, dreams, etc. However, here the discussion is on The Backrooms and how that idea and aesthetic became very popular very quickly.
This feels like a silly over emphasis on a naming that ignores how alike it is to so many things that came before. Don't even have to go too far back to get stories of people finding themselves in a fantasy world through a wardrobe.
How many stories were about hidden worlds below our own? Isn't even that much different from "turtles all the way." Heck, even the Minecraft movie played with a literal mine going into a magical world.
> Considering outcomes of children that grow up in a single parent scenario are well-known to be much better when it is the father rather than the mother
I've never heard this and would be very interested in a source.
Not the same person, but here's something. Just to note, the income portion mention might be lacking additional investigation as child support is typically not accounted for in income numbers.
The buried lede in that link is that mothers who don't have custody of their children are more likely to remain in close emotional contact with their children than fathers are when in the same position. So children living with dad still benefit from having both parents involved in their upbringing. Which undermines OP's assertion that this child would be better off without their mother around.
Yes, involvement from both parents seems to be the major factor regardless of sex. There is likely additional research needed on why fathers disengage more when the mother has primary custody. With a majority of single parent households being headed by mothers, it seems another area ripe for research is how unlikely it is that the majority of fathers are disengaged to create such a large effect on the whole single mother cohort. Likewise, with the way custody tends to be grated in court, you would expect single father households to have a higher percentage of unengaged mothers due if it was determined that the mothers were the lesser choice for child welfare. I would guess looking at outcomes where one parent died would mostly control for that support mechanism.
Yet it's well known that if you want someone to change their mind it's most likely to occur if they think it's their own idea/doing. You're more likely to argue with me than if you just read sources you found and independently came to the conclusion.
This reminds me of those predictions from 1900 about the year 2000, when they thought we'd all live in enormous skyscrapers and get around by flying cars. Instead we moved out to suburbs because improved logistics systems meant we could buy things from suburban shopping centres rather than having to go into city centres. Revolution, not evolution.
Surely the real advantage of an 'actually good AI' would be getting the AI to do the work itself, rather than just allowing the work to be done in a format with which the human is more comfortable. The underlying problem is that there are too many things vying for our attention.
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