Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrtskrt | Hacker News Reader

I want non-physical-media HCI, just for my work as an engineer.

I have always thought that mouse, keyboard, and screens are quite a tedious and uncomfortable way to interact with a computer, and god knows how many health problems sitting at a computer for decades contributes to.

I’d love to be programming laying in a park without being limited by not having a large monitor and quality keyboard/mouse.

View on HN

I always felt the exact same way and thought there will eventually be some interface I can wear on my fingers and “type” anywhere, laying down, standing up, etc. but now I’m thinking it won’t be a hardware change at all but more like a hardware elimination: ie, as long as I can speak and the computer can hear me we will be able to build software anywhere. I will be able to develop software faster as I can start prototyping and testing things while I’m still in the midst of writing them on paper, I can have unit tests churning out automatically while I’m still “white boarding” or whatever it will be called then. I just imagine an AI assistant that can be one step ahead of me and make me able to work so much smarter and more efficiently but also eliminate almost all boilerplate and tedious editing and code organization and greatly reduce code rot as the code base will be “self arranging” and refactors automatic.

Yes - imagine you start sketching out a data model and something is hot-reloading generating the database schema and autogenerates CRUD-type data flow through the DB to see if my system can actually accomplish what I’m imagining.

Same for like a distributed system with message/event queues, it can start demonstrating various data flows that introduce possible race/concurrency conditions as I’m still in the design phase.

Considering the unintended and unforseen side effects of health that our current interfaces have had on our bodies and minds, I'm way more freaked out by the possibilities of what could go wrong sticking a direct I/O device into my head

When I was in high school I used to dream about sticking high speed ethernet ports into my skull (because reading on a screen was too slow, plus this was the 80s and we though Neuromancer was really going to happen)

Now I realize 1. I don't want buggy hardware in my head 2. I don't want to go to the surgeon ("wetdoc" or whatever the Cyberpunk RPG called it) every time a new model comes out

Human-Computer Interface, in case anyone else was wondering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com