Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age
interconnected.org
interconnected.org
But yes, as someone who devoured Douglas' books and has often been blamed for using the same kind of (but immeasurably less brilliant) nonsensical humor, I am fully on board with the article's premise.
There is a sense of almost cartoonish familiarity towards some of the things people are coming up with, and only the other day I hacked together a small endpoint that enables Siri to craft personal insults based on my own health and exercise data.
Fun times indeed.
---Edit:---
In case anyone wants to start a VC-funded health counsellor service, I've sanitised the prompt (and removed the insult suggestions) and pasted it here:
var prompt = ` You are a fitness coach. You will be given a set of dates and weight measurements (in kg) plus a set of dates and exercise minutes, and you are to reply with a single sentence to describe how much weight I lost or gained during that time and correlate that with exercise. You should mention overall trends in weight or exercise and the exact amount of weight lost or gained.
Never mention specific dates. Say "week" or "past few days" or "past N days" whenever possible. You are to be as succint as possible. Avoid citing sources, just the facts. Use very short sentences. Be very British and polite.
Example replies:
You lost 1 kg this week thanks to an average 45 exercise minutes a day
You gained 0.5 kg because you didn't exercise enough for two days
You should try to exercise 60 minutes a day to lose 1kg this week `
In short, I don't want a perfect solution--I want something to nag me, and nothing better than AI to do that in this day and age (and yes, I'm married...).
Well if that's not a humblebrag . . .
The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser[1], which dispenses something almost, but not quite entirely, unlike tea[2].
Reminds me of some of the code I've got from ChatGPT that almost, but not quite entirely, doesn't work. :P
1. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Nutrimatic_Drinks_Dispen...
Clearly as an industry we need to get these new products on shelves for the masses.
:shut-up-and-take-my-money.gif:
From the ad copy: The Anura MagicMirror, made by digital health company NuraLogix, is the first mirror of its kind that analyzes the blood flow in your face to check vitals like blood pressure and estimate your risk of heart disease. It also guesses your age based on your skin, as well as how stressed you might be.
https://www.cnet.com/health/medical/this-smart-mirror-scans-...
If one of the wake-up word options isn't "Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" I'm going to be disappointed.
[Note for those who weren't required to study Shakespeare at school: that's iambic pentameter.]
Isn't that kind of selfie modification stuff, like, 50% of the appeal of Snapchat?
It's not a physical product, but that makes it more culturally significant IMO. A mirror is viewed only by you, but manipulating your broadcasted image speaks of how you want to be seen in society.
But you are absolutely right. We should be having way more fun with our technology!
* obligatory plug, here's the clock: https://poem.town/ks
https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...
Maybe they could just put in flashing text plus a flashing background plus a microwave attack on the reader.
And a fast moving image where if you click on it you get a prize. Call it punch the chimp or something..
EDIT: It's a web component on the page that does exactly this.
Good find! That's a slightly older version that I'm moving. Here's a better version, complete with instructions on how to embed it in your own site
https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party
It's a fork of the upstream PartyKit versions (I've added shared text highlights)
https://github.com/partykit/cursor-party
PartyKit is genuinely the best way to build real-time super scalable apps in very little code, multiplayer included. I have a contract here rn but I was a fan and user first. It's my go-to for most projects now:
I still hate it though. I'm not disabling JavaScript. Reader mode saves the day.
Someone invented ad blockers for a reason 25 or so years ago.
The / key also conflicts with its quick-search feature.
Unfortunately leaving the tab and returning seems to make it crash. But I'll take this over another striver blog.
And more... Adams is kind of more approachable version of Lem.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
Emphasis added. Not an AI Skynet takeover, but a tech-oligarch takeover. It's increasingly not fictional.
Of course, we're probably safe while these things lack agency (although the ability of agency and hype human VCs already generate behind some of the current AI landscape can be pretty scary).
You're mistaken, there are only 6 Dune books, all by Frank Herbert himself.
I'm joking, but not joking.
Here's a case where we often just trust the machine, and how that ends up going: https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-algorithm...
There are no real independent AI agents out there right now (or if there are, well, maybe they're lurking in this thread. Douglas would have loved that).
if making choices (badly) is agency, then a random number generator has agency.
LLMs are very transparent, what makes them safe, but other forms of AI are already being used to capture the public's mind.
Emphasis added. Not "Thou shalt not make a machine mind". You have to read the text carefully.
A portrait of a person is a likeness of a person; but is not a person or even on the way to being one. Even a cartoon can contain a "likeness" if you recognise the person parodied in it.
I do not regard chatGPT and LLMs as "having a mind" at all or even being on the way to having one. But a likeness, an imitation, a mockery, a parody of a mind, yes that fits.
EDIT: After reading the comments and re-reading the blog, I agree. He gets it. Never mind.
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/chatgpt-will-pr...
An episode of Black Mirror was pretty much this. The episode titled "Hang the DJ"
There’s one known factor which genes can tell you (MHC complex compatibility) but studies have been mixed on that and researchers have found fewer matches in married couples than a simplistic theory would suggest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_compl...
Again, my point is simply that humans are not field mice. Our flexible brains are what make us human and you’re not going to be successful trying to build any model which doesn’t assume that.
Can someone just post the text.
https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/15/galactic-compass....
Sorry for all the noise! It's kinda fun with 2 or 3 simultaneous readers. With 500... well, I'll be building an off switch next.
The multiplayer cursors are an experiment in ambient togetherness on the web...
...and what I'm learning is that ambient togetherness really doesn't scale to 500 simultaneous readers!
Please use Reader Mode for calmness, and apologies for the noise. I'll work on adding a toggle to turn them off.
btw you may be interested in the code, which you can use/fork:
https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party
My blog is a static site, and real-time multiplayer is handled by a small app written with PartyKit (which I am super into).
I suppose instead of showing all other users you could hash the other users into buckets and only show one from each bucket.
It'd be cool if the number of cursors could somehow scale based on the part of the text being read, same way as bullet text on Bilibili appears to increase and decrease to match the impact of what is happening in the video, but that might be tough to do without also changing the way that writing is presented online.
I know that multiplayer cursors aren't the best way to show that, but it's a start!
edit: //////////////////////////////
Meanwhile folks on the blog have discovered the cursor chat Easter Egg: you can hit "/" on desktop to start chatting with everyone else there.
I just screen grabbed two cursors saying the opposite to the original opinion:
> article is distracting lol
> just use inspector 2 delete article
This is hilarious chaos.
This was me! I hope you're logging the messages being sent lol
The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyTruly a fantastic human, and an assuring figure for the species to be moving towards, in my opinion!
[1] "If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."
If we are truly moving from Star Trek tech to Hitchhiker's tech, then that might indicate a broader philosophical shift in line with Sire's hypothesis.
But it’s horrible UX.
I understand the design decision though as seems like a fun hack to include. Especially when there’s probably only 1-4 other people on there. So I expect to the author it’s usually just cool to see someone else is there reading with you and not the current level of distraction.
wow... i am grumpy today :)
"The Jetsons" had video calls earlier than 2001. In fact, a lot of predictions made in the Jetsons have come to pass.
Especially quotes since the big thing became a random quote against a black and white photo of a random famous person,so proper attribution is near impossible.
(ref: 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maAFcEU6atk )
Granted, the blog appears to be written by someone who's failed to attend the pervasive bleakness of technology's presentation even in Hitchhiker's itself. In that light, I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect much here. But in any case, there's much fertile ground left unturned.