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Comment by d-lisp | Hacker News Reader

Why would you need webapps when you could just talk out loud to your computer ?

Why would I need programs with colors, buttons, actual UI ?

I am trying to imagine a future where file navigators don't even exist : "I want to see the photos I took while I was in vacations last year. Yes, can you remove that cloud ? Perfect, now send it to XXXX's computer and say something nice."

"Can you set some timers for my sport session, can you plan a pure body weight session ? Yes, that's perfect. Wait, actually, remove the jumping jacks."

"Can you produce a detroit style techno beat I feel like I want to dance."

"I feel life is pointless without a work, can you give me some tasks to achieve that would give me a feeling of fulfillment ?"

"Can you play an arcade style video game for me ?"

"Can you find me a mate for tonight ? Yes, I prefer black haired persons."

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>Can you set some timers for my sport session, can you plan a pure body weight session ? Yes, that's perfect. Wait, actually, remove the jumping jacks."

Better yet, why exercise -which is so repetitive- if we can create a machine that just does it for you, including the dopamine triggering, why play an arcade video game where we can create a machine that fires the neuron needed to produce the exact same level of a excitement than the best video game.

And why find mates when my robot can morph into any woman in the world, or better yet, the brain implants that trigger the exact same feelings than having sex and love.

Bleak, we are oversimplifying existence itself and it doesn't lead to a nice place.

Maybe I should have rephrased everything with : " Make me happy"

"Make me happy"

That's an infinite loop.

Stop the loop of wanting

The Tao of Zen in 5 words.

> Bleak, we are oversimplifying existence itself and it doesn't lead to a nice place.

We are already on this path for many-many years, certainly decades if not centuries, although availability was definitely spotty in the past.

It is also kind of impossible to hop off this train, while it is individually possible to reject any of these conveniences, in general they just become a part of life. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but just different.

> although availability was definitely spotty in the past.

lol, that seems like a reference to the William Gibson quote "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed"

Citation needed on that last sentence about ir not a bad thing, also I'm pretty sure climate change 100% counts as a collateral damage of this behavior.

Zizek is a good reference here. What’s the word for it, interpassivity?

You say bleak, but a huge number of people would consider what you're describing as a utopian paradise...especially the morphing robot part.

I should know I am one of them, I mean exclusively the robot part.

I think this is well illustrated in a lot of science fiction. Irregular or abstract tasks are fairly efficiently articulated in speech, just like the ones you provided. Simpler, repetitive ones are not. Imagine having to ask your shower to turn itself on? Or your doors to open?

Contextualized to "web-apps," as you have; navigating a list maybe requires an interface. It would be fairly tedious to differentiate between, for example, the 30 pairs of pants your computer has shown you after you asked "help me buy some pants" without using a UI (ok maybe eye-tracking?).

They actually aren’t done well via voice UI either - if you care about the output.

We just gloss over the details in these hypothetical irregular or abstract tasks because we imagine they would be done as we imagine them. We don’t have experience trying to tell the damn AI to not delete that cloud (which one exactly?) but the other one via a voice UI. Which would suck and be super irritating, btw.

We know how irritating it would be to turn the shower off/on, because we do that all the time.

On a tangent but I still don't know why we don't have showers where you just press a button and it delivers water at the correct temperature. It seems like the simplest thing that everyone wants. A company that manufactures and installs this (a la SolarCity) should be an instant unicorn.

For what it's worth, Northern European showers typically have two independent controls: temperature and flow. Leave the temperature at what you think is good, and either wait a moment for hot water to reach the end of the pipe or install a recirculating loop.

What's "correct" for you might not be "correct" for others. Furthermore, your owb definition of "correct" changes depending on circumstances; sometimes you want it hotter, sometimes you want it colder. Sometimes you want to change it partway through.

How do you calculate for that?

Back in the 90s, Fuzzy Logic was thought to be the solution. In a way, yes, but only for niche/specialized purposes, and they still have to limit the variables being evaluated.

How about it uses temp sensors to read your skin temp (if that's the variable that matters, idk), and some mechanism for "feedback" after an initial guess? It's all implementation details.

Water + electronics/power typically isn’t very durable, or reliable. Most people want their shower valves to work at least 20 years, ideally 50-100.

Can be mitigated to a degree by separating the (cheaper) sensors and the (pricier) logic.

But then it will become a tradeoff of complexity vs longevity.

Nah, because it would still need servicing.

And why? There are reasonably well done, low maintenance, temperature balancing valves out there.

And they do typically last 20+ or more years.

Maybe you don't even need a list if you can describe what you want or able to explain why the article you are currently viewing is not a match.

As for repetitive tasks, you can just explain to your computer a "common procedure" ?

Voice interfaces are not the be all and end all of communication. Even between humans we prefer text a lot of the time.

What GP describes sounds to me like having a friend control the computer and dictate to them what to do.

No matter how capable the friend it, it's oftentimes easier to do a task directly in a UI rather than to have to verbalize it to someone else.

Plus there are many contexts where you don't want to use your voice (public transport, night time with other people sleeping, noisy areas where a mic won't pick up your voice...).

And there are people that unfortunately cannot speak.

Well, there are people that cannot see.

Fortunately, there are solutions.

I want to add that I think you are missing my argument here. Devices that allow you to speak without speaking shall soon be available to us [0].

The important aspect of my position is to think about the relevance of "applications" and "programs" in the age of AI, and, as an exaggeration of what is shown in that post, I was wondering if in the end, UI is not bound to disappear.

[0] https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/alterego/overview/

I cannot speculate about this, because I am not sure too observe the same.

We've had writing for only around 6000 years. It shall pass.

I just this week vibe-coded a personal knowledge management app that reads all my org-mode and logseq files and answers questions, and can update them, with WebSpeech voice input. Now it's my todo manager, grocery list, "what do I need to do today?", "when did I get the leaves done the last few years?" and so on, even on mobile (bye bye Android-Emacs). It's just a basic chatbot with a few tools and access to my files, 100% customized for my personal needs, and it's great.

I did that in the past, without a chatbot. Plain text search is really powerful.

Full assistant and a text search are quite a bit different things in terms of usefulness

Not for org-mode.

Very cool! Does it load all of the files into context or grep files to find the right ones based on the conversation?

This will eventually cause such reduction of agency that it will be perceived as fundamental threat to one's sense of freedom. I predict it will cause humanity to split into a group that accepts this, and one that rejects it at its fundamental level. We're already seeing the beginning of this with vinyl sales skyrocketing (back to 90s levels).

I must be really dumb because I enjoy producing music, programming, drawing for the sake of it, and not necessarily for creating viable products.

> “Hell of a world we live in, huh?” The proprietor was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in. “But it could be worse, huh?”

> “That’s right,” I said, “or even worse, it could be perfect.”

-- William Gibson: The Gernsback Continuum

Ive been imagining the same thing. Were kinda there with MCPs. Just needs full OS integration. Or I suppose you can write a bunch of clis and have LLM call them locally

Well, if you have a terminal emulator, a database, a voice recognition software, a LLM wrapped in such a way that it can interact with the other elements, you obtain a ressembling stack.

This is what all the people put out of work by AI are going to do.

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