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Comment by finnborge | Hacker News Reader

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?).

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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" ?

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