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Comment by sicktriple | Hacker News Reader

Man, just when it seemed like we had it all. Computers were cheap, efficient and powerful. Somehow we figured out a way to accomplish tasks we already had solved except now it's 1000x more expensive, requires the combined electricity of the entire world, is reliant on someone else's rented compute, and now I need a robot to tell me what button to press. What a time to be alive.

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In 40 year software designers couldn't figure out that there should be a search function for every functionality that your computer provides.

When we got a form of such search, it searched all of the internet alongside with the functions of your software on your computer. You had to tell it manually what software you have and when it found something you had to fish out the description of what to click to get the functionality you are seeking and then click through some dumb ui to actually invoke it.

Agents are the first thing that can lead you directly from "I know what I want my computer to do." to "Actually doing it."

Success of agents is founded on the profound and sustained failure of all of the software designers and developers ever.

> In 40 year software designers couldn't figure out that there should be a search function for every functionality that your computer provides.

apropos ?

I don't understand this question. Please elaborate.

Isn't that what the command "apropos" does?

Not if I can't do

apropos switch desktop to dark mode

and

aprops set dns to 8.8.8.8

I know this is not what you want, but actually:

   $ apropos dns
   [...]
   resolvectl (1)       - Resolve domain names, IPV4 and IPv6 addresses, DNS resource records, and services; introspect and reconfigure the DNS resolver
   [...]
   $ man resolvectl
   [...]
     dns [LINK [SERVER...]], domain [LINK [DOMAIN...]], default-route [LINK [BOOL...]], llmnr [LINK [MODE]], mdns [LINK [MODE]], dnssec [LINK [MODE]], dnsovertls [LINK [MODE]], nta [LINK [DOMAIN...]]

           Get/set per-interface DNS configuration. These commands may be used
           to configure various DNS settings for network interfaces. These
           commands may be used to inform systemd-resolved or systemd-networkd
           about per-interface DNS configuration determined through external
           means. The dns command expects IPv4 or IPv6 address specifications
           of DNS servers to use. Each address can optionally take a port
           number separated with ":", a network interface name or index
           separated with "%", and a Server Name Indication (SNI) separated
           with "#". When IPv6 address is specified with a port number, then
           the address must be in the square brackets. That is, the acceptable
           full formats are "111.222.333.444:9953%ifname#example.com" for IPv4
           and "[1111:2222::3333]:9953%ifname#example.com" for IPv6. The
           domain command expects valid DNS domains, possibly prefixed with
           "~", and configures a per-interface search or route-only domain.
           The default-route command expects a boolean parameter, and
           configures whether the link may be used as default route for DNS
           lookups, i.e. if it is suitable for lookups on domains no other
           link explicitly is configured for. The llmnr, mdns, dnssec and
           dnsovertls commands may be used to configure the per-interface
           LLMNR, MulticastDNS, DNSSEC and DNSOverTLS settings. Finally, nta
           command may be used to configure additional per-interface DNSSEC
           NTA domains.

           Commands dns, domain and nta can take a single empty string
           argument to clear their respective value lists.

           For details about these settings, their possible values and their
           effect, see the corresponding settings in systemd.network(5).


   [...]

Not too bad in my opinion. (I didn't actually knew before how to set the DNS server, never needed to do it.)

Quite uselsess, it doesn't tell me which file to edit, what to put in there, nor what command to invoke with what arguments.

People can do and do better with googling. Proportion of people who found the answer to that question through apropos to people who found that answer googling is probably less than a million to one.

The man pages certainly tell you how to set your DNS to 8.8.8.8. You just have to do a bit more reading than what the agent would give you. But there's a side benefit to that extra reading, you learn how to do more things. Sometimes that's useful, sometimes it isn't. But you don't know if it is useful or not until later, you can only find out in time

Be on GNOME

Press super and type “dark mode”

What happens?

I’m not sure I understand the desire to control computers with conversational language. Computers are a collection of on off switches. I personally would much prefer being able to control exactly which on off switches to switch, instead of just telling the black box to do something and for it to make no mistakes. It just doesn’t strike me as a good idea to give the incomprehensible matrix weight the ability to make decisions about what to do on my machine. There’s just far too much ambiguity for my comfort here.

I sort of agree that this is the consequence of software hell but it's not so much designers couldn't figure out the need for search from the start but that designers gradually made things so complicated you needed a global search functionality and then didn't provide it.

I mean, Android settings has global search because the settings menus for each Android phone is different (wtf) and some settings aren't even accessible except searching.

In a (maybe un-) related note, Docker is basically this but for using C/C++ libraries. In 40 years no one was able to solve the mess

> Agents are the first thing that can lead you directly from "I know what I want my computer to do." to "Actually doing it."

Actually they’re the second thing. The first thing was studying computer science.

"What a time to be alive!" : I used to love Two Minute Papers, but these days all he's covering are AI releases instead of actually good papers.

"He" isn't even covering it, he eventually automated himself out of the channel: He AI-cloned his voice and had it read AI-generated scripts. I assume he still does.

I found he got a lot less interesting when the videos became longer.

Even before all the AI, his videos started lacking substance and were just high level showcases.

Dr. Karol, Johanna, and Fahir.

i've read enough 'shlemiel the painter' ports across hundreds of systems and thousands of examples that I must quickly and coldly dismiss the precept that computers were ever used efficiently.

Valid points, but this sounds extremely useful for learning complicated GUI applications like 3d modeling or media editing apps.

Valid point, but the solution is wasteful and overengineered. Imagine if videogames needed an external datacenter to run the tutorial levels.

Sounds like an opportunity for a good engineer to come in and write something with the same functionality that runs locally and efficiently. The claim that it's wasteful only holds water if the non-wasteful solution exists and can accomplish the same tasks.

Right, maybe the next step is that Blender comes with a local-gui-tutorial-llm packaged with it?

isnt the LLM the wasteful part?

Nonetheless why not let an LLM make a guide and use that in the release, I don't see how that's wasteful

A guide doesn't answer arbitrary questions, though

I am willing to bet you could run a model capable of using this on a 12GB 3060 + some RAM. (Qwen 3.6 35B)

Even the data centre using this probably uses less net energy, and costs less, to build one of these dumb arrows than the aggregate sum of the energy used to keep you alive while you Googled for the answer. (Including heating/cooling the building, powering the equipment growing the food you eat, etc.)

I don't disagree. But the existing tech solution - scrubbing through YouTube tutorial videos until I cobble together the bits of knowledge I need - is also quite overengineered, isn't it?

Obviously I'd prefer to ask specific questions to my expert human friend sitting at the next desk over, but sadly they don't exist.

I just hope there is a future where this tech exists without such big downsides.

There'll be gauntlets of pathways mapped before the first step is taken, as or before the first agent is deployed. Criteria will include resource use weighted against economic efficiency. Already being done.

>Imagine if videogames needed an external datacenter to run the tutorial levels.

I don't see how this is anything like that. The point here is to make it easier to give the user indications which has been a staple since forever, hell this is so much of a problem that there are entire solutions engineered to letting one user take control of the computer of another user through the net.

Beyond that, I'm sorry but looking for help in the context of videogames is extremely prevalent. That external datacenter to run the tutorial levels is sometimes called "Youtube" and others "Wikia".

For ages people have been saying "it's obvious" or "it's intuitive", without learning anything about design principles. Obvious to who?

People have been saying "we don't need docs", "nobody reads docs", "they'll figure it out". They experience the pain of a new employee onboarding but never treat this as a signal for the user experience. The user can't just walk over to the developer's desk. But luckily we got stack overflow, blogs, and Google. Somewhere someone explains it! The problem became finding it!

But hey, why do things the "hard" way when you can just throw money at the problem? Or better yet, dismiss the problem by calling the user an idiot.

You're right. What a time to be alive. We've created a world where this product is useful. And not even to because dark patterns exist, but simply because we've always wanted to avoid taking a step back and thinking or getting an outside view. Because it isn't obvious if a robot has to teach you what button to press. If it does, you probably should be ashamed (there are, as always, exceptions)

That said, I do think there's still a lot of utility you this. Those exceptions aren't uncommon. This'll help people learn programs like FreeCAD or Blender, or whatever. Where the complexity is naturally high. But also I do think we should recognize the silliness of many problems that this does solve that shouldn't be problems in the first place.

> Obvious to who?

Garage sale signs are a good example of this. The person making the sign knows what it says, so they can "read" it from farther away than someone who doesn't already know what it says.

Now imagine what people back in the day thought about going from assembly to C. Or C to Java. Or, forgive me for even saying it, Java to Python.

I'm sorry but I am just so tired of hearing this lazy logic. A C compiler is largely a 1:1, deterministic pattern matcher. I type X, I can be reasonably sure compiler will do Y.

An agent is not at all like this. The freaks who made this disingenuous machine don't even know how or why it does half the stuff it does. We're all just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Absolute nonsense take my man, I'm sorry.

I mean, it's a little like that. If I ask for a Todo app, it's not going to make me a chess game or rm -rf my files instead.

There is a huge difference between mathematical determinism and "it looks like that thing I said." Even the laziest, most superficial analysis must conclude these two things are not the same just because they have vaguely the same shaped shadow.

There's also a huge difference between formalizing your problem in a set of strict rules that take a lifetime to master and saying "make me a todo app, make no mistakes".

It was still the human writing the code. In the last several years it's become the human writing the prompt, which has led to agentic development, and the next step seems to be removing the human from managing the agents.

On the other hand, (while you made a completely valid point,) some people who are new to a field, like young aspiring computer scientists who don't know how to do some stuff and need a guiding hand, will find this tremendously useful. Also, technology and compute power has been growing a tremendous amount over the past 5-10 years (now we have 20-100 billion transistors in chips!). <-- enough to sustain this wild use of compute

Indeed, what a time to be able.

You’re right, but I don’t think you can deny the value of this.

I’m really curious about the end game. When this technology completely saturates and AI becomes his mundane bullshit thing know one cares about but uses all the time. Like the next level above slop. I wonder what that world will look like.

I also am curious of this, I only fear that it's going to turn into a concerted effort by those who have power to remove already existing capabilities from individuals and replace it with centralized infrastructure. Swapping out everyone's desktop for a think client hooked up to an agent and renting it back for a monthly fee for example, would be a strict downgrade when we already had the capability to do pretty much anything we could think of on the internet. Sure maybe it makes someone's workflow a b it more efficient, but I quite like having my own agency. I don't intend to hand it away some dork who owns a billion GPUs can rent it back to me.

If you look at the example animations, it's clear that Apple has brought this entirely upon themselves. Don't yell at some guys who are trying to fix it.

I agree, actually. And I’m more than happy to criticize anyone and everyone involved as the state of software is in my opinion a failure of the human race. So I’ll yell at whomever I want, thanks. They’ll be ok.

Human in the loop is the superior workflow!

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