opto

As a non-developer who really only uses computers to write and produce documents, why would I use typst over org-mode or $your_fave_markdown + pandoc?

When there is a large portion of society that realises this is a way to say, "what if I had every social interaction in the setting I want, with the characters I want, with the response I want, where I say exactly the right thing" and choose to spend all of their leisure hours generating imaginary worlds to make them feel better there will still be people saying, "and so what if they do? If people will pay for it, ultimately the market decides"

This way of encoding numbers is great.

I knew the 7-4-2-1-S way to get 1-9 from 5 holes, and it is more intuitive to use, but once you write out the pattern for yours it is also easy to see

You could also use Zatocoding, or superimposed codes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superimposed_code) as a way to 'tag' cards.

For example, many research facilities kept a stack of edge-notched cards as a way to find papers to read. You write the name of a paper or book on a card, and you notch out the holes which correspond to a search term, like 'polymer', or 'cellulose' -- then you can use needles in those holes to search for them later.

You can also then do things like boolean searches. Let's say you want all of the papers which are about polymers which are not cellulose. First you poke the holes for 'polymer', and collect up all the ones that drop. Next you take that stack and poke the holes for cellulose -- the cards which drop are about cellulose, so you ignore those, and the ones left on the needles are about polymers which are not cellulose.

I got really into the idea of doing this as a way to do something like a crazed zettelkasten, and reading material from the time this was widely used they would claim they could sort through thousands of cards in a few minutes. Not as quick as ripgrep, but not too shabby.

What does that really mean though — ten more years of data centers exploiting local communities for their resources will mean that a computer might be able to teach people to tie knots, and reliably check their work... No government would allow that to certify someone, and no company would risk the lawsuit when someone dies doing what the AI tells them, so it's a non-starter. Even if it were possible, and governments got on board with certifying training like that, would anyone think this was better than what we have now?

What are the likely use cases in my industry then? That AI is used to bodge the important paperwork that protects lives; is used to draft legislation; is used by both employees and management to do things like personal development reports.

Is anyone meant to be impressed? Is this worth communities having their water stolen from them?

I appreciate I am skeptical, but it is hard not to be when the world spends all day telling you a piece of technology is going to fundamentally change the world, and in real life you only see people use it to blag CVs, personal reports, and lesson planning.

I mean only that I see no use for it myself, in my own work. I'm sure there are people working in roles around me who believe they get some use out of AI doing their work for them, and they will have to answer to auditors when they find problems with their work, or when someone is killed.

To me, as a non-techie person, it feels as if people who work in software believe that because their work can be done by AI, everyone else's can, too. Or that this would be better, simply because it proposes a technological solution to human work — it is taken as read that a solution which uses cool sounding computers and data farms is better than one done by humans with a pen and a pad and life experience. They don't have to justify this belief, because the money is on their side.

> AI is a tool. Use it appropriately

Yes, but no room is made for people who see no use for it. There is a forced-consensus that this technology is useful, which I have to combat against at work.

We teach in a very different environment, but your use sounds typical of my colleagues. "I ask it for suggestions and pick one", but nobody seems to wonder about what is lost when we shrink the horizon of what we will teach to the most likely outputs from a chatbot, one of which we will use.

Maybe this makes more sense in other fields. I have to prepare people to work in the shipping industry, in extremely dangerous roles where they will be operating heavy machinery, steering ships, driving cranes etc. The fact is that AI knows next to nothing about this field because an AI cannot experience handling a ship in rough weather, has never secured a boat to a ship's side with the rain and wind in its face.

Yet, when people are brought in to instruct our trainees, they are told to "tell AI what you want and pick one of the suggestions", in the best case, or just give over everything to the AI in the worst case. And nobody seems to be able to explain why this is a better way of working than sitting with a pen and paper, brainstorming some ideas for a lesson based on your real experiences, and then delivering it. The only justification I'm ever given is your one, "I pick from a list so I am really still in control", "it's quicker and I don't have to think as hard or as long", "it's better at making slides or writing good-sounding (to management and auditors) lesson plans". No-one ever seems to justify it by saying it is genuinely a better experience for the trainees.

I am an instructor who helps deliver an apprenticeship. My new boss has been in our industry for about 20 years and is one of the most respected people in our company. They've just joined us to teach and are off doing a two week course. On the first day she was told to let AI write all of her lesson plans, and then feed the lesson plans to AI to make her slides...

Hopefully she rejects all this out of hand, but if she doesn't it'll mean that none of our trainees get the benefit of her experience, who she is as a person, and what she has to pass onto them.

We have 6 monthly reviews as instructors where we are told the same thing. "How could you use AI for your teaching?"

They don't even feel the need to justify why this would be desirable, or is needed at all. It's just pure bandwagonning. Unbelievably, most of my coworkers are extremely positive about AI, although none of them have told me they use it for anything besides preparing their lessons for them — they just use it instead of having to think, or spend time preparing...the only important thing they do at work.

It makes no sense to me.

Well in the 90s and early 2000s you really could make money as a small local artist in a niche genre. Think of the people who could cut 500 white labels of their new UK Garage tune and reasonably expect to sell them from the back of their car and turn a decent profit on it.

The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.

The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.

You just need a tickler file.

In a completely different field, navigating ships at sea, the Collision Regulations which define how people must conduct ships at sea, they use the words "Shall" and "May" to differentiate legal requirements and what may just be best practice. "Should" intuitively means something more like "May" to me

Pay licence fee, read BBC news

Replying for anyone reading this comment: Le Guin was a Daoist, but also, and concurrently, an anarchist. So much of her writing, especially The Word for World is Forest, parts of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, is informed by her anarchism. Very often you find Le Guin exploring ideas of an anarchist response to colonialism, or just enjoying setting out an anarchist society and imagining how it might work, how it would unfold, the challenges it would face, and the solutions people might try.

I believe this is a solved problem and you were closest with the analog system. I'll outline my system so people might find it:

You'll need:

- A physical diary to track your appointments

- A 'working' box to hold index cards of whichever size you prefer (I use 3x5 Exacompta cards)

- 43 tabbed index card dividers + some more if you want tabs for GTD-style 'contexts'

- A pouch for carrying index cards on your person (I have a Lochby Pocket Journal which holds plenty of cards)

- A box to act as an 'inbox' for you to dump cards into before processing them

Where you went wrong is keeping a list on a single card. The only solution is 'One Item, One Card'.

The Set Up:

- Take 31 tabbed dividers and write the numbers 1-31 on them. These will represent a day of the month.

- Put these in your Working Box

- Take 12 more tabbed dividers, write JAN-DEC on them. These will represent a month of the year.

- Put these in your Working Box /behind/ the daily tabs

- If you are using tabs to track 'NEXT ACTIONS' with contexts like GTD, write the name of the contexts on a set of tabbed dividers

- Put these in your Working Box /in front/ of the /daily/ tabs - as in, they come first in the box

Daily Routine:

- In the morning, sit down at your desk

- Check your Diary for any appointments you have that day

- Check your inbox for new cards and put them on your desk

- In your Working Box, pull out the cards that are behind today's day tab and move the tab to the next month. For example, today is the 28th of January, so I pull out the cards behind the 28 tab, put them on my desk, and then move the 28 tab back to February (which is already full of the 1-27 tabs from previous days)

- Sort through today's cards - I do this in 4 or 5 piles:

  1) Things I'm going to do now before I go to work

  2) Things I'm going to do today, but not right now - these go in my Pocket Journal so that I can refer to them through the day (things like "Call this person over my lunch break")

  3) Things I'm going to today, but when I get back home from work - these go right in the front of my Working Box, before all of the tabs. I also organise these into an order in which I am going to tackle them

  4) Things I'm going to move to another day, which I then move to another day tab

  5) (optional) things I am not going to do, but don't want to throw away. I put these into storage in a 'Someday' box which I look at once a week

- Go off to work with the cards you sorted into the (2) pile, and plenty of blanks to write down anything that comes to mind that you might want to do - make sure that you put one thing on one card, so that they can be sorted into the box easily

- Come home, dump all of the cards in your Pocket Journal into your inbox, and sort them out there and then or leave them for the next morning's routine

As jobs get done I either throw away the card if it was a one-off job, or move it to another day if it is a recurring thing. For example, I have a card that reminds me to clean my phone which I do, and then put back in the box in 2 days time.

Why This Works:

I've been using a system like this for about two and a half years. Before this I used Org Mode and spent a lot of time tweaking agenda views and tagging systems etc. Index cards work better for me for the following reasons:

- The system works offline

- It requires no technology, so I can have a productive day without touching a computer or phone, which is good for my mental health

- I work a job where I cannot always pull out a phone to take notes

- The act of writing things down helps me to remember that I need to do them, and stops me writing down frivolous things (think about how many people have a TODO app full of odd little jobs they'll never do which got there because there's no friction to adding things to their lists)

- Because I have a good habit of writing down anything that I think about doing, and can trust my physical system, I have confidence that what is in my box represents everything I /need/ to do. I don't have to think about whether things have synced properly, leaving me unsure if my I am missing items.

- Once the box is set up there is no need to spend time tweaking the system, which is a time-suck for people who use things like Org Mode

- Because there is one item per card I can easily reshuffle my plan for the day, and move jobs from one day to another and back without crossing things out and re-writing them (this is the drawback of systems like Bullet Journals, and your one)

I'm sure there are other benefits which no longer appear to me because I am so used to it.

The forecastle of a ship is in the forward part of a ship — at the front, not the back. Looking at renderings of cogs, the 'castle' at the stern seems more to anticipate the modern bulk carrier, with an accommodation block with bridge on top at the aft end, looking out over the cargo holds.

> I wasted several hours on occasions where Claude would make changes to completely unrelated parts of the application instead of addressing my actual request.

Every time I read about people using AI I come away with one question. What if they spent hours with a pen and paper and brainstormed about their idea, and then turned it into an actual plan, and then did the plan? At the very least you wouldn't waste hours of your life and instead enjoy using your own powers of thought.

I work as a merchant seaman and for our regular day's work everyone basically exclusively uses bowlines, round turn and two half hitches, and clove hitches. We'd use reef knots or single sheet bends for joining ropes.

I think most often people have some vibe coded stuff that kind of does what they want but they don't really understand what it all is and how it works, or any confidence it can be made into something useful, so rather than spending time cleaning up AI code they just use it to grasp the idea and write it themselves. Whether any time is saved by going through this process with the AI seems doubtful to me. Sitting down with pen and paper and thinking through things would probably be more useful.

I think this is a good point because "cheating at the work I have to do, as quickly as possible, well enough to not get fired" is the actual use case for AI for 99% of people.

All the stuff you see in this thread about how kids are going to use AI to bootstrap an education for themselves even better than what their teachers give them (not sure why there's so much hostility towards teachers) is a fantasy.

HN obviously overrepresents kids who were interested in tech things who may do something like that. The vast majority of kids will use AI as a tool to blurt out essays and coursework they don't read, so that they can get back to their addiction to TikTok and Instagram.

As will, of course, everyone using it at work. This is already the case. This is what AI is for. "Do this for me so I can scroll more".

Tell us more about the kitchen timer system!

If it would have taken you days to learn about the topic well enough to write a bad implementation, how can you have any confidence you can evaluate, let alone "correct", one written by an LLM?

You just hope you are on a tractor.

Am I being a completely delusional sceptic or do tools like this make no sense to anyone else?

If you need AI to tell you about a guest and tell you what to ask them, why are you having them on your podcast? You don't know anything about them, and have nothing to ask them - why does the world need you to do this interview? You don't care about your guest at all, so why would we want to listen to you talk to them?

As the guest, why bother responding to questions made like this? Why not have an AI write answers for you, since you are probably equally uninterested in your interlocutor and their questions?

Skip the bs and just publish the transcript of two AIs talking to each other.

Looks like a great project, and one sorely needed by people like me who find themselves trying to get hold of old books they can't get in their local library and that are too expensive to buy secondhand.

I carry 3x5 index cards and a pen with me everywhere I go. When I think of things I need to do, should do, or could do, I write them down. When I get home I see which ones are worth keeping. I put them in a box which has dividers for contexts, like GTD, and a 43 Folders system so that I can schedule stuff for future-me.

That is what you need to get things done every day in a reliable way. Everything else is bs. You don't need it.

I love the early generative artists:

- Frieder Nake

- Vera Molnar

- Manfred Mohr

More recently people like Casey Reas, who developed the language Processing, Jared Tarbell (https://complexification.net), and Anders Hoff (https://inconvergent.net) are the people I'd look at. Hoff works in Lisp if that's your thing.

For a place to look at the history of generative art, the best resource is still http://dada.compart-bremen.de/