24 ms·

It's easy not to have email if you have a secretary who filters and prints out the incoming messages for you. I guess he never orders anything on the net, does

It's easy not to have email if you have a secretary who filters and prints out the incoming messages for you. I guess he never orders anything on the net, doesn't use any online services, because those usually require an email address where the receipts and acknowledgements are sent.

rwmj 6y ago
I imagine one day we'll all have digital personal assistants who can do this, so having a secretary shouldn't be a barrier eventually. My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  > personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them. The more worrying fact to me, is not MegaCorp will be providing it, but that it's possible that self-hosting would be technologically infeasible. That is, even if MegaCorp gives you a free and open copy of personal assistant, it's still not practical run it on your own hardware - massive computing power and storage is required to operate it, and massive data is needed to train (and continue to train) the machine learning model. Only MegaCorp can afford to run it, and provide it as a service. This has already happened in web search, content recommendation, speech recognition, machine translation, and many more applications. It's simply impossible to run your own speech recognition or machine translation package that has a comparable quality to Google's. And these technologies will eventually become an integral part of life in a future society - e.g. When you must use machine translation or personal assistant in your daily life, and when only MegaCorp can provide a high-quality solution, it's a recipe of disaster. It's Ghost in the Shell. Unfortunately, I'm definitely seeing it as a very likely outcome. The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law - which is, fortunately, not entirely impossible if alternative computing technologies are developed in the future. But still, there's still the ML training problem.
  - ReactiveJelly 6y ago
    > The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law No, economies of scale will always result in some services being cheaper to centralize. I think the same will happen with 3D printing and solar panels. No matter how cheap they get, it's always even cheaper for the power company to build a huge solar farm, or for me to order a printed part online and have it shipped. (For small batches anyway) Services like search and speech recognition and translation that benefit from having large datasets to work with, also need fast Internet connections to keep that data updated. So in 2020 my $100 might buy as much CPU as Google's $80, but it only buys as much network transfer as Google's $10. The ratio is probably worse if you consider that self-hosted or even federated search means all the web scraping has to be replicated to 100x or 1,000x more databases than Google has to manage even with their CDNs. Redundancy is not free. I want it to work too, but I don't think centralization is a technical problem with a technical solution. We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Not even capitalism, either, economics itself as a law of nature.
    - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
      >> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law > services being cheaper to centralize. You are talking about its relative cost, while I'm talking about the mere possibility. Back in the early 80s, having a personal workstation (not a home computer) to process private information was nearly an impossibility, not simply because it's cheaper to centralize but because it's technologically prohibitive. Even in the early 90s, I still read stories about how a hacker in a crypto community needed to import his private key every time he comes to work in the morning to read some personal messages, and to remove it again at the end of the day. The server could not be trusted and there was no alternative. And today, everyone uses Gmail and the same privacy problem is still here - the server can't be trusted, but at least, if you are personally willing to spend some money and energy on your project, it's possible to host your own. It'll never be mainstream, yes, but it's possible and Moore's Law enabled it. Maching translation, or personal assistant, on the other hand, now resembles a "personal-workstation-in-the-80s" problem. If computing power continues to advance according to Moore's Law, at least it's going to be a "Gmail-in-the-20s" problem after a decade or two. > We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Moore's Law and personal computing, regardless of how sufficient or insufficient, is historically a balancing force. If this force continues to act upon, the level of centralization of future software applications will still be imaginable to us. But if it ceases to exist, things will become much worse. That is all I wanted to say.
- ragnese 6y ago
  > My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them. That's all but guaranteed if it's any time in the next decade or so.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  > My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them. My worry is built on your worry; I worry that people won't even think of using their self control to say no to this, but will wait breathless for some third party to save them from their own bad decisions.
- shifto 6y ago
  I have been fantasizing over these virtual assistants since I played the Megaman Battle Network games.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    I've spent many hours playing AI Dungeon, a text adventure game powered by GPT-3 (unlocking it requires payment). You input an arbitrary body of text, and GPT-3 keeps writing the story for you. You press enter, and the AI writes a new line. There are some serious limitations, but still, sometimes the plots are surprisingly creatively, as if the characters are alive, and I couldn't wait to see what follows it (it's rate-limited). I always think Machine Learning is merely a useful and flexible pattern recognition machine that can be trained, anything beyond that is all media hype and marketing, there's nothing to see here. Now my opinion has changed - if a pattern recognition machine that contains no breakthrough (GPT-3) can be surprisingly intelligent if you throw a lot of data to it, any new development cannot be worse than that. I'm now a true believer on the feasibility of AI assistants.
    - chongli 6y ago
      I’m curious how you can be “playing” this for hours and hours. Isn’t AI Dungeon mostly just a toy, not a real game? There isn’t any goal, there’s nothing to figure out, there isn’t even a coherent state that I’m aware of. And that’s why I disagree with the claim that GPT-3 is in any way intelligent. It’s a chameleon. Or a Chinese room [1]. I think to have real intelligence you need a model for reality, not just a language model. Otherwise you can do nothing more than parrot and remix the words of others. Parrots are entertaining companions though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
      - Miraste 6y ago
        It's not like a video game, but it's not a toy either. To get good results you have to direct it and be mindful of its limitations, but if you're willing to approach it as a human-assisted story building application rather than a game, it's easy to put some hours into.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
It's hard to have such a secretary and printing opportunities nowadays. In academia across Europe, I am hearing complaints that department secretaries are overworked or reduced to part-time status (even as the number of administrative personnel elsewhere in the uni is ballooning), and printing is limited by quotas after which soon one has to start paying out of pocket for printouts. Even grayhaired tenured faculty are feeling the pinch.
- passerby1 6y ago
  What does cause it, some green-eco-pressure or a bare underbudget reason?
  - martin_a 6y ago
    Mixture of all of it. On the one hand, university is changing a lot in Europe with less funding from governments and more and more fundraising from private companies. Then there's the point that some professors (or universities at all) really have to leave their ivory towers. Cutting their funding (or secretaries) works wonders in getting those people to move and care about things again. Then there's the point that one should really ask what needs to be printed and what not. My university life/education fits on a USB-drive and three file folders with notes I made. I know students who have a whole wall filled with folders. Did they really need to copy whole books and whatnot? I doubt it. At last there's some ecological considerations, too. But that's not really forced, it's more a "nice to have" for the image of the university...
  - notmyname9173 6y ago
    I used to run network printing for a 35,000 student university in the US. For some reason, the administration insisted that ICT provide printers free of charge to departments. When I started, we had 1 printer per 3 full time employees and the average student printed 150 pages per semester. Some students and faculty printed entire textbooks. Each page cost $0.03 all-in. When ICT funding was easy, eating the $350,000/year didn't matter as much, but when state appropriations dried up...well, print cards, quotas, and penny pinching became the norm.
- 6y ago
danmg 6y ago
It was 1990. No one was really ordering stuff over the internet yet. Commercial commerce was still sort of a taboo since, by and large, it was funded by public research monies. Now? He probably has some webmail account so he can sign up for online banking, utility accounts, and all the other mundane stuff people do online which would have been science fiction back then.
- dhosek 6y ago
  Even in the early 90s, there was debate about whether it was acceptable to include an advertising tagline in your signature on Usenet posts.
nogabebop23 6y ago
I agree. I fear people look at this situation in a different light than say the current president of the United States who, while he does have an email address, admittely does not write emails or read them directly. Knuth is admired and this is a pleasant quirk; the POTUS appears an old, out-of-touch dinosaur. I'm not judging either; my initial thoughts were just of the different perceptions for similar unique and rare circumstances.
- bo1024 6y ago
  I think he explains pretty clearly up front why his job makes this circumstance appropriate - on the bottom of things. I can’t think of anyone who should be more on top of things than a president.
  - notmyname9173 6y ago
    And there is barely worse way to stay on top of things than email.
    - bo1024 6y ago
      I wouldn’t agree. It’s the best communication format for someone who wants to control their own time and attention.
- reificator 6y ago
  While I greatly admire Knuth, I've never thought he wasn't a dinosaur. I don't look down on my grandmother for being confused when she's trying to use email, and I don't look down on Knuth for abandoning it in the 90s. I guess it comes down to whether you think technological dinosaur is an insult or an observation.
- container 6y ago
  It seems that the current POTUS knows how to use Twitter directly, which is probably generally considered more modern and "in-touch" than email. Maybe, then, the perception of him that you described wouldn't be based on the technology he uses to communicate.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
The secretary does all of that, I'd guess.
- irepairmacs 6y ago
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rwmj 6y ago

I imagine one day we'll all have digital personal assistants who can do this, so having a secretary shouldn't be a barrier eventually. My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
> personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them. The more worrying fact to me, is not MegaCorp will be providing it, but that it's possible that self-hosting would be technologically infeasible. That is, even if MegaCorp gives you a free and open copy of personal assistant, it's still not practical run it on your own hardware - massive computing power and storage is required to operate it, and massive data is needed to train (and continue to train) the machine learning model. Only MegaCorp can afford to run it, and provide it as a service. This has already happened in web search, content recommendation, speech recognition, machine translation, and many more applications. It's simply impossible to run your own speech recognition or machine translation package that has a comparable quality to Google's. And these technologies will eventually become an integral part of life in a future society - e.g. When you must use machine translation or personal assistant in your daily life, and when only MegaCorp can provide a high-quality solution, it's a recipe of disaster. It's Ghost in the Shell. Unfortunately, I'm definitely seeing it as a very likely outcome. The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law - which is, fortunately, not entirely impossible if alternative computing technologies are developed in the future. But still, there's still the ML training problem.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  > The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law No, economies of scale will always result in some services being cheaper to centralize. I think the same will happen with 3D printing and solar panels. No matter how cheap they get, it's always even cheaper for the power company to build a huge solar farm, or for me to order a printed part online and have it shipped. (For small batches anyway) Services like search and speech recognition and translation that benefit from having large datasets to work with, also need fast Internet connections to keep that data updated. So in 2020 my $100 might buy as much CPU as Google's $80, but it only buys as much network transfer as Google's $10. The ratio is probably worse if you consider that self-hosted or even federated search means all the web scraping has to be replicated to 100x or 1,000x more databases than Google has to manage even with their CDNs. Redundancy is not free. I want it to work too, but I don't think centralization is a technical problem with a technical solution. We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Not even capitalism, either, economics itself as a law of nature.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    >> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law > services being cheaper to centralize. You are talking about its relative cost, while I'm talking about the mere possibility. Back in the early 80s, having a personal workstation (not a home computer) to process private information was nearly an impossibility, not simply because it's cheaper to centralize but because it's technologically prohibitive. Even in the early 90s, I still read stories about how a hacker in a crypto community needed to import his private key every time he comes to work in the morning to read some personal messages, and to remove it again at the end of the day. The server could not be trusted and there was no alternative. And today, everyone uses Gmail and the same privacy problem is still here - the server can't be trusted, but at least, if you are personally willing to spend some money and energy on your project, it's possible to host your own. It'll never be mainstream, yes, but it's possible and Moore's Law enabled it. Maching translation, or personal assistant, on the other hand, now resembles a "personal-workstation-in-the-80s" problem. If computing power continues to advance according to Moore's Law, at least it's going to be a "Gmail-in-the-20s" problem after a decade or two. > We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Moore's Law and personal computing, regardless of how sufficient or insufficient, is historically a balancing force. If this force continues to act upon, the level of centralization of future software applications will still be imaginable to us. But if it ceases to exist, things will become much worse. That is all I wanted to say.
ragnese 6y ago
> My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them. That's all but guaranteed if it's any time in the next decade or so.
microcolonel 6y ago
> My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them. My worry is built on your worry; I worry that people won't even think of using their self control to say no to this, but will wait breathless for some third party to save them from their own bad decisions.
shifto 6y ago
I have been fantasizing over these virtual assistants since I played the Megaman Battle Network games.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  I've spent many hours playing AI Dungeon, a text adventure game powered by GPT-3 (unlocking it requires payment). You input an arbitrary body of text, and GPT-3 keeps writing the story for you. You press enter, and the AI writes a new line. There are some serious limitations, but still, sometimes the plots are surprisingly creatively, as if the characters are alive, and I couldn't wait to see what follows it (it's rate-limited). I always think Machine Learning is merely a useful and flexible pattern recognition machine that can be trained, anything beyond that is all media hype and marketing, there's nothing to see here. Now my opinion has changed - if a pattern recognition machine that contains no breakthrough (GPT-3) can be surprisingly intelligent if you throw a lot of data to it, any new development cannot be worse than that. I'm now a true believer on the feasibility of AI assistants.
  - chongli 6y ago
    I’m curious how you can be “playing” this for hours and hours. Isn’t AI Dungeon mostly just a toy, not a real game? There isn’t any goal, there’s nothing to figure out, there isn’t even a coherent state that I’m aware of. And that’s why I disagree with the claim that GPT-3 is in any way intelligent. It’s a chameleon. Or a Chinese room [1]. I think to have real intelligence you need a model for reality, not just a language model. Otherwise you can do nothing more than parrot and remix the words of others. Parrots are entertaining companions though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
    - Miraste 6y ago
      It's not like a video game, but it's not a toy either. To get good results you have to direct it and be mindful of its limitations, but if you're willing to approach it as a human-assisted story building application rather than a game, it's easy to put some hours into.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

It's hard to have such a secretary and printing opportunities nowadays. In academia across Europe, I am hearing complaints that department secretaries are overworked or reduced to part-time status (even as the number of administrative personnel elsewhere in the uni is ballooning), and printing is limited by quotas after which soon one has to start paying out of pocket for printouts. Even grayhaired tenured faculty are feeling the pinch.

passerby1 6y ago
What does cause it, some green-eco-pressure or a bare underbudget reason?
- martin_a 6y ago
  Mixture of all of it. On the one hand, university is changing a lot in Europe with less funding from governments and more and more fundraising from private companies. Then there's the point that some professors (or universities at all) really have to leave their ivory towers. Cutting their funding (or secretaries) works wonders in getting those people to move and care about things again. Then there's the point that one should really ask what needs to be printed and what not. My university life/education fits on a USB-drive and three file folders with notes I made. I know students who have a whole wall filled with folders. Did they really need to copy whole books and whatnot? I doubt it. At last there's some ecological considerations, too. But that's not really forced, it's more a "nice to have" for the image of the university...
- notmyname9173 6y ago
  I used to run network printing for a 35,000 student university in the US. For some reason, the administration insisted that ICT provide printers free of charge to departments. When I started, we had 1 printer per 3 full time employees and the average student printed 150 pages per semester. Some students and faculty printed entire textbooks. Each page cost $0.03 all-in. When ICT funding was easy, eating the $350,000/year didn't matter as much, but when state appropriations dried up...well, print cards, quotas, and penny pinching became the norm.
6y ago

danmg 6y ago

It was 1990. No one was really ordering stuff over the internet yet. Commercial commerce was still sort of a taboo since, by and large, it was funded by public research monies. Now? He probably has some webmail account so he can sign up for online banking, utility accounts, and all the other mundane stuff people do online which would have been science fiction back then.

dhosek 6y ago
Even in the early 90s, there was debate about whether it was acceptable to include an advertising tagline in your signature on Usenet posts.

nogabebop23 6y ago

I agree. I fear people look at this situation in a different light than say the current president of the United States who, while he does have an email address, admittely does not write emails or read them directly. Knuth is admired and this is a pleasant quirk; the POTUS appears an old, out-of-touch dinosaur. I'm not judging either; my initial thoughts were just of the different perceptions for similar unique and rare circumstances.

bo1024 6y ago
I think he explains pretty clearly up front why his job makes this circumstance appropriate - on the bottom of things. I can’t think of anyone who should be more on top of things than a president.
- notmyname9173 6y ago
  And there is barely worse way to stay on top of things than email.
  - bo1024 6y ago
    I wouldn’t agree. It’s the best communication format for someone who wants to control their own time and attention.
reificator 6y ago
While I greatly admire Knuth, I've never thought he wasn't a dinosaur. I don't look down on my grandmother for being confused when she's trying to use email, and I don't look down on Knuth for abandoning it in the 90s. I guess it comes down to whether you think technological dinosaur is an insult or an observation.
container 6y ago
It seems that the current POTUS knows how to use Twitter directly, which is probably generally considered more modern and "in-touch" than email. Maybe, then, the perception of him that you described wouldn't be based on the technology he uses to communicate.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

The secretary does all of that, I'd guess.

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