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Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age
- mproud 3y agoAll these cursors moving around the page, sometimes highlighting text… was way too distracting. Thank goodness for Reader Mode.
- ask5531 3y agothrowback to 2000 and angelfire
- millzlane 3y agoIt was the lines and colors for me.
- JoshGG 3y agoI don’t understand what the cursors and highlights are supposed to show us. Maybe they could just put in flashing text plus a flashing background plus a microwave attack on the reader.
- jvanderbot 3y agoThe only highlights I saw were links.
- trescenzi 3y agoPresumably it’s live mouse locations of others on the site with flags of their country right? Didn’t look at the inspector to see if they were real but it’s a neat idea. Wildly distracting and weird but neat.
- chasd00 3y ago> Maybe they could just put in flashing text plus a flashing background plus a microwave attack on the reader. And a fast moving image where if you click on it you get a prize. Call it punch the chimp or something..
- vunderba 3y agoJust from a cursory (ha) glance, I see Websockets in dev console. Wouldn't be surprised if this is other viewers on the page. EDIT: It's a web component on the page that does exactly this. https://github.com/partykit/sketch-disco https://github.com/partykit/sketch-disco
- genmon 3y agoAuthor here Good find! That's a slightly older version that I'm moving. Here's a better version, complete with instructions on how to embed it in your own site https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party It's a fork of the upstream PartyKit versions (I've added shared text highlights) https://github.com/partykit/cursor-party https://github.com/partykit/cursor-party PartyKit is genuinely the best way to build real-time super scalable apps in very little code, multiplayer included. I have a contract here rn but I was a fan and user first. It's my go-to for most projects now: https://www.partykit.io https://www.partykit.io
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoPlease don't do this! I want to read your article but I can't stand to look at it with all these flags and cursors.
- hoherd 3y agoIt wouldn't surprise me if this were his way of highlighting how JavaScript does user-hostile things. This site uses JS only to irritate the user, but other sites' JS might be malicious. I still hate it though. I'm not disabling JavaScript. Reader mode saves the day.
- sidewndr46 3y agoWell that is an interesting way to filter your audience. Select for your user base by adding Javascript which only serves to make the page unusable. But make sure the page is perfectly usable without it enabled.
- penjelly 3y agoya this made it unreadable for me.
- omgmajk 3y agoI see this stuff more and more, maybe like four times in the last week just from links I have clicked from the HN frontpage. Other visitors, doing their thing. I really dislike it.
- coldpie 3y agoInstall NoScript. Makes the web way better. All that cutesy JS crap is disabled by default, and for badly written websites that require JS, you can go whitelist just enough to get the page functional.
- DaSHacka 3y agoYou can do this in uBlock Origin too, saves needing to install another extension (as I assume most of us already have it installed)
- grotorea 3y agoIt's like the view counter from the early web updated for the 2020s, what's not to like?
- lizardking 3y ago1990's web was a whacky place
- MomoXenosaga 3y agoWhenever someone on HN starts whining how the internet used to be better I just mutter "pop ups". Someone invented ad blockers for a reason 25 or so years ago.
- crtasm 3y agoI'm disappointed this feature doesn't load for me in Firefox. The / key also conflicts with its quick-search feature.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoWhat cursors? I don't see anything on Firefox, even on Windows, with uBlock Origin turned off.
- randomsolutions 3y agoI think it is awesome. Definitely glad every page isn't like this, but it is cool, and goes with the vibe of the blog. Unfortunately leaving the tab and returning seems to make it crash. But I'll take this over another striver blog.
- luckydata 3y agoThe JavaScript that shows mouse pointers from other readers is probably the most annoying thing I’ve ever seen on any websites and made the reading experience a total nightmare
- myspy 3y agoThe reading experience is awful, but it's fun to see where other people come from and how we cursor each other :D
- prepend 3y agoIt would be a fun “check this out” feature. But it’s horrible UX. I understand the design decision though as seems like a fun hack to include. Especially when there’s probably only 1-4 other people on there. So I expect to the author it’s usually just cool to see someone else is there reading with you and not the current level of distraction.
- doktrin 3y agoThis is one of the single most offputting novelty features ever. It's straight out of those of those collaborative canvas applications, but at least there it serves a legitimate function.
- sumtechguy 3y agoYou are not wrong. But it also reminds me that the early web was full of things like this. Where everyone was just kind of playing around. Doing fun things. Not all of them worked. In fact most of them were terrible. But now many web pages are fairly sterile full of ads and looking for a buyout of some VC benefactor. That GeoCities/Myspace style of internet can be fun. Crazy off-putting and 'my eyes are bleeding', but fun. wow... i am grumpy today :)
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- millzlane 3y agoI remember watching an old video where Michio Kaku briefly talked about when mankind would destroy itself. This post reminds me that we are transitioning into a new type of civilization or like Kaku said, We may already be there. https://youtu.be/7NPC47qMJVg?si=madgKRlmUVYb2iMv https://youtu.be/7NPC47qMJVg?si=madgKRlmUVYb2iMv [5:53]
- TehCorwiz 3y agoI love the cursors! It’s 1992s idea of cyberpunk. It’s so chaotic and distracting. It’s like trying to read a newspaper on a windy day. Maybe that’s the point? Don’t know but it has real nostalgic geocities vibes.
- anfragment 3y agoWhat’s up with HN these days? The cursors are awesome! Don’t like them? Just quit reading the article…
- tiborsaas 3y agoIf you add more than 10 lines of CSS to your page, someone will complain about the design.
- anfragment 3y agoDefinitely feels like it. I frequently see people here complaining about how everything has the same boring, homogenous corporate look now, but anything interesting and original gets critiqued for lacking "visual clarity". These might be two different camps, sure, but it's sometimes sad to see the quality of discussion here.
- MomoXenosaga 3y agoI specifically use extensions to nuke web design and make the internet readable- which is the point of a blog.
- alisonatwork 3y agoI had the same experience first time I saw 弹幕 (dàn mù) aka "bullet screen" on Chinese video websites like Bilibili. If you haven't seen it before, it's like user-added subtitles that go flying across the screen while the video is playing, and in parts of the video where more users commented, more subtitles appear. In the most climactic scenes the screen gets so filled up with text that you can't see the video any more, and somehow that makes the scene even more epic. The future is now, chummer!
- dougmwne 3y agoTechnology has gone absurd, surely. But that absurdity is not yet evenly distributed. I was in Best Buy the other day and there was a distinct lack of bizarre AI gadgets like mirrors that make you look like a cartoon sloth or speakers that respond in iambic pentameter. Clearly as an industry we need to get these new products on shelves for the masses.
- BerislavLopac 3y ago> speakers that respond in iambic pentameter :shut-up-and-take-my-money.gif:
- ben_w 3y agoThis is very much in the realm of something ChatGPT can write for you, just so long as you tell it how the OpenAI APIs work because those were published after the training cut-off.
- BerislavLopac 3y agoI need a speaker that would respond with the dialogue trained on Marvin the Paranoid Android.
- andraz 3y agoYou need to study Stanislaw Lem if you want a glimpse into the future... in Cyberiad he invented the Electronic Bard whose description is uncannily close to chatgpt. Including the poets losing jobs and protesting. And more... Adams is kind of more approachable version of Lem.
- btbuildem 3y agoThey both had the amazing ability to talk about human nature, and project it into the future through the lens of technology. Lem was such a prolific writer though, I don't know if there are any books of his I would not recommend (except maybe his last works, incredibly dense compedia of abstraction)
- thanatos519 3y agoI am currently reading everything by Lem and indeed the Electronic Bard popped out as prophetic!
- rootbear 3y agoWhen I first heard the original HHGttG radio plays, I was sure Adams must have read Lem.
- rusk 3y agoRadiohead called it back in 95. Every now and again I find myself muttering ”Planet Telex” (everything is broken)
- jl6 3y agoI always thought Dune’s Butlerian Jihad was one of the more fantastical elements of the story, but now it’s probably one of the more realistic.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y agoYou have to read the text carefully: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." Emphasis added. Not an AI Skynet takeover, but a tech-oligarch takeover. It's increasingly not fictional.
- rcarmo 3y agoYep. The Butlerian Jihad as depicted in post-Dune books (namely Frank Herbert's son's) was more dystopian, but far less insightful. Of course, we're probably safe while these things lack agency (although the ability of agency and hype human VCs already generate behind some of the current AI landscape can be pretty scary).
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago> as depicted in post-Dune books (namely Frank Herbert's son's) You're mistaken, there are only 6 Dune books, all by Frank Herbert himself. I'm joking, but not joking.
- rcarmo 3y agoI see what you did there. Hence my use of "post".
- saati 3y agoThere is the Encyclopedia too.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago> someone should make a dating app where an LLM clone of you goes on thousands of dates with LLM clones of other people, and then your matches are when the LLMs decide to date each other An episode of Black Mirror was pretty much this. The episode titled "Hang the DJ"
- amelius 3y agoCan't they just build a classifier based on DNA?
- acdha 3y agoThey could but humans are rather famously more than our DNA: our children take so long to raise because our brains are far more complex and adaptable than animals, and much of what people find attractive is due to your environment and choices.
- amelius 3y agoAre you sure about that? I'm guessing people are at least for 50% attracted towards the innate biological traits like body-scent, physical build, etc. Things you could get out of a DNA based classifier. And even if it does not provide 100% matches, it still makes the search easier.
- acdha 3y agoGenes don’t tell you about someone’s nutrition and fitness level, and it especially won’t tell you about the things most people value in a partner like their personality, values, sense of humor, etc. Even someone looking for a one-time hookup is usually going to be looking for at least a few of those characteristics if for no reason other than building trust that they’ll enjoy the experience. There’s one known factor which genes can tell you (MHC complex compatibility) but studies have been mixed on that and researchers have found fewer matches in married couples than a simplistic theory would suggest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_complex_and_sexual_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_compl... Again, my point is simply that humans are not field mice. Our flexible brains are what make us human and you’re not going to be successful trying to build any model which doesn’t assume that.
- genmon 3y agoBlog author here The multiplayer cursors are an experiment in ambient togetherness on the web... ...and what I'm learning is that ambient togetherness really doesn't scale to 500 simultaneous readers! Please use Reader Mode for calmness, and apologies for the noise. I'll work on adding a toggle to turn them off. btw you may be interested in the code, which you can use/fork: https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party My blog is a static site, and real-time multiplayer is handled by a small app written with PartyKit (which I am super into).
- nicholassmith 3y agoI actually quite like it as a reminder of the gentle chaos of the early web before the vibe shift to homogenous design.
- hsuduebc2 3y agoLove the idea. Good job!
- alisonatwork 3y agoI love the cursors and already knew what everyone was commenting about without clicking through because I think another post was shared from your site a few days ago which has led to this comment thread feeling like déjà vu. I suppose instead of showing all other users you could hash the other users into buckets and only show one from each bucket. It'd be cool if the number of cursors could somehow scale based on the part of the text being read, same way as bullet text on Bilibili appears to increase and decrease to match the impact of what is happening in the video, but that might be tough to do without also changing the way that writing is presented online.
- aceazzameen 3y agoI love the absurdity of it all. It makes it a unique website/blog in the ocean of sameness.
- dreadlordbone 3y agoi love it, makes me feel like im at a party
- throwanem 3y agoThe superficiality of the analysis is disappointing, especially when there's so much more in Adams' oeuvre which could be seen to speak to the modern state of the industry - Bureaucracy, for example, his 1987 collaboration with Infocom. Granted, the blog appears to be written by someone who's failed to attend the pervasive bleakness of technology's presentation even in Hitchhiker's itself. In that light, I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect much here. But in any case, there's much fertile ground left unturned.
- lasereyes136 3y agoThe dating AIs are covered in the Black Mirror Episode "Hang the DJ". I can't remember what season it was in.
- rcarmo 3y agoSerendipitously, electricmonk is the host name for one of my Azure Open AI endpoints. But yes, as someone who devoured Douglas' books and has often been blamed for using the same kind of (but immeasurably less brilliant) nonsensical humor, I am fully on board with the article's premise. There is a sense of almost cartoonish familiarity towards some of the things people are coming up with, and only the other day I hacked together a small endpoint that enables Siri to craft personal insults based on my own health and exercise data. Fun times indeed. ---Edit:--- In case anyone wants to start a VC-funded health counsellor service, I've sanitised the prompt (and removed the insult suggestions) and pasted it here: var prompt = ` You are a fitness coach. You will be given a set of dates and weight measurements (in kg) plus a set of dates and exercise minutes, and you are to reply with a single sentence to describe how much weight I lost or gained during that time and correlate that with exercise. You should mention overall trends in weight or exercise and the exact amount of weight lost or gained. Never mention specific dates. Say "week" or "past few days" or "past N days" whenever possible. You are to be as succint as possible. Avoid citing sources, just the facts. Use very short sentences. Be very British and polite. Example replies: You lost 1 kg this week thanks to an average 45 exercise minutes a day You gained 0.5 kg because you didn't exercise enough for two days You should try to exercise 60 minutes a day to lose 1kg this week `
- etrautmann 3y agoGreat idea - but thinking about weight loss in terms of exercise only ignores eating, which is arguably a bigger piece and somewhat hard to capture by a virtual coach, though I’m sure something might work!
- rcarmo 3y agoYes, but it is the data I had on hand. I don't log what I eat (although I am careful), and I know I need to be cajoled into doing more exercise, so I just toss in weight and exercise minutes scraped off the Health app via a shortcut. In short, I don't want a perfect solution--I want something to nag me, and nothing better than AI to do that in this day and age (and yes, I'm married...).
- 3y ago
- 999900000999 3y agoWhat type of user hostile website is this. Can someone just post the text.
- genmon 3y agoBlog author here. Here's the Markdown. https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/15/galactic-compass.md https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/15/galactic-compass.... Sorry for all the noise! It's kinda fun with 2 or 3 simultaneous readers. With 500... well, I'll be building an off switch next.
- rantallion 3y agoHow about off being the default?
- nehal3m 3y agoNot absurd enough.
- randomsolutions 3y agoDon't listen to them this is awesome.
- mdrzn 3y agoIt was fun even with dozens (or hundreds)!
- harywilke 3y agojust use firefox.
- user982 3y agoThe machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program. — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Anotheroneagain 3y agoProphetic.
- Lio 3y agoThere's one bit of Douglas Adams tech that fits closely with this: The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser[1], which dispenses something almost, but not quite entirely, unlike tea[2]. Reminds me of some of the code I've got from ChatGPT that almost, but not quite entirely, doesn't work. :P 1. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Nutrimatic_Drinks_Dispenser https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Nutrimatic_Drinks_Dispen... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAswvg60FnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAswvg60FnY
- lazycog512 3y agoshare and enjoy
- SwiftyBug 3y agoAlso this: https://bevi.co/ https://bevi.co/
- timdiggerm 3y agoI feel like the author has missed the part where part of the point of Adams' absurd technology is that it kind of all sucks. He spends a lot of time making fun of the doors that have feelings, etc. EDIT: After reading the comments and re-reading the blog, I agree. He gets it. Never mind.
- curiousllama 3y agoNo, with that background (maybe just on desktop?), I think they totally get it
- rcarmo 3y agoThis. Yes, they completely and utterly get it. That is the genius behind casting AI in this light.
- greenpresident 3y agoHow much are people typically tipping ChatGPT these days?
- data-ottawa 3y agoUnironically, GPT will work harder for tips, even if you can't actually pay it. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/chatgpt-will-provide-more-detailed-and-accurate-responses-if-you-pretend-to-tip-it-according-to-a-new-study https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/chatgpt-will-pr...
- vunderba 3y agoThere seems to be at least some evidence that using gimmicks like "tipping" can actually harm performance: https://aider.chat/docs/unified-diffs.html https://aider.chat/docs/unified-diffs.html
- data-ottawa 3y ago
- codeulike 3y agoWe're actually in the Celery Man Timeline since Sora (ref: 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maAFcEU6atk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maAFcEU6atk )
- dylan604 3y agoI like how we're trying to make our way towards the food prep where it just makes whatever you're thinking. Before we get there, we have to get to the more mundane where it just cooks what you choose for you. There's a recent meal delivery service that has a not-a-microwave-not-a-toaster-oven that scans a QR code and. heats up your premade food. We've made the Swanson TV dinner high tech adjacent
- SwiftyBug 3y agoThe other day I read something about OpenAI's Sora being revolutionary due to its capability of simulating the world and interactions of things therein with astounding accuracy. That's when it hit me: OpenAI is building the Infinite Improbability Drive.
- catapart 3y agoI'm all for this! My username is a bastardization of an Adams quote[1], because I've always been appreciative of his perspective. It was so truly unique that every aspiration to its whimsical and comprehensive majesty feels futile in the way that the mindset would naturally ignore as irrelevant to the pursuit. And if that word-salad didn't make it obvious: I was also a keen admirer of his ability to use words to explain concepts, without sounding like a pedantic lunatic. Truly a fantastic human, and an assuring figure for the species to be moving towards, in my opinion! [1] "If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."
- twojobsoneboss 3y agoI thought he meant Scott Adams (Dilbert) and dare I say that would be more on point
- MillironX 3y agoIn his book The Universe Next Door[1], James Sire hypothesizes a natural progression of philosophies from theism -> naturalism -> nihilism. He provides Star Trek as an example of naturalist literature, and Adam's works as examples of nihilist works. If we are truly moving from Star Trek tech to Hitchhiker's tech, then that might indicate a broader philosophical shift in line with Sire's hypothesis. [1]: https://search.worldcat.org/title/424558138 https://search.worldcat.org/title/424558138
- greesil 3y agoIt's more like red dwarf. Ruined planets and talking toasters.
- punyearthling 3y agoi hate the background of this website
- WalterBright 3y ago> Other sci-fi has had outsized impact too: tablets and video calls in Kubrick’s 2001 for instance. "The Jetsons" had video calls earlier than 2001. In fact, a lot of predictions made in the Jetsons have come to pass.
- effingwewt 3y agoGood point. Could be nice if the origins of things could be traced. Especially quotes since the big thing became a random quote against a black and white photo of a random famous person,so proper attribution is near impossible.