3 ms·

> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed

> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. > What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. The writers were surprisingly prescient about this. Turns out, the secret about paper-based workflow isn't that a sheet of paper can display anything, but that you can have a lot of them, freely arrange them in front of you as you need, pass them around, pin up the wall, etc. Multitasking on a single swab is strictly inferior to that. EDIT: >> And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek > No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead. We definitely do, and this, somewhat unexpectedly, got us to the point of being close to having a basic universal translator as well. Computers on Star Trek ships weren't built for conversations, and weren't talked with as a regular thing for basic operations, so it wasn't like chatting with LLMs. There wasn't much opportunity to hallucinate - mostly simple queries, translating directly to something you'd consider a "tool call" today. But that's not the actually notable part. The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers is that they understood natural language and intent. They could handle context and indirect references and all kinds of phrasings. This was the part we didn't know how to solve until few years ago, until LLMs unexpectedly turned out to be the solution. Now, we have this. (Incidentally, between LLMs and other generative models, we also have all the major building blocks of a holodeck, except for the holographic technology.)

latexr 1y ago
> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste. > The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining features. Are you talking about the real world or the characters? > is that they understood natural language and intent. Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is. The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology. The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. I just asked GPT-5 about itself and it replied it’s GPT-4. And if I ask it again in five minutes, it might give me a different answer. When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  > Would we? What for? Why would we need reams of iPads on our desks? To use like we'd use paper. > Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean That is very much up to debate at this point. But for practical purposes in context described here, they do. > and don’t know what the right answer is. They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101 - the model itself is behaving much like a person's inner monologue, or like a person who just speaks their thoughts out loud, without filtering. It's very much not a database lookup. > I also disagree that was an underappreciated featured of the Star Trek computers, it’s one of their defining features. What I meant is, people remember and refer to Star Trek's ship computer for its ability to control music, lights or shoot weapons, etc. with voice commands. People noticed the generality, the shamelessness of interaction, lack of structured command language - but rarely I saw anyone paying deeper attention to the latter, enough to realize the subtle magic that made it work on the show. It wasn't just some fuzzy matching allowing for synonyms and filler words, but more human-like understanding of the language. (Related observation: if you pay attention to sliding doors on Star Trek vs. reality, you eventually realize that Starfleet doesn't just put a 24th century PIR into the door frame; for it to work like it does on the show, the computer has to track approaching people and predict, in real time, whether or not they want to walk through the door, vs, just passing by, or standing next to them, etc. That's another subtle detail that turns into general AI-level challenge.) > The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even strange pieces of technology. That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this assumption comes from, that a computer must be a single, uniform blob of compute? It's probably because people think people are like this, but in fact, even our brains have function-specific hardware components. (I do imagine the scans involve a lot of machine learning and sensor fusion, though. That's actually how "life signs" can stop being a bullshit shorthand.) > The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. They'll stop when run with a "who am I?" tool. > When the Start Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that, they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning. Yet you’re defending this monumental gap as being effectively the same thing. Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave. All I'm saying is, LLMs solved the "understand natural language" problem, which solves the language and intent recognition part of Star Trek voice interfaces (and obviously a host of other aspects of computer's tasks that require dealing with semantics). Obviously, they're a very new development and have tons of issues that need solving, but I'm claiming the qualitative breakthrough already happened. Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM. That would be a stupid design.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mapt 1y ago
> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. The price of a lowend Android tablet can be shockingly low, to the point that physical multitasking is totally practical for an environment as expensive as space travel. The issue is bloat. The UI for a Trek level starship could easily run on 1999 era PC hardware much less powerful than a 2025 postage stamp of an SOC, if we were still coding like it was 1999. But not if it has to run Android Infinity with subpixel AI super resolution, a voice interface, and no less than 70MB of various JavaScript frameworks crammed into a locked Chromium frontend. I run a Motorola mobile device at work (retail) that would be competitive with 10-15 year old flagship phones. The browser interface is designed for tracking and ease of development and to show off new AI tools. It employs landing pages, phased loading, a bunch of dynamic things. Looking up a SKU number takes 2-5 minutes (MINUTES) to load things I could get in ten milliseconds on a console interface or hundreds of milliseconds in a 1999 World Wide Web e-commerce site.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> There wasn't much opportunity to hallucinate - mostly simple queries, Depends which Star Trek series you are talking about; early TNG routinely had complex request for new research/analysis/hypothesis generation and evaluation; if it came out today we’d accuse Starfleet of being infected with vibe crewing...

latexr 1y ago

> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste. > The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining features. Are you talking about the real world or the characters? > is that they understood natural language and intent. Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is. The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology. The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. I just asked GPT-5 about itself and it replied it’s GPT-4. And if I ask it again in five minutes, it might give me a different answer. When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.

TeMPOraL 1y ago
> Would we? What for? Why would we need reams of iPads on our desks? To use like we'd use paper. > Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean That is very much up to debate at this point. But for practical purposes in context described here, they do. > and don’t know what the right answer is. They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101 - the model itself is behaving much like a person's inner monologue, or like a person who just speaks their thoughts out loud, without filtering. It's very much not a database lookup. > I also disagree that was an underappreciated featured of the Star Trek computers, it’s one of their defining features. What I meant is, people remember and refer to Star Trek's ship computer for its ability to control music, lights or shoot weapons, etc. with voice commands. People noticed the generality, the shamelessness of interaction, lack of structured command language - but rarely I saw anyone paying deeper attention to the latter, enough to realize the subtle magic that made it work on the show. It wasn't just some fuzzy matching allowing for synonyms and filler words, but more human-like understanding of the language. (Related observation: if you pay attention to sliding doors on Star Trek vs. reality, you eventually realize that Starfleet doesn't just put a 24th century PIR into the door frame; for it to work like it does on the show, the computer has to track approaching people and predict, in real time, whether or not they want to walk through the door, vs, just passing by, or standing next to them, etc. That's another subtle detail that turns into general AI-level challenge.) > The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even strange pieces of technology. That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this assumption comes from, that a computer must be a single, uniform blob of compute? It's probably because people think people are like this, but in fact, even our brains have function-specific hardware components. (I do imagine the scans involve a lot of machine learning and sensor fusion, though. That's actually how "life signs" can stop being a bullshit shorthand.) > The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. They'll stop when run with a "who am I?" tool. > When the Start Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that, they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning. Yet you’re defending this monumental gap as being effectively the same thing. Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave. All I'm saying is, LLMs solved the "understand natural language" problem, which solves the language and intent recognition part of Star Trek voice interfaces (and obviously a host of other aspects of computer's tasks that require dealing with semantics). Obviously, they're a very new development and have tons of issues that need solving, but I'm claiming the qualitative breakthrough already happened. Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM. That would be a stupid design.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mapt 1y ago

> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. The price of a lowend Android tablet can be shockingly low, to the point that physical multitasking is totally practical for an environment as expensive as space travel. The issue is bloat. The UI for a Trek level starship could easily run on 1999 era PC hardware much less powerful than a 2025 postage stamp of an SOC, if we were still coding like it was 1999. But not if it has to run Android Infinity with subpixel AI super resolution, a voice interface, and no less than 70MB of various JavaScript frameworks crammed into a locked Chromium frontend. I run a Motorola mobile device at work (retail) that would be competitive with 10-15 year old flagship phones. The browser interface is designed for tracking and ease of development and to show off new AI tools. It employs landing pages, phased loading, a bunch of dynamic things. Looking up a SKU number takes 2-5 minutes (MINUTES) to load things I could get in ten milliseconds on a console interface or hundreds of milliseconds in a 1999 World Wide Web e-commerce site.

dragonwriter 1y ago

> There wasn't much opportunity to hallucinate - mostly simple queries, Depends which Star Trek series you are talking about; early TNG routinely had complex request for new research/analysis/hypothesis generation and evaluation; if it came out today we’d accuse Starfleet of being infected with vibe crewing...