danhite

Apropos, from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) ...

  The shareholders won't be happy.

  It's not our job to make them happy. 
  It's our job to make them money, 
  but once we launch this little baby, they're gonna flip!

  We call this Pure O2. 
  This is the first of our planned upgrades. 
  Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions, 
  we estimate we can sell up to 
  80% of an individual's visual field 
  before inducing seizures.

At least one human has functional tetrachromacy (ie 4 cones of retinal perception not 3) ...

The dimensionality of color vision in carriers of anomalous trichromacy (2010)

https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517

So I suppose we could look forward to genetic enhancement in order to perceive better display technologies

I think the editor just liked the juxtaposition of "humanoid robots" and "human workers".

or perhaps we are far enough along this timeline that the AI editor preferred the distinction for the story title?

It is based on the premise of making work easier for workers. The objective is to thoroughly eliminate waste and shorten lead times to deliver vehicles to customers quickly, at a low cost, and with high quality.

^ = from your linked Toyota Production System philosophy

Thanks for that link! I find those two early sentences to be an insightful and relatively complete loop of process.

When considering using automation or ~A.I. we can easily ask: which part of this loop is our addition improving (or messing up)? Where is the balance that works?

As you point out, answering these what-works/quality questions are not solved problems and expertise is needful, but careful consideration does not seem to be a popular mode in our age of fountaining funny money and magic genies.

I grew up in the '60s where the science fiction/future was always: march of progress and you'll have so much time and choices! Now I am in the future and the reality is close to: who has the time?

More insidiously/invisibly: you have plenty of time for endless momentary thrills, but no one has time to make things better.

Once upon a time there were customer complaint departments and the Production System would get fixed. Then it became suggestion boxes and returns. Then pleading for a Return Merchandise Authorization. Then it's your call is valuable to us recordings before click call hangups. Oops, unhappy customer?--give 'em a coupon to keep up the addiction, it's cheaper than Quality Control.

The latest devolution seems like fire the workers but use AI to mesmerize customers, or just mind control ~investors and ~regulators, since who needs cover-our-costs-paying-customers anyway?

Will the pendulum swing back?

The hover-text for the OP's linked xkcd cartoon is :

  I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the present, 
  they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, 
  whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, 
  they're a master artisan of great foresight.

In OP's terminology, I would add that the left-path ascenders are playing king-of-the-hill as they know that (in our current business environment) they can be the one to roll down rocks from the top to both crush those latecomers attempting to overtake them, as well as cheaply flatten paths up for the consumer masses.

Those masses will pay this King for an easy ascent because, above all, the Hormuz spice must flow.

Who has time to make their own donuts?!

From this kind of P.O.V. the OP's middle and right paths are often just losing strategies whose appeal lies in their comfort & morality (i.e. a luxury of personal preference).

To be clear, I am not personally advocating for Capitalist Utilitarianism here, but I find it worthwhile to see our current turmoil from this higher viewpoint and perhaps relevant to some personal software development decisions.

The Moon is a harsh Mistress.

In case you actually mean you want DF website font-size increased, Gruber actually has a page for that as a site-wide setting ...

https://daringfireball.net/preferences/

R.I.P. Copyright

It seems to me that copyright doesn't exist anymore as a reasonable notion and effective right for an individual creator--A.I. being the final stake through the heart

What used to look professional now looks generic. What used to look weird now looks human.

The signal you want to send isn’t “I spent effort on this,” because that signal is now cheap to fake. The signal you want to send is “a human actually wrote/made this.” That one currently costs almost nothing to send, because so few people are sending it.

or, in other words ... "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson

P.S. so, was this, elegantly composed, brilliantly thought provoking, comment sufficiently Weird enough?

or am i ai ?

Good documentation includes background and decision information that cannot be derived from the code. It is hard to imagine any foreseeable software or robot that could collect this information from the people involved with a programming project—at the very least it must understand natural language, which is still the Holy Grail to the AI community.

Re-reading this short essay (after many years) got me to wondering if those of you using AI coding assistance tools are using them to both analyze and document existing code (i.e. non AI gen'd code but AI gen'd coments/doc for humans to read) or only transiently (e.g. for your own quick understanding or to help the AI whip up an API etc)

I also (humorously?) wonder if any of you have automated AI using the git ~blame/history to email the humans who wrote some code asking for their rationales (or perhaps complaining?)

"People think they want to interact with a robot that totally mimics a human, but they really don’t," Simmons says.

There were those used to try hard, carefully yet hopefully, to learn how robots, computers and "artificial intelligence" might benefit or harm people, especially for those with special needs.

But now I think we're in a harms race.

[FYI, Proto was a magazine published by Harvard Medical School's teaching hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, from 2005-2022.]

Maybe nobody will read it. These comments are now many hours old and HN has a way of walking away once they have had their turn shouting into the void.

  All that is gold does not glitter,
  Not all those who wander are lost;
  The old that is strong does not wither,
  Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Google's blog post promoting what their Stitch AI can do for you to rapidly design and make a UI by voice in realtime has this gem [1] :

You can easily extract a design system from any URL

[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...

Kudos on your site effort and I immediately see your point.

In fact I took your topmost entry with no helpful site/update tags and dove in a little to try to understand why a RSS friendly blogger might not be passing along ~ tags for better reader discovery.

Turns out my scarce info test case blogger has a mastodon that immediately lists all these tags about himself [I've stripped it down] ...

#FrontEnd Developer #CSS #Halifax #London #Singapore Technical writer and rabbit-hole deep-diver Former Organiser for https://londonwebstandards.org & https://stateofthebrowser.com Interests: #Bushcraft #Outdoors #DnD #Fantasy #SciFi #HipHop #CSS #Eleventy #IndieWeb #OpenSource #OpenWeb

I conclude if he knew such site and post tags getting to RSS would be of use, he'd probably make the tiny effort to wire the descriptions.

Nonetheless I merely crawled links for a minute to found this info, so I imagine something like the free tier of the Cloudflare crawling api might suffice over time for a simplistic automated fix to hint decorate blog sites.

I mean, given that we're not trying to recreate pagerank, but just trying to tip the balance in favor of desirable initial discovery.

Isn't this a simple compute opportunity? ...

March 15 there were 1,251 updates [from feed of small websites ...] too active, to publish all the updates on a single page, even for just one day. Well, I could publish them, but nobody has time to read them all.

if the reader accumulates a small set of whitelist keywords, perhaps selected via optionally generating a tag cloud ui, then that est. 1,251 likely drops to ~ single page (most days)

if you wish to serve that as noscript it would suffice to partition in/visible content eg by <section class="keywords ..." and let the user apply css (or script by extension or bookmarklet/s) to reveal just their locally known interests

While XML/XHTML aren't spec'ed/evolved to support your fun font sans attribute challenge, certainly modern html does ...

  <p>
  <style>
  @scope { font-family: "Arial" ; }
  </style>
  Prospero: Where in the world is my teapot? Hello? I'm waiting! 
  </p>

To wit, it seems to me a style issue.

[1] Apple has long used XML plists for data ~ interchange or even archival storage such as .webarchive (ie just a plist flavor). Of course they soon added a simple binary version to compress out some redundancy and encoding waste.

They used an XML nested tag approach, not attributes. Maybe not well rounded pegs and holes but it has worked for them on a large scale over a long time.

Some things never change ...

"Send the Marines" -- satirical song lyrics by Tom Lehrer (1965) and in the public domain

https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/send-t...

Rather than just looking at Apple's motivations as to address ~new customers, I'd like to point out Mr. Gruber surprised himself:

I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house.

My wife and I prefer iPads around the house as she is a pencil centric artist and loosely speaking I prefer touch to keyboards. But his framing points out Apple is expansively addressing broad market work/school/home computing needs/preferences and thus also brings up a question I think is under discussed...

What is Apple's user experience roadmap for Apple TV mass market home computing? And for home computing in general?

We are overdue for a leap up there, where Apple, as with the Neo, exploits their ability to profitably deliver higher end hardware which enables features at prices below any comparable competition.

I know folks are fond of pointing to Apple struggling to deliver Siri/AI advances but I view that like their Apple Maps fiasco: an ongoing priority roadmap that they will keep working at until it is better than good enough.

I believe Apple will soon accelerate the power ramp up in Apple TV both because they could now ~ Neo that device into very $/performance competitive vs game consoles but also because they likely predict an ever increasing demand for home compute by consumers.

Not just speech i/o and AI conversation but also active realtime cheap private application of compute, such as personalizing your sports game feed, for example:

a) continually show me where the ball is by [dynamic method] b) rewind to when player X had the ball c) freeze there and show me what might have happened if they had passed to Y d) dress all the players in tutus e) change to my cooking show but warp me back to this game if someone scores f) etc etc etc.

Their 5+ year planning and commitment to the Apple Watch and Vision Pro show that they are ardent bettors on personal computing continuing to evolve very rapidly if they can concoct a profitable multi-year course from niche to ubiquitous. [not just for a product but for their synergistic products]

Remember they build elaborate fake homes as test centers, and not just to film product promos. I would be very surprised to learn their current 5 year outlook ignores robotics. Look around the edges of their public activities and imagine how what you notice might also fit together with something new but hidden.

They are ambitious. Very Ambitious. What's next?

Also earlier credit due to Isaac Asimov in Second Foundation [1953] "...

The same basic developments of mental science that had brought about the development of the Seldon Plan, thus made it also unnecessary for the First Speaker to use words in addressing the Student.

Every reaction to a stimulus, however slight, was completely indicative of all the trifling changes, of all the flickering currents that went on in another's mind. The First Speaker could not sense the emotional content of the Student's instinctively, as the Mule would have been able to do – since the Mule was a mutant with powers not ever likely to become completely comprehensible to any ordinary man, even a Second Foundationer – rather he deduced them, as the result of intensive training.

finally found a non-paywall version of your SDAM [1] cited:

(A)phantasia and Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory: Scientific and Personal Perspectives.

https://oro.open.ac.uk/53222/1/53222.pdf

AI constitutes a particular threat because no form of human cognition is more heuristic, more cue dependent, than social cognition. Humans are very easily duped into anthropomorphizing given the barest cues, let alone processes possessing AI.

Software is eating the World, so what are we doing to eat software?

Our Civilization d'Sapiens ecology will find balance, but can it, sans catastrophic collapse?

43 mins long so here's my subjective short summary in case it's worth it for you:

South Korea developed a widely popular "K-Drama" mini~series industry over decades of iteration, but wages for overworked writers were perpetually pitiful and upside for producers very limited (due to IP & value capture by broadcasters)

Netflix tested the waters licensing existing K-Drama content years prior to Covid then flooded production with much much higher $ to own original IP and make huge returns (NB Squid Games).

Writers & producers are only slightly better off, but their long honed winning formula for creating audience beloved content has been greatly skewed in new directions (i.e. subjectively artistically worse) due to economic dis/incentives.

Modern global tastes, such as for short form slop, are also enshittifying the content.

Author's short personal account, basically solving the mindblind imagery/hypnosis fail with another level of indirection. Her subtitle:

Can aphantasics be hypnotized? My experience learning to be hypnotized with imagery-free inductions.

caveat emptor re long hashtag techniques on (ipad) safari ...

you may think safari has no effective url limit (i.e. very high) but if you ever treat a url within the url bar as editable you are at risk to be silently truncated to 4096 bytes (eg select a character in the url bar and replace it)

also re-testing potential ~buffer limits in various ways on ipadOS 26.2 safari just now slowed my safari ui down to a crawl

eg after saving example.com with ~20k #hashtag to reading list -- each keystroke in this reply was taking several seconds, so I had to force quit safari and retype to post this warning

"Mood Driven Development: Work on what you feel like working on."

The product quality matters, but it's table stakes. What matters is whether people know your brand exists and trust it enough to buy it.

On a related note, my wife today suggested we buy a replacement Ninja toaster oven for just half the price I'd seen anywhere from a website odd~name.shop that I'd never heard of... the site looked normal, even slick, but a little research turns up the domain didn't exist a month ago.

Now perhaps this is a new business that failed to mention that fact, instead of an AI generated scam website, but I could not be certain without more effort than I wished to exert.

And this is a simple example of my worries from OP's line of thinking--I fear that AI will be increasingly bulldozing us past our cognitive capacity to function normally.

My favourite was an interview with Jerry Springer. He also had a theory of what's wrong in the current world and none of it had anything to do with what he did.

FWIW, later in his life there are many findable examples of Jerry finding fault with what he did--since I recalled seeing him express mea culpas I took the time to give you this early (jocular) example from 2014 :

https://youtu.be/eBL00CcBF40?si=PXXc5oJk9atlWKjv

"Jerry Springer Apologizes For His Career" -- Dish Network (~1 minute clip)

OP wrote:

He acknowledged that my way reduced the chance of failure without making the technical consequences of failure worse, but it was more important that we not be embarrassed. Now that I've been working for a decade, I have a better understanding of how and why people play this game, but I still find it absurd.

If OP's embarrassment comment and the topic of normalization of deviance interest you then you might find this soft (Social) Science Fiction short story to be amusingly enlightening...

"The trouble with you Earth people" by Katherine MacLean (1968)

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Trouble_With_You_Ea...

^ link is to google books and their preview includes the entirety of the titular short story from the collection.

If ^ that short story is tl;dnr for you, Spoiler Alert:

Well meaning Alien POV discovery that Humankind is a self important and superstitious lot, and not mostly harmless.

there are so many links I have saved that it freezes

If you are motivated enough to write Apple Shortcuts a useful trick for ~Find type actions that overload is to Filter them into reassemblable pieces eg

action find items from reading list filter Title begins with A (then do B etc)

that this trick often works would be due to the internal nature of the Shortcuts implementation problems, so YMMV

OP describes this ^ long arduous process and then notes:

Your writing can only be as good as your taste.

That is, using an LLM to help with "collecting these fragments and structuring them" might be okay--should the writer still be able to deeply immerse--but the "stitching them together and choosing the vocab and grammar" of a faux writer LLM is likely to leave a bad taste in the mind of some readers (e.g. those HN types who "kinda hates LLMs").

This IRL now is very much in the spirit of Mark Stiegler's 1990 humorous thought piece takedown of the $ inefficiency of the B-2 ~stealth bomber by proposing ~everyone buys chances to down one by any means possible.

There is a proper citation below, but you can enjoy this quick read at his dusty website here :

http://www.skyhunter.com/b2.htm

The B-2 Lottery · Marc Stiegler · published in New Destinies, Vol. IX/Fall 1990 ed. Jim Baen (Baen 0-671-2016-3, Sep ’90 [Aug ’90], $3.50, 286pp, pb, cover by David A. Hardy) Original anthology of eight stories plus six non-fiction pieces on space and technology.