HN user
I make stuff: art, music, code.
Views expressed here are my own.
Probably not! I'd imagine that whoever did production design for the movie would have visited some of the labs of the time, or talked to people involved in AI – and the CM-1 / CM-2 were very much at the forefront of that type of computing back then.
But that's such a great find – I've seen T2 many times, but that visual of the black hypercube-looking design really is strikingly similar!
Thank you! My biggest regret in the video is I didn't get to touch on Brewster Kahle's involvement – especially given what he's gone on to do with Internet Archive. Would love to do a followup.
Re: Search Engines, I think I mention this in the video but apparently Sergey Brin was part of the Connection Machine user community, and had that experience on his resume. (A copy of that is still floating around.)
It was indeed a Thinking Machines CM-5 — Nedry actually mentioned them in his line about how Hammond wouldn't be able to find anyone "anybody who can network 8 connection machines".
An actual assembled CM-5 actually cost closer to a million dollars.
But, from what I remember the one in the control room is a shell. In the CM-1 and CM-2, the LEDs were actual status indicators on the processors, which Tamiko Theil and the other designers had the engineers move to be at the edge of the boards, so that they'd shine through the case. Super cool.
But by the CM-5, they were run off a simple microcontroller.
They went bust not long after this movie.
I made a YouTube video on the history of the Connection Machine – it was a lot of work, and if you're interested in this sort of thing I think you'll enjoy it:
As an American, I just want to say that I'm very dismayed by the discourse around this topic over the past 24 hours in particular. The polarization of politics has become so intense, that the bipartisan mainstream position of just a couple of decades ago – that immigrants are a net positive to this country – feels like a distant dream.
We've gone from perpetually punting the football on comprehensive immigration reform, to people saying, "Good, go back home, we don't want you here."
The same people who want to paint the Statue of Liberty gold seem to have no clue what it represents.
Because absent more evidence we don't yet know if this is a different variant of the Andes virus than the one people have had experience with. A lot hinges on whether this flight attendant is hospitalized out of an abundance of caution, or something entirely unrelated. But given that they came into relatively brief contact with an infected person, it would be significant if somehow she contracted it. A lot of people disembarked and went to various parts of the world. Combined with a long incubation period, that's a lot of guessing.
Most of the public messaging I see is basically "please don't stop shopping, flying, or going to restaurants."
Oh that's interesting because I would have assumed the demoscene stuff would have done some kind of direct signed distance field rendering and skipped the marching cubes part.
And yea I remember the patent being in effect for so many years. The Spore creators got around it by using the "ear clipping" algorithm.
Negative Metaballs are really fun — included them in our app I mentioned at the end of the video. But they date all the way back to Blinn's paper!
Ah, this is amazing thank you. I had dug and dug for some demoscene examples for the video. It turned out to be quite difficult to find many of these sources, especially the early Japanese stuff.
Despite having recently done a video on The Connection Machine, the Links-1 was new to me – and I basically did a double take to learn that they had this parallel ray-tracing super computer back then. Sadly, there's not a ton of documentation beyond a couple of brief papers.
Thanks for watching!
Uploading 15 minute videos to YouTube, downloading hundreds of gigabytes of 3D assets, updating large applications, streaming movies for a 4k projector, frequently downloading beta OS updates, etc, etc, etc.
Congrats, you've killed the idea in its infancy because you demanded answers to questions before it could even walk.
Ideas need time to be explored, and given a chance.
I really enjoyed it! Actually read it to my kids as a bedtime book, and although it was pretty advanced for them, they really stayed with it. Really too bad he's not around anymore.
Thanks! My primary source for this was Carl Sagan's book "A Pale Blue Dot" IIRC — don't have the folder in front of me to double check, but fairly certain.
Edit: found it!
Here's the excerpt. According to Sagan they sent these instructions up. Given his details on what had to be done to boost the signal upload, it sounds like this really did happen:
"...while taking a photograph of a street scene from a moving car. This may sound easy, but it's not: You have to neutralize the most innocent of motions. At zero gravity, the mere start and stop of the on-board tape recorder can jiggle the spacecraft enough to smear the picture.
This problem was solved by sending up commands to the spacecraft's little rocket engines (called thrusters), machines of exquisite sensitivity. With a little puff of gas at the start and stop of each data-taking sequence, the thrusters compensated for the tape-recorder jiggle by turning the entire spacecraft just a little.
To deal with the low radio power received at Earth, the engineers devised a new and more efficient way to record and transmit the data, and the radio telescopes on Earth were electronically linked together with others to increase their sensitivity. Overall, the imaging system worked, by many criteria, better at Uranus..."
One of my favorite stories about the Voyager mission was how they wanted to grab photos of the outer planets but the click of the tape drive was enough to ruin the long exposures. I made a YouTube short about it a while back:
Thank you so much! Even though I knew a bunch about the Connection Machine when I started making this, I learned so many new details doing the research for it.
"Surely you're Joking, Mr Feynman" was a great read.
The annoying thing about corporate hiring practices is – speaking from experience – some of us would have loved your answer. But then it goes to committee and someone's like, "this iOS engineer doesn't know any javascript, and I'm an expert in javascript, so I'm a 'no'."
As I see my kids bring home Chromebooks from school, it has made me recently nostalgic for the Apple of the 90s in terms of their presence in education. Using my Science teacher's Performa to play Sim Ant after we finished our assignments, (or Oregon Trail before that on the lab of Apple IIs) – not to mention HyperCard, etc.
Anyway, updating my priors a bit with this Neo laptop. This feels like it could maybe spark some renewed excitement over Apple as a student / classroom device. If nothing else, the price makes it more of an option.
The quote in this case is because "cringe" is what many online have been calling it. So, they're actually quoting a very common critique.
There's a wide variance, but there's been a lot of 'title inflation' over the past decade that has more to do, I think, with giving people incentives when they don't want to stretch the equity package any further.
One thing I've learned is, there's a ton of interesting stuff in the world. Super talented people. But, what surface and gets widespread recognition and adoption is often very much determined by luck, and these days by algorithms. It's very possible there's some really cool AI games out there already, and they just haven't been discovered.
The other aspect is that a lot of people in the AI community are completely hooked on the reward-seeking of 'new thing'. Every hour there's some new tool to try out that 'changes everything'. But, without grinding it out you might never create something interesting by constantly jumping to the next new thing. Because, technological capabilities are just one part of the story.
Third, what makes something 'fun' often requires tons of iteration and a lot of LLM-type tools still rely on snapshots of applications. They're not fully there yet in terms of what happens in between moments. There are lots of principles they can draw on from and get a good prototype quickly, but it again comes back to really just slogging through lots of iterations until you find something fun.
Finally, I think with every new medium you get a first wave that really just copies the medium that came before it. Early radio was a lot like theater. Early TV was a lot like radio. I think eventually we'll see people – probably younger people – who are fully into AI and will find interesting things about that medium to express in ideas, and we'll get some really new and interesting stuff as a result.
Thank you!
I had to suffer the embarrassment of a Tandy Sensation as our first home computer lol. (Sorry, Tandy Sensation – you were a very good friend and I owe you a lot.)
OP here. A ton of work went into making this video and I tried to be as accurate as possible. I know folks like Alan Kay and others come by Hacker News from time to time, so please let me know in the comments if there's anything I missed or got wrong.
This was both difficult and fun to make — it's a departure from the types of videos I've been making. Hope you like it!
Were you a HyperCard user? Tell your story here.
Don't get me wrong – I think if people grew more of their own food it would be fantastic! And technology combined with alternative farming practices has the potential to be hugely transformative. I'm all for it. But the way things are currently, it's a monumental effort to grow food for sustenance on any meaningful scale, and would take enormous amounts of time, energy, and effort – leaving very little for other pursuits. I want people to also be able to make art, music, etc.
I'd at least, you know, pretend we had a top-secret amazing model. By airing all of this publicly, they've basically admitted that Claude is the best there is.
As someone who owns a small farm — and actually enjoys land, growing things — I'm just saying this is not a "solution" for the vast majority of people.
Farming requires inputs unless you started an agroforestry farm 10 years ago and are now just maintaining it. It's also insanely time consuming.
I'd say more of a rejection of a certain kind of millennial Instagram scented candle branding minimalism.
That car's interior is a great example of what made Ferrari so iconic and aspirational. It's not trying to be nice and comfortable. It feels stiff, brutalist, direct. It has an immediacy and a danger.
As a heavy Xcode user and native app developer: pretty excited to dig into this.
I recently have pivoted to mainly working in either Claude of Codex on the command line, because their ability to run autonomously for long, extended periods wasn't possible in the turn-based Xcode intelligence features.
That, plus the fact that the agents could run command-line utilities and just generally be more "agent-y".
My way of working has really shifted this year. I've been experimenting with LLMs for coding for years now, but the models released in the past year really feel like they've hit a point where they write code much closer (sometimes indistinguishable) from how I would write it.
Why are you so certain that LLMs/AI can't be used as a tool to learn and grow?
Like Herbie Hancock once said, a computer is a tool, like an axe. It can be used for terrible things, or it can be used to build a house for your neighbor.
It's up to people how we choose to use these tools.
One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project.
I think the reality is that to really understand these tools, you need to open your mind to a different way of working than we've all become accustomed to. I say this as someone who's made a lot of software, for a long time now. (Quite successfully too!)
In someways, while the ladder may be getting pulled up on Junior developers, I think they're also poised to be able to really utilize these tools in a way that those of us with older, more rigid ways of thinking about software development might miss.