allenu

I agree. The ergonomics of using a touch screen on a laptop screen aren't great. It only really works if you convert it to a tablet so that the screen is closer to you and angled up a bit for comfort, but it's no longer a laptop, so why bother?

Google also has their own take on this when you search for Katamari. Click on the little katamari ball.

Good point. What I'm thinking is probably more like individual taste. An AI trained is kind of a collection of different tastes. What would be interesting is to see is if a "collective" taste that would yield good products on its own. Design by committee often creates things that have conflicting points of view. Can a trained AI do better than design by committee? It's obviously not a committee and not an individual (at least in the human sense). Is there something inherent in following general principles that makes it difficult to have a specific point of view in the creation of a product? My thinking is it's probably possible to train AI to have, say, an "Apple taste" and make good Apple-like products but that taste might not be suitable for particular products or needs. A "Linux taste" might be better for some things, but not for others, and so on. If we did get to that point, then there'd still be a need for a choice to be made about what particular "taste hat" to put on, and likely an AI can be trained to do even that. Definitely an interesting thing to ponder!

Something I've been thinking about a lot is that ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste. Even with humans, each of us has different values, intent, and taste, although we do share many of these things. As a living human being, you have biological or cultural desires and particular goals that you want to accomplish while you're alive on this earth.

When you're creating art or even a product, what you create is a result of your particular values and particular tastes and those drive some sort of purpose for whatever it is you're creating. What you're building is, generally, made for the consumption or use by another person (even if indirectly), and we mostly have empathy and want those people to have a good experience with whatever we're creating. We think about our audience and weigh their particular needs.

When you use good software, you can sense the intent in what was made. The person (or team) combined their particular point of view with that of the goals of the user. At this point, I don't think agentic coding is going to give you that, at least not fully. It might get most of the shared values and common things right as a result of its training data, but a human still needs to edit the output or steer it on a good path that only they can see and which is part of a larger vision. For simpler needs, taste and values matter less, but for more complex things, it makes a difference, in my opinion.

That's true but the point of working out for regular people is to benefit their body, look good, feel good and have that strength vs. the average person who doesn't work out, not so much to be useful lifting heavy objects.

To your point, a lot of hobbies are about creating something that wasn't possible before without the investment of time, which is one reason it's rewarding. If people could just take a pill to get muscles to skip all the training, I'm sure a lot of people who put in time to train regularly would feel cheated out of their accomplishment, especially if nobody could tell if they did it manually or with a pill and if everybody started to have the same musculature with no effort.

Well, some hobbies are fun because you're doing something no one else has done before, or which is challenging to accomplish without a lot of investment in time and growing in personal skill. A lot of hobbies are fun because of the competition and because you get to be at the forefront of something. It's fun because we're all limited in our time and energy and choosing to spend time on something means you can do things that someone else who doesn't spend time on it can't. That feels good.

People who were in the demoscene took joy in learning how to make a computer do things no one had done before and push the hardware to its limits. That's not as meaningful if someone can achieve the same thing by prompting an LLM.

A lot of hobbies are fun because of the human challenge in creating the output and knowing it was only achievable because someone had to take time to create it. Having an LLM accomplish the same thing absolutely devalues the fun in the hobby. Hobbies aren't 100% just about accomplishing something for yourself, even though if you sway to much into doing it for validation or to compete with others it can lead to burnout and lack of enjoyment.

I definitely feel the nostalgia here. I remember the first time I got a modem in the early '90s and dialed out to a few local BBSes as a teenager. I didn't quite know what they were or what they were for.

It was the most amazing experience to see this text and ASCII/ANSI art appear on my screen that was running off somebody else's computer. It's hard to describe the feeling I got when I realized I was connected to somebody else's computer somewhere within my city. It felt futuristic. At first I felt like I was being watched (possibly) by whoever owned the computer, seeing what I was doing on the system.

Also neat was I was using an IBM PC and some of the BBSes I connected to were using Apple computers or something else. It blew my young mind.

Eventually I ran my own BBS and made my own BBS door games that I made a little bit of money with. I released them as shareware and people would send checks in the mail to me to register the software.

I still have the data from my BBS that I could probably run in DOSBox to log into for old time's sake.

Using the same model, I asked it what 2 + 2 is and it said "2 + 2 is 2 + 2" which is not wrong.

Other questions and answers were mixed:

How many cards in a deck? > A deck of cards contains 52 cards.

How many cards in a deck if I remove all Queens from the deck? > If you remove all Queens from the deck, there are still 52 cards in the deck.

You might be a little too close to the work to judge, but to me it still looks off. I suppose I might not immediately think it was AI, but there's something not quite human about it. The video contents are a little too sterile and clean, lacking character. The room is quite empty and the composition doesn't cause me to focus on any one thing. That said, you could probably improve a bit of it with some prompting.

The making-of post itself also is clearly LLM generated, probably by Claude, judging by the language used.

I think it's clear that Apple has recognized that their target markets don't care to have useful computers. Just look way back to when Steve Jobs was still alive and he was talking about how "PCs are going to be like trucks. Fewer people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy."

They could certainly add features to make them more like general purpose computers, but there's a bit of product development and engineering "tax" they'd have to pay over time to maintain that aspect. Much easier from a product development standpoint to create products that provide a walled-garden experience, especially if that's what most customers want.

I agree. The demos were great. They really showed off how things you already do today are "better" on two screens. This is in contrast to the Vision Pro where the demos were of things that were neat but I can't see myself needing (watching 3D captures, watching a big virtual cinema screen).

I think this will be a hit, but the $2k is a bit much for me to even consider getting one. Obviously they'll likely drop that price over time.

I wonder if for many people today, it's not so much the art form of writing they are interested in, but rather having their thoughts and opinions validated by an audience. I mean, we live in a world where technology is constantly asking us to share our voice with the world at every opportunity. It's not asking us to phrase our thoughts well or to find meaningful things to share, but to get something out there quickly that captures people's attentions and to bask in it.