1年前

Slorp

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Remember when email was useful? I remember when it was magical!
Time for a story from the ancient times. I had this idea and asked my professor for advice. He said he knew a person on the other side of the world who would know all about it. “This is his ‘email’ address.”
I had never heard about ‘email’ so I needed to learn what it was and how to send one. I wrote my message and off it went. The very next morning I had a reply. One of the best experts on a topic I was keen about had shared their thoughts from the other side of the world, just like that.
In that time, a long time ago as you’ll appreciate, that interaction was magical.
In an instant I understood the power of the Usenet. A while later and with a couple of additional protocols they started calling that the Internet.
- Usenet is now INTERNET!
  
  ...
  ...
  The INTERNET is shutting down (?)
  
  The Usenet actually still exists.
- I remember in like 1997 or so, my friend's dad got VoIP working on his computer, and we would talk to random people from around the world. I still have fond memories of my first conversation. It was someone in Australia! All the way on the other side of the planet, and we were talking in real time, FOR FREE! I've been a computer nerd ever since.
  
  I had a similar but very different experience. At the beginning of COVID my buddy and I got our ham radio licenses.
  One of my earliest contacts was a guy in Japan, over 6000 miles away! Nothing between us but some wire strung up in a tree, and a couple of radios. Using the ionosphere to bounce our signals around the world.
  So. Stinking. Awesome.
  I've been hooked ever since.
  It's funny because it's almost the opposite of your story, you were using the amazing new technology and infrastructure to make the trip. These days we take that very infrastructure for granted.
  It's fun to try doing it with as little infrastructure as possible!
  
  What time were you talking to the guy in Japan? I live in Japan and am (very slowly as technical and legal japanese are hard) working on my HAM license and would love to chat with my dad in the US eastern time zone. Still not 100% sure about propagation and other such. Thanks!
  
  I'd have to check my logs, but it was something like spring or early summer. Honestly though the solar cycle has a much larger effect on propagation, and right now we're near solar maximum so things are really hopping. At the beginning of COVID we were just starting to come out of solar minimum.
  I haven't been super active lately, so I can't comment on how often you'd be able to make contact. But with some coordination it's definitely doable. Especially if you get some decent metal in the air.
  You still have US citizenship? You might be able to do your testing in the USA over zoom and use a reciprocal license, though I haven't looked deeply into it.
  
  It's possible to get my US license and transfer it, yeah. I was unaware zoom was an option, so I might look into that. The 13-hour time difference (to US Eastern) might make the test a bit rough, hah. Cheers!
  
  That's rad! I bought a ham radio during covid too, but I still haven't got my license. I've studied for the test several times, but never felt ready to take it.
- Heh, that's nostalgia. I always wonder what the young people of today's equivalent will be. Probably something quantum.
  
  There is no equivalent, because it's not new, and even if it was, it's monetized and manipulative. The internet back then was wide open, free as fuck, and completely new!
  
  I was specifically referring to the ability to communicate in writing at that speed. I guess the telegraph technically existed as well, but it was expensive and awkward.
  
  And couldn't reach across oceans, required special training, and only accommodated short messages because of the tedious nature of signaling.
  
  You could definitely send telegraphs overseas, and sending or receiving them required no training.
  
  and sending or receiving them required no training.
  If you mean paying someone to send them, then sure. But it required learning Morse code, and learning to use a keyer.
  You couldn't send them overseas until after ~~the invention of radio. Before that the signal traveled along a wire~~ they laid the transatlantic cable.
  
  The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid down in 1854 and radio waves weren't even theorized until 1873... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio#History
  
  I had no idea radio was such a recent discovery.
  
  Whoops!
  
  No worries, we can't all know everything all the time.
  
  I kinda suspected I might be wrong about that as I was typing it, and then I was like "Nah! That's just silly. Of course they didn't run a cable across the entire Atlantic Ocean in the 1800's!". But I was wrong. That's actually really impressive.
  
  The only way you were keying in a telegram yourself is if you worked for them.
  
  What's writing? Is that a new feature on TikTok?
  
  The pre-Google YouTube is probably the closest thing I can think of. And just a time before when everything about the Internet was about profit.
  Back when Google were cool.
  
  Google was the absolute coolest for a while. It's a damn shame what they've become. Fuck you Sundar Pichai!
  
  I'll admit that I didn't really get YouTube when I first heard of it. I think justin.tv was the thing that made me realize there was something there, even though I only watched it all of about twice. Then again, I thought music CDs were a scam for the longest time. I'm old.
  
  It’s happening right now with AI. It’s currently in the Usenet phase. A few people understand it and are using it to positively alter their daily lives by improving their ability to gather and filter information, but (ironically) thanks to the internet the vast majority of people are distracted by some niches like generative art or writing book reports. In the next year or two, we’ll start to see mainstream people have AI personal assistants that will have conversations with other AIs. Even without the robotics component, daily life will change. Remember before you could order Amazon same day delivery, or Door Dash a meal? Imagine that level (and better) of tracking and communication for every service you could need, all completely automated. Your sink broke? A perfectly fine plumber can be here in 20 mins, be advised to expect an 80% chance that you’ll see their buttcrack, a 40% chance that they aren’t wearing deodorant, and a 100% chance there will be multiple off-color remarks about the current political situation. Does this bother you? Your AI already knows and an instant deep dive of reviews and social media has found a plumber that may in fact be your soul mate. They’ll be here on Thursday. Your AI queued up a playlist of your mutual favorite songs.
  In a slower but possibly as life altering revolution, AR. Apple is starting this with Apple Vision Pro, but this will need to be miniaturized down to a discrete pair of glasses (like Meta Ray-Bans) with 3 pieces of tech that aren’t there yet:
  Even smaller computers (remember when they were the size of shipping containers?)
  More efficient batteries
  A display technology that both adjusts focus depending on the distance your eyes are focusing at while also occluding reality.
  I’m confident these will exist in our lifetime, but probably not within the next decade. Once they all come together, the way people experience life will change. Both for the better and worse. If capitalism hasn’t been legislatively reigned in a bit, the ads are going to be insane.
  
  I actually work with ML a lot (at the intersection of my domain with it), though I am not an ML/AI engineer.
  I think short-term, ML/AI has a great chance of helping hugely with accessibility issues with users of various systems. My secondary thought is maybe related to elder care, but I'm not sure yet.
  I have largely had bad experiences with AI assistants (coding, search, and other domains), except maybe helping with finding/generating code samples for libs/packages with poor or missing documentation (though I go to the docs and code first and those results aren't always correct).
  I do see virtual assistants in various forms being a possible near-term implementation with promise, but most are still heavily trained on and biased to. A handful of languages (in the case of LLMs and such) which limits global appeal.
  I am both frightened (the race to market without considering the near- nor long-term costs to society as a whole neither ethics in many cases) and hopeful about the whole thing.
  I think you are probably correct, though I also feel we might have something in physics or robotics that has ripple effects opening new avenues. Only time will tell, I suppose. Cheers!
  
  I am both frightened (the race to market without considering the near- nor long-term costs to society as a whole neither ethics in many cases) and hopeful about the whole thing.
  Same! I’m downright terrified about the impossibility of determining what should be legal/illegal because our politics move at a glacial pace and rarely involve experts in the field. Some bad actors can AND WILL really fuck things up here. I do think that the possibilities are a net positive. If I were in charge, I would pump the brakes until we could better ascertain what the fallout will be.
  I have largely had bad experiences with AI assistants (coding, search, and other domains), except maybe helping with finding/generating code samples for libs/packages with poor or missing documentation (though I go to the docs and code first and those results aren't always correct).
  Maybe my current scenario is in some Venn diagram of the perfect situation, but I’ve been having the opposite experience. I’m a game designer changing from about a decade of Unreal (and another decade and a half of various proprietary engines) to learning Unity. I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what I want to do, I’ve just got no clue how to do it. I’ve been using a combination of GPT-4o and co-pilot to figure things out and it’s been great! GPT has been a combination of pair programming and Google replacement. I’ll tell it what I’m trying to do and it not only spits out a code example, but it describes what each section is doing. Occasionally it’ll tackle problems from the wrong end, like yesterday it was placing a UI element and then clamping it to ensure it was drawn on screen instead of figuring out the proper screen space scale first and properly converting world space to that specific space/scale. But if you're familiar with the methodology and need help with the syntax/structure, it’s kind of amazing. Co-pilot is SO FAST! I’ve got no idea where a property I’m looking for is being stored and that shit auto-completes (almost always) exactly what I’m looking for, purely based on context or comments. Some times it hallucinates properties that don’t exist, but the IDE calls my attention to that pretty quickly and co-pilot usually sets me on the right path.
- Yeah, man. Good times. Good times.
- That is what the internet used to be. You could reach out to some of the best minds in science and industry. Then they opened it up to the public. And by “public” I mean every degenerate opportunist in the world.

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