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KrispyRice9 t1_j0ucit5 wrote

Reminds me of a show I watched as a kid. Read All about It

It's funny how in the 70s I was sure a chatting typewriter was just around the corner. Then most of my adult life it seemed centuries away. And now here we are.

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Maximum_Bear8495 t1_j0uioi4 wrote

That reminds me of how my dad, who’s wasn’t very old at the time (early 40’s) first saw my sister use FaceTime and it nearly blew his mind. He’d used Skype and stuff before but he said the fact my sister had it in good quality on her iPod reminded him so much of the Star Trek stuff when he was a kid, and his amazement was palpable enough it made an impression on me I remember it 10 years later

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Kwahn t1_j0um0pe wrote

My dad, who was a huge fan of Atari, NES and arcade games in the 70's to 90's, saw Angry Birds and was like, "oh my god, it responds to your touch with physics? It's so smoothly animated! How did they get such high quality images to be so small? It has HOW MANY LEVELS? On a phone, where you can take it with you anywhere?"

It's amazing what we take for granted every day that someone used to other standards spots!

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hawkinsst7 t1_j0uqi7s wrote

Years ago, I had what would probably be a shower thought, but really I was just coming from dental surgery :

We can do arcane gestures on a slab of metal and glass, and magically know more, communicate with other, or even affect the real world.

Really puts into context Arthur c. Clarke's quote.

>“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

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aircooledJenkins t1_j0v23j6 wrote

"I think every world is magic, we just get used to it."

From Stephen King's new book "Fairy Tale."

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ablackcloudupahead t1_j0veyzh wrote

Damn I loved that book. Crazy that King can make giant departures from his norm at this place in his career

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MARCVS-PORCIVS-CATO t1_j0xxajy wrote

This is something that I unironically believe in wholeheartedly. I saw a comment a year or two ago on I think /r/programmerhumor? Haven’t been able to find it since, wish I could. Anyway, basically it was about this exactly, explaining how computers are magic, chemistry is magic, engineering is magic, and all sorts of other fields. So, yeah, as far as I’m concerned, magic is real

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Matuno t1_j0xbnl3 wrote

Reminds me of a quote that is now over a decade old already: Your cell phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969. NASA launched a man to the moon. We launched a bird into pigs

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TheReplierBRO t1_j0xu2fq wrote

Was it total recall that had Arnold Schwarzenegger doing the same on the phone? Seemed pretty crazy and I always thought how far we would be off from that growing up

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checker280 t1_j0uq0zx wrote

My (M60) WTF moment with tech that everyone else just shrugs over is the tech behind Google Translate.

I discovered Word Lens in 2010.

I was fascinated with Optical Character Recognition programs at the time - it was a way of taking a photo of text, recognizing the text well enough to not only understand what was written but create an editable file.

Word Lens took that to another level when it not only understood what was written but was able to translate it to another language almost as fast as it would take the camera lens to focus on that portion of the screen.

It’s even more impressive that the dictionaries were tiny.

I recall being fascinating by the Palm Pilots decades earlier - particularly the part where you were carrying around word processing and text editing capabilities in the palm of your hand. This was next level magic.

While the dictionaries were cheap - maybe $5 - nobody seemed to care enough to want to pay.

Fast forward to today, after Google buys Word Lens then folds it into their Google Translate and makes it just another feature that most of my peers just overlook.

I’m constantly looking for opportunities to use it. I read the free foreign language newspaper found in most major cities. I translate the menus of my favorite ethnic restaurants. As an installer, I used to create Flashcards in real time to communicate with my immigrant customers.

It really is Star Trek level tech

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ThePhoneBook t1_j0uqven wrote

You realise that all that's happening is your clients are aware of the limits of the translation and are accommodating to it, yes? Machine translation has got a bit better over two decades, but humans have got much better over two decades at realising they're reading machine translations and either making sure the input is basic or correcting mentally for deficiencies in the output. I'm at the point where I expect shit translations but I ask myself, "Why did the computer say it like this?" and meanwhile am depressed that the average article has the reading age of a 12 year old to accommodate for all this automated processing. Compare a reputable newspaper's writing style in the 1980s to today, or even look at the enjoyable turn of phrase of publications like the New Yorker and contrast with modern clickbait style.

This is like the trope about French people preferring to speak in English than tolerating your terrible French. They've taken the opposite attitude to Silicon Valley America, which expects everyone to race down to the lowest common denominator of man and machine - they don't want to have to dumb themselves down to your level of French.

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checker280 t1_j0utyju wrote

Not really. I never used it for chats over coffee. I simply needed to ask simple questions like “where is your tv?”, “where do you use the internet?”, and “where is the electrical outlet?”

Just being able to get to that level of easy communication without (this was the Verizon way) calling up an 800 number, passing my cell to the customer, customer has a lively chat with the operator about why I’m here and what needs to be done, with me standing by stupidly while the operator over promises what I can do (of course he’s going to hide all the wires and feed your cat!!), and then ends the call, which inevitably leads to “can you point me toward an electrical outlet?” and puzzled looks.

Can you describe that sentence without props with hand gestures?

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estherstein t1_j0v5fqo wrote

I have an MA in Talmud and I used Google Lens to OCR old blurry books all the time so I could format them. It's incredible.

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ThePhoneBook t1_j0upk83 wrote

Hm, I think every geek made a chatting computer from Acornsoft's Speech or DECtalk or whatever the Amiga and Atari equivalents were in the '80s, but it wasn't so logorrheic or self-confidently wrong as ChatGPT. It's really hard to have a nice conversation with ChatGPT - like if you want to let it out then a much dumber interface that's closer to Eliza is more helpful, and if you need a question answered then a search engine + existing human responses are way more useful. I hope we get to the point with ChatGPT that we already seem to be at with DALL-E, where we say "oh that's fun" but understand that it's not thinking anything like a human and so is more fun and useful in very specific cases than as a general intelligence.

I feel like ChatGPT's basic vision is to simulate a mediocre software engineer who thinks they're a genius in every field, and we have millions of them already. In this sense maybe OpenAI is performative art of Genesis God making human life in His image.

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checker280 t1_j0vy95d wrote

I loved talking to Eliza but always wanted something to actually talk to like J.A.R.V.I.S. or Spidey’s version Karen.

How hard would it be to turn Chat into that?

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RespectableLurker555 t1_j0v3y8i wrote

Well said. Anyone who is familiar with the history of chat bots can plainly see we're still nowhere near "artificial intelligence" in the high-level sense of the term, but it's becoming very interesting just how much a bunch of math and datasets can create a readable piece of text.

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Layer_4_Solutions t1_j120zf3 wrote

Yep, ChatGTP is a tool. It can speed up things like writing reports and coding. It can't(yet) do it without human supervision though.

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Flaky-Fish6922 t1_j0whshl wrote

turns out, nobody wants to have their grammar critiqued by a typewriter,

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