Posted by AndrewDucker 4 days ago
The article does taste a bit "conspiracy theory" for me though
GUIs emerged to make things easier for users to tell their computers what to do. You could just look at the screen and know that File > Save would save the file instead of remembering :w or :wq. They minimized friction and were polished to no end by companies like MSFT and AAPL.
Now that technology has got to a point where our computers now can bridge the gap between what we said and what we meant reasonably well, we can go back to CLIs. We keep the speed and expressiveness of typing but without the old rigidity. I honestly can't wait for the future where we evolve interfaces to things we previously only dreamt of before.
Particularly when you throw in agentic capabilities where it can feel like a roll of the dice if the LLM decides to use a special purpose tool or just wings it and spits out its probabilistic best guess.
The bridge would come from layering natural languages interfaces on top of deterministic backends that actually do the tool calling. We already have models fine-tuned to generate JSON schemas. MCP is a good example of this kind of stuff. It discovers tools and how to use them.
Of course, the real bottle neck would be running a model capable of this locally. I can't run any of models actually capable of this on a typical machine. Till then, we're effectively digital serfs.
can never go back
>There were a tiny handful of incredible nerds who thought this was fun, mostly because 3D graphics and the physical touch of another human being hadn't been invented yet.
I can barely stomach it with John Oliver does it, but reading this sort of snark without hearing a British voice is too much for me.
Granted, that number does not equal the number "nerds" who played the games because the same player will probably have bought multiple titles if they enjoyed interactive fiction.
However, also keep in mind that some of the games in that table were only available after 1981, i.e., at a later point during the 1981-1986 time frame. Also, the 80s were a prime decade for pirating games, so more people will have played Infocom titles than the sales figures suggest - the document itself mentions this because they sold hint books for some titles separately.
[0] https://ia601302.us.archive.org/1/items/InfocomCabinetMiscSa...
Except one: it gives them the default search engine and doesn’t let you change it.
I asked Atlas about this and it told me that’s true, the AI features are just a hook, this is about lock in.
Make of that what you will.
They didn't even change the codename that's displayed in the Settings page.
Welcome to capitalism.
I wish it wasn't like this, but this is the system we have. If you want OpenAI to do things differently, another company has to do it differently, show that doing it differently is even more profitable (see Apple and their privacy angle), and force OpenAI to change for competitive reasons.
Or figure out some way to trick our way into a constitutional convention so we can change the system.
What irks me the most about LLMs is when they lie about having followed your instructions to browse a site. And they keep lying, over and over again. For whatever reason, the ONE model that consistently does this is Gemini.
Worth reading to the end.