Basically all of Big Tech is betting it all on Red that this whole AI business pays off before they end up losing everything. And I get it, it would be unwise to stay behind and ignore what could very easily turn out to be humanity's greatest invention since pizza. But still, is there seriously no other way to go about it instead of collectively running head first, hands behind at a breakneck pace, while risking the complete collapse of ... well, everything? I suppose not, especially considering it's a technology with potentially massive military and social impact on a global scale, or even beyond that if we're being particularly delusional. Though one has to wonder who will end up paying the tab, and I think that we all know the answer to that.
I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems.
Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison.
It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.
In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.
Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.
To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders!
This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen.
The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers triggered a CPU interrupt to let the kernel switch to a new timeslice, and of course reading a floppy disk was done with hardware interrupts and DMA transfers because the OS knew exactly what hardware it was dealing with, while PC compatibles couldn't guarantee those transfer modes (https://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller) so Windows 95 would inevitably handle floppy drives with polling.
Windows 95 was hamstrung by DOS compatibility. If you installed OS/2, you could have butter-smooth mouse cursor movement even while formatting a floppy disk and running a DOS (or even Windows!) VM in another window. And if you had a XGA card (which no one did) you had a hardware mouse cursor sprite, just like the Amiga (except only one boring sprite and no cool audio/video tricks)
There were SCSI floppy drives. Rare, though. However, with the right controller, not necessarily Adaptek, and drivers for it, they enabled all of that, too.
If the Amiga's mouse-pointer sprite was removed and the pointer was rendered onto a bitmap, it would still be 50Hz. There is more than enough time to do that.
The flawless refresh rate comes from the fact the update is executed as part of a level 3 priority CPU interrupt triggered by the vblank refresh. Interrupt code reads the hardware register of a dedicated chip that has been measuring the mouse's potentiometers this whole time, to see how much they've moved. The mouse itself is a passive device.
It then sends a input event to Intuition, whose priority 20 input.device task (the highest priority task in any normal Amiga system) processes the event and updates the hardware sprite coordinates, but could equally write it onto the bitmap. It has the time to do that because everything else in the system waits for it.
Compared to a modern PC, which also uses a hardware cursor... the mouse is an active device and sends its own potentiometer readings as USB input events, which arrive to be processed by an independent USB subsystem in the kernel and is bundled with all the other USB traffic from devices attached on the same bus. A vblank interrupt couldn't get the mouse coordinates even if it wanted to.
I should correct myself here and say it's not potentiometers, but that the mouse has vertical/horizontal wheels that let infrared light through to detectors, and the hardware is counting a quadrature-encoded pair of pulse trains, so it can tell how many steps back/forward each axis has moved.
It also estimates that, if the hardware counters are sampled every vblank, it's accurate (no missed wraparound) for the mouse moving at up to 3km/h! But it's still possible to whip the mouse around faster than that, so action games might like to sample the mouse more often than once per frame.
Apple loved doing things in software, ever since Woz wrote the Apple II disk routines in software so their floppy drives didn't need their own controller (the Commodore machines had a whole second CPU running an operating system in theirs). This is also why the one thing that WOULD lag the cursor on a classic Mac was formatting a floppy disk, since it required interrupt-level timing.
Even to this day Apple loves running things in software - the speakers on modern Mac laptops are driven in software - macOS has a daemon that runs and adjusts the speaker volume, tracking the sound pressure sent to them to keep them from being blown out. When Asahi Linux added speaker support, they had to reimplement this from scratch.
I had a sidecar with my Amiga 1000, which allowed you to use an XT MFM hard drive + controller card for the Amiga side. Once kickstart + the software loaded, it was incredibly fast. It was weird having a full IBM PC + Amiga in one conjoined machine.
But I agree that predictable slowness is a thing. One only need to discuss traffic jams vs a 20 minute car trip without them.
Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :)
The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here.
Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.
The GUI was fast because it was fixed layout, MUI on the Amiga was slow as well. We tend to go that way to get UI that is easy to create. You see the same in all GUI libraries the more CPU you have the more you use it.
MUI was slow because it was written in C and went all-in on BOOPSI, as well as supporting fully dynamic layout. It could likely have been faster, but the sort of people who paid for it were also the sort of people who bought CPU accelerators.
Also gp talks about input responsiveness (e.g. key and mouse input), and that has indeed much less latency on those old-school home computers than on modern systems where each input event goes through layers and layers of abstraction bloat before causing a visible change on the display.
Floppy based Amigas were incredibly clunky. Each file shown in the Workbench GUI has its own icon file (".info" file) which is loaded separately, resulting in additional time for each file in a "drawer" (Amiga folder.)
AmigaOS couldn't be described as a RTOS proper, not like QNX. For one, it had a forbid() system call which would stop the scheduler from pre-empting the current running process. It had no guarantees on latency, which is the essence of a RTOS.
It had a very simple static absolute priority scheduler and very little that could cause long pauses (like virtual memory), which made it much more predictable in scheduling than more sophisticated schedulers like in Windows, Linux, and MacOS. At one point I had an A1200 and a Linux Pentium 300-ish, and CD-writer on both systems. I could trust the Amiga to write CDs without creating a coaster every time, where the Linux box would succeed only 2/3 the time due to the unpredictable scheduling and it running the buffer dry.
So it wasn't a real RTOS, but it definitely behaved more like one that what we have now.
That particular tool's purpose was actually to shift the Amiga's very simple RTOS-like static priority scheduler more towards a more complex fairness-based scheduler like Linux/Windows currently has, making it less real-time than before. Yes, you could make rules that could elevate certain tasks by name matching automatically, giving you more control and predictability, but that's not something you couldn't already do.
The loss of personality is real. The most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.
For example, at my local preschool there was a wall flyer with information about what to bring the swimming pool. It had the most crudely drawn fishes and crabs and seahorses that I had ever seen. It was clear that whoever drew that had no prior experience with anything even remotely resembling a pencil, and by no metric one would define those drawings as "good". Maybe it was drawn by a janitor, or a teacher with too little time to waste on a drawing? Regardless, and I cannot emphasize it enough, I VASTLY preferred it to the new AI generated one they put up, with its generic AI generated marine life that one would get if they just typed "sea life" in the prompt. I can't tell you why myself, if you were to look at both versions side by side, the AI one is undoubtably miles better. But... it just feels wrong. Off. Out of place. I know I sound like a luddite, but it just doesn't look right. It's uncanny, and I really can't explain the reason. It's like seeing a perfectly drawn, realistic, anatomically accurate human being in an otherwise cute and cuddly children's cartoon. It just doesn't fit in with everything else. It's a preschool, it's supposed to be filled with "bad" drawings, you know?
And don't get me started with the time they put up AI filtered group photos. I almost had a meltdown, and I'm (mostly) pro AI.
Beauty standards, for example, track directly alongside what a body looks like when the owner has free time to spend on leisure. For example, a tan in some cultures used to be ugly and pale skin more beautiful because a tan meant you worked outside in the sun and pale skin meant you could be inside, doing a higher status job or not working. Now, pale means stuck inside working and tan means going outside for leisure. This is suddenly changing, because “being healthy” means you have time to do this.
In the media and art we consume, the amount of human effort involved drives how much we subconsciously value it. Subtle indicators of human involvement in writing, for example, will make us like the writing more. A video clearly made by a real human will be more entertaining. Just like a meal cooked at home by some with passion for the art will always taste better than a chain restaurant meal, even if the restaurant meal is technically more complicated or uses better ingredients.
As AI takes over more and more, its direct output and stuff that smells like its direct output is going to be less and less desirable.
There is a TON of market opportunity in business for people who truly understand this.
> The most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.
Not heartbreaking, but the ones that get my goat up most are flyers from craft fairs and worse places promising to teach crafts/arts. How is that not a sign to walk very quickly in the other direction? Or maybe it is intentional, like some bad spam text apparently being intentional to weed out the people who are less likely to fall from the scam anyway…
My wife and I just doesn't a weekend at a craft show (she has a hobby writing sci fi books and we go to street fests to sell them). There were at least TWO vendors selling "hand made" paintings that I could tell were AI generated pictures pasted onto a piece of wood and then had a few coats of clear coat slapped on thick to give it a paint brush effect. Also, their banners were AI generated. Disgustingly dishonest.
This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.
Reminds me of the scene in The Social Network (2010) where Mark Zuckerberg points out the absurdity of playing a looping video of the Niagara falls in the background during a Caribbean themed party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9R8uYUXLUc
The obvious answer is because the old, crudely drawn sign did (and to go deeper, you'd have to ask the janitor who drew it.) Now it's become completely detached from its origin and pointless.
The only reason this question is answerable is because the poster saw the old sign. When everybody is gone who saw the old sign, they'll just continue doing it for no reason. When somebody asks about it, some creep will babble about Chesterton's Fence.
Preschools decorate lists with little pictures on the sides. In most preschools that I’m aware of the person who makes that list makes minimum wage and has 4-8 children to keep alive while she’s making that list.
I'm aware of that, and it becomes extremely obvious in an inherently soulful context such as a preschool.
Still, while "it's AI generated crap" and variations thereof are all perfectly valid reasons by themselves, they are way, WAY too shallow for the average guy who looks at both versions and prefers the AI one because it looks "better". I would probably sound crazy and/or pretentious trying to explain to him why I prefer the badly drawn one to the perfect AI generated one, I do not know exactly why myself.
Bud, you went on a rant about art in a preschool. You wrote paragraphs about a list that someone who quite likely makes minimum wage put together while keeping 4-8 children alive.
You already sound pretentious - that ship sailed a long time ago. This is one of these moments in life that doesn’t matter one bit.
I think AI pictures have this soulless vibe because they are creations of Frankenstein: many pieces of other pictures stitched together in a sloppy manner. A human-made picture, even a bad one, is made by outlining an idea and the presence if this idea behind a picture is what gives it a soul, figuratively speaking.
Felt the same way back in the Broderbund 'The Print Shop' days. Once my school purchased a copy, all the signs around the school looked nearly identical, just with variations in symbols and fonts. I was a huge computer nerd and that was one of my first times thinking that maybe computers weren't always the best solution.
It felt much the same when posters went from hand-drawn to created by computers. Personality went from handwriting or eccentric, dynamically-created fonts to Comic Sans. To me this feels like the next level.
TBH, most of those menus just looked like pre-AI menus to me...
To me, it feels somewhat anti-social. Going from working with the community on the flyer (assuming, like you said, it was hand drawn by a janitor or teacher or maybe even a student) to working with no one. Why can't we invite the community to work on things like this? If we don't have time, we should make time for it, like a little bit of class time for the students to draw a flyer. Children, schools and community 3rd places like pools are worth it!
I totally agree with you! I love seeing a flyer at my daughter's school that was obviously made by a student. It shows that they care enough about the thing to put real work into promoting it. Heck yes I'll buy a donut from coffee cart so you can go to some camp, fifth graders!
Exactly. In a few short years no one will feel the slop content is unusual - just in time for thr next jarring iteration to come along. It's not good or bad. It just is. Time marches on.
It's the corporatization of all aspects of life. It's so bad of a problem that many people voluntarily adopt the style of neutered corporate branding in even their own things. Listen to how people talk: we used to laugh and call people names when they used the word "synergy" in a personal setting and now it's used unironically.
Humans are social creatures. We crave a personal touch in things. That's why we idealize the small shop. But we're also risk averse. It's easier to eat at a big chain restaurant than to take a chance at a local place.
Just look at the country music industry. It's practically an assembly line for "small town nostalgia" slop. And yet small towns are the worst for defecting to Walmart or Dollar General.
Who are these “everyone”? I suspect that you actually mean “many random social media users”, which only proves that getting negative reactions out of the average social media is trivial; not exactly a groundbreaking discovery.
If it was never about objective quality, Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Eye of Argon would be highly regarded, not the butt of jokes and drinking games.
And those are the examples so infamous that they get to have the honour of being laughed at, there are many more which simply fade into obscurity from their ineptness.
We need to clear up the responsibility of these "AI went rogue" situations, ASAP.
How serious does it have to get before "oops AI did that not me" stops being a valid defense and we start looking into it?
Because I'd bet my life that if I asked ChatGPT to fix a bug that one of my clients reported, and the model fixed it by outright k*lling the client IRL, I'd be held liable instead of anyone at OpenAI. Just a hunch.
Low quantity electronics like this have that problem. 600€ makes sense. The fact that you can buy a phone for much less than that, or a car for 15,000€ is a testament to what is possible at scale... When I saw single thousands quantities mentioned on the linked page I went "oh no..."
Some people seem to exist in a bubble where they believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them or their loved ones, so paying to improve society has no benefit to themselves.
What's 'paid' to the median child in education is a pittance compared to what the payers suck back out of them in old age during social security.
Public education is largely a scam to put 'original sin' of debt of children to society so when they grow up there is some plausible explanation that "we're a society" and they must feed into the pyramid scheme.
I hear you on intergenerational stuff. I just don’t think “public education is a scam” fits what most kids actually receive.
Kids are not only getting classroom time. They inherit a whole baseline that previous taxpayers built: safer streets, clean water, courts that mostly function, vaccines, roads, libraries, stable money, and the accumulated tech and culture that makes modern jobs even possible. That bundle is huge, and it starts paying out long before anyone is old enough to “owe” anything.
Also, adults are not literally trapped. People can move, downshift, opt out of a lot, or choose different communities. Most don’t, even when they complain loudly, and to me that’s a pretty strong signal the deal is at least somewhat reasonable. Not perfect. Not fair for everyone. But not a cartoon pyramid scheme either.
If there’s a real fight worth having, it’s making the burdens and benefits less lopsided across generations, not pretending the whole social investment in kids is fake.
But charitable causes perpetuate the problems by creating an industry around them rather than trying to find solutions for them. You can’t trust industry to solve civil problems like healthcare or housing, since they shouldn’t be problems in the first place. Its like trying to trust the free market to keep people from raping and killing each other—people will rape and kill with or without the market! Some level of coercion is necessary that free market principles cannot employ.
This isn’t about free market vs single payer healthcare. These kids are from poor countries. Unless you’re arguing for rich countries to offer literal worldwide healthcare.
> It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to
We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhelmed, but the choice remains.
Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).
This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels. If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history... it has not been.
> This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels.
This is neither here nor there. As I said, temptations can arise that make things more attractive to certain people given their conditioning and the habituation of their desires. But ultimately, at the end of the day, we can refuse to indulge even strong desires. To the degree that we are in possession of our wits, we are culpable.
> If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history
I have no idea how this is supposed to follow, or even what this means.
Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.
This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.
We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.
This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.
I congratulate all of you ladies and gentlemen, all of you in the Congress, in the executive departments and all of you who come from private life, and I thank you for your splendid efforts in behalf of this sound, needed and patriotic legislation.
If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time.
”
(@Nintendo: this is a joke, you can put down the rifle)
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