"progress" is a loaded term, it carries connotations of good. Not everything from the tech industry is an example of progress. I agree with the authors
of the linked article that programs designed to create the illusion of a sympathetic listener in order to prey on the naive and credulous are just evil.
Right, the linked article clearly and vehemently opposes AI chat technology. It says: "Clergy and laymen alike must become aware of the threat that AI poses and take steps to minimize or eliminate its use." And even stronger: "we should not rule out the possibility of demonic influence within its
output."
I'm not sure if they really mean to say that literal horns-and-pitchforks demons in the flames of hell are typing chat responses designed to drive people mad and encourage them to kill themselves -- or just that the chat programs are built and promoted by people motivated by a systematic hostility to human well-being. Either way, they think they are pure evil.
Back in the 1950s Olivetti was famous for its striking, modernist showrooms, with typewriters and calculators displayed on pedestals like works of art.
It's been said that they inspired the Apple stores.
See also Rogaway's Moral Character of Cryptographic Work[0], which is a more technical talk for an audience of cryptography researchers. It's been noted
several times on HN, most recently in 2023 with 56 comments [1] and in 2015 with 93 comments [2].
Its low cost and being completely self-contained made the KIM-1 unique among the 6502 computers of the 1970s. It was a small fraction of the cost of an Apple, Pet, Atari etc. which made it practical to build into an embedded controller as if it were just another part.
It did not require an external computer or terminal to use, you could program and run it from the built-in hex keypad. The simple 6502 instruction set did not require an assembler, it was quite practical to write the assembly language program on paper and then hand-assemble it by looking up the hex opcodes -- after a while you remembered the most common ones -- this was actually simpler and faster than dealing with program development tools. It only took a few minutes to key in a couple of hundred bytes, which was sufficient for many control programs -- you were not using the KIM as a personal computer, but as a (much better!) replacement for dozens of TTL chips and IC timers.
You could use it to do real work, build real devices. I built this programmable gas mixer for respiratory physiology experiments:
There of course could have been 100 corrections. He just threw those papers out and started again. Which is what we old timers did when we wrote things that we wanted to look nice. I did this with every math assignment at uni: do the work, get it right, then hand-copy a legible version to hand in.
Oh sure, he might have made several, or many, drafts on scratch paper. But even then it is impressive. Many of these are around 12 pages of hand written text and math in ink with no corrections -- he famously used a Mont Blanc fountain pen. How many people could do that at all, even if they were copying from a rough draft? And there are so many -- more than 1300 EwDs!
Well he only needs to write one mistake-free page at a time. On page two, a mistake, you just stat page two over again.
But your point about doing 1300 of these is well-taken.
(For what it's worth, this would be easier with a fountain pen because a big selling point of them is they fly over the paper so easily compared to a ballpoint pen. I switched to a fountain pen, and I had to un-learn how hard to grip the pen and press on the page.)
Not to undersell things, but doing this for hundreds of pages is what everyone did before 1868, when the typewriter was invented. I think perhaps it's less about the physical act of doing it and more about the mental act of deciding to do it over and over again.
"progress" is a loaded term, it carries connotations of good. Not everything from the tech industry is an example of progress. I agree with the authors of the linked article that programs designed to create the illusion of a sympathetic listener in order to prey on the naive and credulous are just evil.
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