Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'AI'

Conversational Interfaces

May 12, 2025 • #

Julian Lehr wrote an interesting post recently on the problems with conversational interfaces, with the fitting title “The case against conversational interfaces”. Here’s Julian:

We keep telling ourselves that previous voice interfaces like Alexa or Siri didn’t succeed because the underlying AI wasn’t smart enough, but that’s only half of the story. The core problem was never the quality of the output function, but the inconvenience of the input function: A natural language prompt like “Hey Google, what’s the weather in San Francisco today?” just takes 10x longer than simply tapping the weather app on your homescreen.

Voice works so well in human-to-human communication because it’s enormously flexible on both ends — for speaker and listener. Through speech we can both communicate and understand just about any idea using the same framework of 26 letters and a couple thousand words.

The speaker can walk up to anyone fluent in the language and fairly effectively communicate just about anything — commands, requests, thoughts, ideas, emotions — and have the listener comprehend.

But conversation is slow. The “bitrate” for conversational speech is peanuts compared to what you can do with hand signals or ideograms or jpegs. A set of hand signals could convey a message much faster, but at the expense of loss of range, and easier misinterpretation. Spoken language trades bandwidth and information density for flexibility, nuance, and error tolerance. All major utilities when talking with a stranger, but not with our computers.

We keep chasing conversational interfaces in computing because of ease-of-access and the promise of flexibility. But in commanding the computer, the loss of compression, low bandwidth, and ambiguity are annoyances rather than assets. When we have a conversation with a clerk at the store, these are features. When it’s with our computers, they feel like bugs.

Julian goes on to talk about how we might think more creatively with fitting LLMs into this picture:

We spend too much time thinking about AI as a substitute (for interfaces, workflows, and jobs) and too little time about AI as a complement. Progress rarely follows a simple path of replacement. It unlocks new, previously unimaginable things rather than merely displacing what came before.

As AI seeps in everywhere, we need to think positive-sum in how it helps the human-computer interaction problem. It holds the potential to generate background threads of activity as we’re using our slow-but-flexible inputs like speech or typing: retrieving information and summarizing and performing interstitial actions while we’re in the middle of other tasks.

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Personal Software

January 17, 2025 • #

A common problem I encounter with computers is the everyday minor friction in workflow: the repetitive but only occasional task, or the tedious multi-step process.

Perfect example: the other day I wanted to batch resize and compress a bunch of images. It’s something I’ve had to do before, but not an everyday problem.

When you have a problem software can solve, it has to be painful enough to warrant the effort and overhead required to build something. Given my level of knowledge, I could thrash my way through writing a shell script to do this resizing operation (probably). But it’d take me a couple hours of Googling and trying and retrying to eventually get something that works — all for an operation that might take 7 minutes to just do manually. So rather than automate, I just deal with it.

Personal software

This means dozens of daily nags go on nagging —they don’t nag enough to warrant the cost of solving. And they aren’t painful enough to search for and buy software to fix. So I go on muddling through with hacks, workarounds, and unanswered wishes.

But yesterday with a few prompts Cursor, in 15 minutes I made (or the AI made) a shell script to handle images that I can reuse next time. I didn’t even look at the code it wrote. Just typed 3 bullets of a description of what I wanted in a readme file, and out comes the code. An annoying process goes away, never having to search around for existing tools. Even if a solution did exist, it’d probably be part of a bundle of other features I don’t need; I’d pay for the Cadillac when I only need a taxi.

We’re moving into a new phase where personal software like this might often be the simplest path to a solution. In a world where we’re used to going to Google or GitHub, it’s now even faster to make your own. It’s cracked open new possibilities for people formerly incapable of creating their own tools.

Software used to be costly enough that those “hey this might be cool” ideas were quickly set aside when the cost/benefit wasn’t there. There’s potential for this new paradigm of digital goods production to radically alter the landscape of what gets built.

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August 23, 2024 • #

Prompt: “liminal space”

Recalls the finale of Interstellar.

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February 8, 2024 • #

A group of researchers just won the Scroll Prize, a project to read the ancient Herculaneum papyri, burned and buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Using AI and computer vision techniques they were able to discern text from the rolled, charred, and brittle papyrus. An unbelievable feat.

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Anachronistic History

August 24, 2023 • #

I asked ChatGPT:

Write about some creative anachronistic historical events.

The results don’t disappoint. Every single one is gold, big-budget film caliber material we got here. Scroll down and enjoy…

Marco Polo's Transcontinental Railroad, according to Midjourney
Marco Polo's Transcontinental Railroad, according to Midjourney

Leonardo’s Electric Canvas (1492): Leonardo da Vinci, known for his ingenious inventions, unveils the world’s first electrically powered canvas projector, allowing him to showcase his artwork in vibrant colors and dynamic animations, centuries ahead of its time.

Napoleon’s Moon Landing (1801): In a bid to establish a new world order, Napoleon Bonaparte orchestrates a daring expedition to the Moon using steam-powered spacecraft, setting the stage for lunar colonization and a galactic French empire.

Medieval Internet Symposium (1220): Scholars from across the medieval world gather for an “Internet Symposium,” where they discuss ideas through telepathic communication devices, resembling a rudimentary version of the internet.

Genghis Khan’s Airship Campaigns (1206-1227): Genghis Khan’s vast empire extends beyond land as his horde launches airborne campaigns using intricately designed airships, enabling swift conquests across continents with unprecedented speed.

Renaissance Era Robotics (1565): As a culmination of Renaissance curiosity, artisans and scientists collaborate to create a series of clockwork automatons that exhibit human-like intelligence and serve as precursors to modern robotics.

Cleopatra’s Underwater Expedition (50 BCE): Cleopatra, fascinated by the sea, leads a team of engineers and divers on an underwater archaeological expedition to explore the sunken city of Atlantis, unraveling ancient mysteries beneath the waves.

World War I: Age of Steampunk (1914-1918): The First World War takes on a different tone with both sides utilizing advanced steam-powered machinery, elaborate mechanical exosuits, and ornate weaponry, in a steampunk-inspired alternate history.

Marco Polo’s Transcontinental Railroad (1271-1295): Marco Polo’s extensive travels result in a collaborative effort among the nations he encountered to construct a massive transcontinental railroad network connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa centuries ahead of its time.

Industrial Revolution of Magic (1700s): The Industrial Revolution ushers in a new era of magic, where steam-driven wands power factories and alchemical engines replace conventional machines, driving technological progress through mystical means.

Joan of Arc’s Space Exploration (1429): Inspired by visions of the cosmos, Joan of Arc leads a celestial expedition using a fantastical flying fortress, journeying through the stars to bring harmony to distant planets.

Da Vinci’s Cyberspace Designs (1500): Leonardo da Vinci sketches out intricate plans for a virtual reality world using a combination of mirrors, lenses, and mechanical devices, offering a glimpse into a digital realm centuries ahead of its time.

Socrates’ Philosophical Podcast (399 BCE): Instead of written dialogues, Socrates engages in thought-provoking discussions through an ancient form of podcasting, spreading his philosophical ideas through the airwaves of Athens.

Ancient Egyptian Steam-Powered Pyramids (2500 BCE): The ancient Egyptians harness steam power to build their pyramids, using massive steam engines to lift and transport colossal stone blocks with astonishing precision.

Shakespearean Space Odyssey (1601): William Shakespeare’s play “Space Odyssey” tells the story of intrepid explorers venturing beyond Earth, grappling with cosmic conflicts and celestial dramas in a performance that takes theater to the stars.

Gutenberg’s Digital Printing Press (1450): Johannes Gutenberg invents a digital version of the printing press, allowing for instant creation and dissemination of books and manuscripts, revolutionizing information distribution long before the digital age.

Aztec Airborne Armada (1400s): The Aztecs develop an array of helium-filled airships, forming an airborne armada to defend their empire and launch surprise attacks on neighboring civilizations.

Ancient Greek Teleportation Symposium (300 BCE): Greek philosophers convene a “Teleportation Symposium,” discussing the ethics and implications of instantaneous travel across vast distances, shaping the course of human exploration.

Einstein’s Quantum Social Media Theory (1915): Albert Einstein introduces a theory of “Quantum Social Media,” predicting that interconnected networks of thoughts and ideas will shape the fabric of reality, long before the development of modern social platforms.

Viking Age Space Telescopes (800): Vikings construct massive, ornate space telescopes atop their ships, enabling them to explore distant planets and navigate the cosmos with extraordinary accuracy during their seafaring expeditions.

Caveman’s Cave-Painted Animation (10,000 BCE): Prehistoric artists create animated sequences on cave walls, employing ingenious mechanisms to bring their paintings to life and share stories through early forms of motion pictures.

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Patrick Collison and Sam Altman at Sohn 2023

May 10, 2023 • #

An interesting discussion between Patrick Collison and OpenAI founder Sam Altman on a predictably fascinating assortment of subjects. AI developments, stagnation, long-term bets, and what’s preventing us from having more founders.

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Weekend Reading: Ancient Text, StarLink, and Chinese Origins

October 26, 2019 • #

📜 Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy

A project from DeepMind designed to fill in missing text from ancient inscriptions:

Pythia takes a sequence of damaged text as input, and is trained to predict character sequences comprising hypothesised restorations of ancient Greek inscriptions (texts written in the Greek alphabet dating between the seventh century BCE and the fifth century CE). The architecture works at both the character- and word-level, thereby effectively handling long-term context information, and dealing efficiently with incomplete word representations (Figure 2). This makes it applicable to all disciplines dealing with ancient texts (philology, papyrology, codicology) and applies to any language (ancient or modern).

They’ve only launched 60 so far, but it looks like SpaceX has big plans for their future broadband satellite constellation.

🇨🇳 The People’s Republic of China Was Born in Chains

I haven’t read much Chinese history, but its origins and the Mao years were one of the greatest tragedies. And it’s frightening how much of that attitude is still there under the facade:

China today, for any visitor who remembers the country from 20 or 30 years ago, seems hardly recognizable. One of the government’s greatest accomplishments is to have distanced itself so successfully from the Mao era that it seems almost erased. Instead of collective poverty and marching Red Guards, there are skyscrapers, new airports, highways, railway stations, and bullet trains. Yet scratch the glimmering surface and the iron underpinnings of the one-party state become apparent. They have barely changed since 1949, despite all the talk about “reform and opening up.” The legacy of liberation is a country still in chains.

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The Incredible Inventions of Intuitive AI

January 2, 2019 • #

This talk on “generative AI” was interesting. One bit stuck out to me as really thought-provoking:

Dutch designers have created a system to 3D print functional things in-place, like this bridge concept. Imagine that you can place a machine, give it a feed of raw material input and cut it loose to generate something in physical space. As the presenter mentions at the end of the talk, moving from things that are “constructed” to ones that are “grown”.

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