It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.

If they're using the same keyboard in this phone, it won't be of interest to me.

Half a megabyte for a URL. That certainly is a thing.

Let the battery die on your phone, and live one week without it. Cold turkey. Tell people in advance if you need to, give them an alternate way to reach you. Replace your phone for that week with a small notebook that fits in your pocket.

During that week, every time you want to do something that requires a smartphone, jot it down in your notebook. Then, fifteen minutes later or so, write down what you did instead.

After a week, you're ready to start using your smartphone again and turn it into a so-called "dumb phone." Read your notebook and think honestly about which things you really needed to do, and which ones weren't such a big deal after all.

The "accomplishments" you're listing are mostly just investments that he managed to hype up very well. I'll give him this, he's an excellent huckster. But listen to his opinions? I wouldn't let him tell me what color an orange was.

I feel that way about so much digital painting and illustration now. Artists can work faster than they can with physical media, but the end result is always missing something when there are no happy accidents.

I haven't played with the most state of the art parsers that are available right now, so I wonder how large the gap is between a great parser and using an LLM to process user input.

The main thing for me, though, was the feeling of emptiness I got while playing. I love text adventures, having grown up with Infocom games. The thing about them is that you can feel the choices made by the writer / programmer, just like you can feel the human author behind a book.

I'm sure part of what feels empty to me is because I know it was autogenerated. But I feel that even if I was shown this without knowing an LLM was behind it, the gameplay wouldn't be as rewarding as something written by a human using Inform.

In order to be able to really recommend something as multi-faceted as a book, movie, or song, you have to know a person on pretty much every level. I suppose seeing a person's entire social graph, search history, LLM history, media consumption history, and browser history might get you close, but it's still a Hard Problem™.

I expected to be able to provide a lot more than just five books. The splash page says "Our AI analyzes your reading DNA to recommend books you'll absolutely love—guaranteed to match your unique taste." That makes it sound like it's going to dive deep into my reading history and really think about my taste. Five books is absolutely not "my reading DNA."

There are lots of ways to get a richer picture of the books a person loves. You could connect to Goodreads or Storygraph, or scrape their social media for books you've discussed, or let users upload a .csv exported from other sources like LibraryThing, their Amazon wishlist, or their own local lists they might keep on Obsidian, Notion, or wherever. My public library keeps my reading history automatically - that would be another good data source for my "reading DNA."

Right now, it's just an AI recommendation based on five books. I can do that with any LLM from ChatGPT to Copilot to Gemini. The recommendation I got was very basic, just obviously similar books from the same authors I entered or ones that are closely related.

People's tastes are complex. Even if you allow much larger data sets to create a person's reading DNA, that alone won't necessarily recommend books that are right for them. For example, I love PG Wodehouse, but I have no interest at all in Evelyn Waugh, James Thurber, or G. K. Chesterton. A great recommendation engine would ask me why I love a book, and try to tease out the reasons behind my reading list in order to recommend books that will be more accurate and unexpected than I could get from a simple ChatGPT query or my Goodreads profile.

A site like this needs to do a lot to stand out. It's an excellent concept, I hope you develop it into something special.

Especially when there are actual digital recreations, available for free use under Creative Commons, based on historical information and modern surveys: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PHAROS2013-3000x2250...

The overall design is unfocused and cluttered, just the exact thing I don't need as someone with ADHD.

I don't think I'd use this.

In that 40 years, many UI conventions have sprung up, and we've internalized them to the point that they're so familiar we actually say they're intuitive.

But if you go back to the state of computing in 1986, or even earlier, when Raskin was developing his UX principles for the Canon Cat and the SwyftCard, he was considering computer interfaces that were almost exclusively command-line interfaces.

You're not supposed to "idolize" any designer or engineer. But I would highly encourage you to read The Humane Interface, learn about the underlying principles of usability and interface design, and consider how you'd apply them to a UI today, 40 years later. The execution you'd come up with would be different. But the principles he started from are foundational and very useful.