Kids have been communicating with "Santa" since forever. This is just another way to do the same - a modern "Santa Hotline". Nothing new under the sun.
Watch as your child's eyes
light up when Santa remembers their name, asks about their day, and responds to their wishes in real time.
$99 for 60 minutes of your child interacting with, their voice getting sent to Google. In a best case scenario, a parent who could already fill that role is standing by.
Can't help but imagine some kid being shunted off to the side during Christmas with only this thing to talk to while their parents are much too busy drinking and listening to some esoteric tech/acc podcast.
Or maybe it's something that parents can do with their children, since that's clearly the intent. It's also the convention for "letters to Santa" since...forever.
Honestly, it doesn't take much of a good faith effort to see this.
Before installing all those apps the author listed, I'd recommend this exercise:
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.
I find that regular wilderness backpacking trips in places without cell service accomplish this kind of reset in a fun, social (bring friends!) way that provides plenty of exercise and fresh air, with the added bonus of being a reasonably "normal" explanation/antidote to the social pressure of those "you're doing what??? I need to be able to reach you!"-type conversations.
There's the added bonus that being fully out of cell service effectively removes the ability to cheat altogether, though it seems inevitable at this point that satellite data will be invading the backcountry before long.
This is the way. I've spend few weeks back a wonderful time on remote islands in heart of Sulawesi, Indonesia. I even bought sim card for the operator that was supposed to have some coverage there (to stay connected a bit with kids back home). Suffice to say no phone signal for week and a half, I don't mean internet, not even sms.
Pretty amazing, one focuses on actual adventures, people, food, culture, coral marine life, diving and so on. It felt like spending 2 months there.
Then coming back to all this cheap pathetic crap was a proper 'bleh'.
I switched to a candy-bar style dumb phone for a month and did something similar. My list was pretty much the same as the one in the article with a few small changes.
The most jarring was probably maps - other things like email, messaging etc could be delayed until I could reach a computer but not knowing how to get somewhere right now was problematic and required planning in advance.
I usually kept my smart phone in my car and did a sim swap on the occasion that I really needed it.
same experience. switches to an old school dumb phone. my neighbor joked that I was a drug dealer, lol.
but man did I miss maps. need to go somewhere? get in the car, start the engine, look it up on some map app, and then I'm off.
text messaging and being able to send simple photos was also a loss. definitely missed being able to text the wife a photo of something on sale in the grocery store ("hey, 10% off X, wanna give that a try for dinner?"), and I missed how good some of the auto-fill was after a while.
to a much lesser degree, a phone was nice during some downtime. waiting in line for something, killing time in a doctor's office waiting room, etc. 20 years ago they had magazines, now they don't...
eventually after getting lost a couple of times I just tapped out and went back to the Pixel 4
Normalize checking notifications 1-3 times per day.
Once in the morning, once after work, once some time later in the evening if you feel like it.
During working hours there’s rarely any reason to touch or check your personal phone (and in many professions you simply aren’t able to).
During after-work hobbies and/or family time you are for obvious reasons unable to have your phone on your person (it’s in a locker room, or you’re playing with your kids) or unable to pick it up (any creative or performing arts, or you’re having family dinner).
I have reasons to believe that my sister works like this. We joke that she has "office hours". She will rarely answer messages or calls that she does not expect right away. Then at around eight in the evening, every other days or so, messages will start trickling in.
At first it was a bit annoying, but once you know that she works like that it perfectly fine. I'm starting to think that she's doing modern communication correct.
I've had this for years but it makes me check my phone more often I think. At times I find myself cycling through apps to see if someone replied, whereas if I had a notification I'd know whether or not to bother
Author here: this is exactly what had me turn on notifications for email. I first tried without it, but found myself "checking on important responses" way too much.
> This has cost me a relationship. (it was long distance to be fair).
Tbh, (imho, having tried it) in normal circumstances it would be a miracle to make anything really work like that, but at present you're just fighting a losing, nearly irreconcilable battle, unless you're both wholly on the same page about infrequent synchronous communication.
If a relationship relies on immediate responses to async, unpredictable, text-based communication, and what you want is a sane lifestyle, it's going to be a tough situation.
I just tell people that need my attention how to get it. Call me if it's important and/or time sensitive, otherwise I'll just check when I check based on the implied nature of the platform. Instagram is super casual unimportant brainrot usually, Messenger for coordinating plans with older millennials and Gen X family, Whatsapp for younger millennials sometimes, SMS or RCS is slightly more important and I'll get visual but not physical or audible notifications. I make it clear that if it's a group chat, I'll turn notifications off unless I'm specifically tagged, or maybe check in once a week if it's for a specific purpose, but otherwise I hate them. Signal for some things that aren't time sensitive, no notifications, no read receipts on any platform.
> They will perceive your lack of response as you not prioritising them.
And correctly so: you are prioritizing people that contact you in the normal way (via phone calls).
If I send you a text message, it's usually because I don't need an immediate reply; answering me tomorrow is good enough. If I do need a faster reply (if I'm texting an image or some such, or in a noisy place), I'll make a call afterwards, just long enough to set off your ringer so you hear it.
I also deal with notifications in a different manner: I have different ringtones and extensive notification filters set up. Most of my apps will not make any noise with a notification while the screen is off. Most notifications will not show up on the lockscreen. Most notifications will not show up in the status bar. My standard ringtone is an mp3 with a short quiet ring and a long pause before it ends, so while I do get call notifications they're easy to ignore; only important contacts (family) are allowed to bubble or pop on top, and they also get a different ringtone.
I dread migrating my phone, as none of this can be backed up. I changed phones last year and still find the occasional app that I forgot to blacklist notifications for and never noticed because things related to https://dontkillmyapp.com simply prevents it from running altogether when I haven't used it in the past couple days.
One aspect of no phone is how to deal with payments. Specifically UPI payments in India. These are QR code based payments and it is getting more difficult to pay by cash at many locations.
Right next to that is OTPs from financial institutions.
On the way towards the same issue in Vietnam. You can still pay with cash everywhere but it's becoming more and more normal to use QR codes. I guess in the next year or two I'll start to see places that only take QR. It's very convenient... unless you don't have a local bank account, or your phone runs out of battery, or, as happened to me 30 minutes ago, your bank's system goes down.
That would be a great idea if I were on vacation in a cabin in the woods. But realistically, I need my phone for just about everything I do on a daily basis, from payments, to navigation, to communicating with friends and family, and logging into accounts for work.
At least a few of these, like payments and basic communications, can be done from a watch.
Work accounts, camera, and maps are the big blockers for me. I know I can buy a camera but 90% of the times when I take a photo it's to instantly send it via a messaging app, mostly for work.
But I need my phone daily. I can’t log in to my client’s servers without 2FA, can’t make payments, can’t do many things that are super important.
I found Jomo app perfect instead. I blocked all apps and websites that are distracting or promote doom scrolling behavior in me. Once I went through a detox I’ve allowed them in the evenings for 15 minutes only when conditions are met (I’ve exercised and walked 10k steps etc.). I generally don’t have desire to use them then but I might have messages from my friends or I might want to publish something myself.
I do use Reddit and YouTube to follow topics related to work. And to some degree Hacker News as well. Come to think of it, these are the apps that make up for most of the screen time usage for me.
I think a middle ground version of this is possible, e.g. instead of letting your battery die, reset the phone to defaults and don’t install anything with the exception of critical communication apps.
Run the rest of the experiment as described for other categories of use.
Some people have family juggling/concerns that requires frequent contact (usually involving children being remote places).
There are many, many, not so strange reasons that someone might need to maintain contact. Thinking it's not possible suggests a very naive perspective.
Most people probably don't. I'm an editor who's been working in print for years, so the keyboard shortcut for an em dash is muscle memory for me at this point. I have always been a Chicago Manual of Style person, so I don't place spaces around the em dash. AP style guide users do place a space around it.
"Dug tunnels" - one of the most ridiculous boondoggles of any modern industrialist. The Boring Company is a machine for overpromising to get government contracts and underdelivering at exponential scale. He didn't start PayPal, he joined it and ended up getting fired, albeit with a golden parachute that gave him the chance to make more bets.
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.
"Today, you still find airbrush-inspired art in advertising that’s done digitally rather than with ink on paper. The digital art is a little too perfect though — the gradient blends are flawless, while an airbrush would give you the slightest inconsistencies that made it look more genuine."
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.
Ironic, because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections. We were totally going for maximum hyperrealism and clean precision. I had the same experience of craving an airbrush, obtaining an airbrush, then within a year seeing a demo of 32-bit color graphics editing (a museum had a computer set up for the public to try it out) and feeling silly.
> Ironic, because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections
I might be talking out of my ass, but I'm pretty sure we've "known" for centuries that imperfection has an enormous place in art. Before computers, before photography.
> because we didn't know the art was improved by the subtle texture of imperfections
This is quite amusing, because I always could tell the CGI [in the films] off the real deal because it was or too perfect or too imperfect, along with a shitload of a motion blur.
It was so until Chappie when I couldn't distinguish between the green screen and Rogue One when I couldn't distinguish a fully rendered scene.
Also a conterfeit VHS along with a DivX compressed copies (hey, 4700:700 !) always looked... more immersive than the 'real deal' in a theater, heh.
There’s a lot of CGI that blends in invisibly in most movies made in the last 20 years. Sure we notice the bottom 20% of terrible CGI + stuff that’s blatantly unrealistic, but all the stuff you miss is just quietly worked.
Poor makeup, anachronistic aircraft contrails, unsightly construction cranes, etc get quietly adjusted to make everything look clean in ways that don’t stand out until you start analyzing individual frames. On top of this some kinds of CGI have gotten so common that it’s less obvious how few physical cars are used in car commercials.
I think 80s music is still popular because it is good. Many artists of that era like Elton John, Paul McCartney and specially Stevie Wonder had a very good musical background and the advances in electronic music tech gave them tools to explode their talent to new levels.
This is probably survivorship bias or familiarity bias more than anything.
Music from the 80s/90s that is popular today has stood the test of time; there's a lot more music from these decades that we don't hear today & is not popular. We've also heard those songs a lot more times than contemporary music.
The happy accidents in this case aren't even directly discernable either. It's not like you say "oh that little random smudge is interesting." It's just an impression you get.
Old school animation has the same quality. It's all hand drawn so not quite as exact. It looks fantastic. You wouldn't really even call it flawed, just less formulaic.
I guess that makes me think "how could we model that with computers?" I mean we could make a gradient less smooth. We could add different sorts of noise. It sounds quite complicated but in theory a computer could do this. Practically speaking it may never be worth trying to implement. Kind of a 80/20 issue. That is, you could do a ton of extra work to bump the quality a bit but people are already pretty happy with it so why bother?
Exactly both of these sentiments are what, to me, make photography and film (movies in general) so much more interesting, both visually and emotionally more textured from a couple decades ago, compared to the forced perfection of both today as practiced by so many creators.
I practice black and white photography, for example. So much of what I see of it now looks like the overdone, over-edited forced perfection of style derived from the gritty beauty of much more crudely interesting monochromes of decades past.
There are some cases where CG in old movies looks better than the average CG in new movies, too, probably because the FX team responsible put a lot more work into getting to look right, despite the technological limitations of the era. No matter the medium, care and attention are felt.
I agree. I think when something is at the cutting edge, and you're creating effects no-one has ever seen before - (the first Jurassic Park, say) - people really go the extra mile to make it look as great as possible. Fast forward to today, when CG is pretty much a commodity - and it's often a lot more about getting it done on time and within budget.
True but it is also like saying that some office building came out better than other because the workers put more effort into it. There is skill to to the craft but also it’s a game of constraints and how the project is planned and budgeted is large part of how it will look in the end. I believe what has changed is that producers know that cg looking cg is just a stylistic choice among many others and doesn’t hurt the box office in some genres almost at all.
That's a complaint I have about 80s music. So perfectly synthesized, it's fake. That's why I like 70s guitar and drums over 80s. Humans make artistic mistakes; it adds character.
It's a pretty cool proof of concept. I did run into some weirdness with it right away when trying the Harry Potter book. The app kept switching between 2nd and 3rd person for Harry.
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.
This is true for me as well. Once you realise that with the right prompts you can get the LLM to go off on any tangent you want, it starts to ring really hollow. Add to that the inability of LLMs to maintain world simulations of any fidelity at all, and it becomes difficult to motivate spending time with them in that way.
Freedom is valuable in games, especially text adventure games. And an LLM is a powerful way to give the player freedom, since it can respond to almost anything.
But for games to shine they also need carefully considered constraints - when the player bounces off constraints they start to understand how the game's world and systems function, which lets them build a mental model and be able to start thinking the same way the designer(s) thought and come up with solutions for puzzles or decide how to react to a given situation.
What makes a maze engaging as a challenge is that your path is closed off in some places and not in others. Ideally any maze also has one or more concrete solutions, so the player is rewarded for mastering the maze by finding an exit, or maybe finding objectives or creatures hidden at key locations in the maze.
You can probably use modern LLMs to construct this sort of world and set those constraints, but I wonder how far we are from being able to also have the LLM maintain that world state and enforce the constraints?
That's a very insightful take. I think an LLM would have some role in a good text adventure game, in terms of being able to understand any natural language input and respond intelligently. But as you point out, it would need to do so within strict constraints set by the game designer.
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.
Half a megabyte for a URL. That certainly is a thing.
reply