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The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

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Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#51

Post by LarsDu88 »

eru wrote: post #34
ekelsen wrote: post #16

I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". Monks writing out manuscripts is somewhat relatable since we all (at least for now) still learn how to write. Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work? Why was it still a pain and how did later inventions fix those problems?

Most of the things school curricula touch turn awful. It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.

Yet the end result appears that people on their own accord go and "learn" things like vaccines are bad, fluoridated water is used for mind control, rectal enemas can cure bowel cancer, and that the moon landings were fake.

At least the education system enforces some baseline level of standards

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#52

Post by LarsDu88 »

arbuge wrote: post #13

> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do. That would in fact be the main argument agains…

This whole episode suggests to me that people are misjudging the future of robotics. Many companies are building robots to exactly imitate humans, perhaps with the thought that the "egocentric" training data widely available will be more useful for this form factor. Look at Tesla, Unitree, Boston Dynamics, or Figure... But humans are just barely adapted to bipedalism and hunter-gathering as it is.

The perfect kind of robot is perhaps something closer to the linotype... a AI controlled macine that has the capability to birth or re-assemble to be optimal for the task at hand. Just like the linotype automated the "casting" of lines of text.

Not necessarily a 3d printer or a nanobot universal assembler... but maybe something more akin to a modular assembly line that can rearrange itself intelligently.

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#53

Post by cubefox »

jrflowers wrote: post #14
cubefox wrote: post #7

[flagged]

Reading about a machine from one hundred and fifty years ago and getting progressively more and more upset that the writing doesn’t give sufficient praise to the real topic of every article, my lovely chat bot

My lovely pocket calculator, he says these are lessons for us, for the present. And, since he is talking about technology in general, presumably for the future. The past events were only the inspiration.

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#54

Post by pineaux »

anon-3988 wrote: post #49
miki123211 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanoids are the Turing machines of physics. They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.

There's no reason why an ideal body needs to have such a high center of gravity though? Clearly we are wasting a lot of energy and capacity to maintain that balance. I am pretty the ideal body is actually a spider.

Actually bipedal systems are very energy efficient when walking and moving and very slightly inefficient when standing still.

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#56

Post by EagnaIonat »

kazinator wrote: post #8

> The easy moral of the story is that Twain was gullible and Paige a huxster. It absolutely isn't. Paige was actually the engineer/tinkerer earnestly developing this machine, which really worked. One of his main problems is that he always thought he needed to improve it more before it was ready. He didn't understand "release early and often": that time-to-market matters. > Twain felt that he had an insider’s perspect…

> It absolutely isn't. Paige was actually the engineer ...

It glosses over it and Twains autobiography goes into more detail.

What impressed Twain about it was the demonstration had an operator typing at high speed.

When he got the device, he discovered the operator was typing the same phase over and over. They had memorised it so as to type faster.

So one of the overlooked lessons is don't believe product demos.

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#57

Post by wolfi1 »

BrenBarn wrote: post #48
wolfi1 wrote: post #25

I don't like the first photo, historical photos getting colorized does not feel right to me, as all the colors are just assumptions and the whole thing may have looked different in real and if we look at this photo it sure did

As the caption says, it's not even a real photo of Twain or Paige, it's from a movie.

then it does even less make sense

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#58

Post by brianpan »

somat wrote: post #27
arbuge wrote: post #13

> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do. That would in fact be the main argument agains…

See also: the sewing machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine The 30 second version, sewing is very labor intensive and people started trying to make a sewing machine from about when manufacturing tolerances got tight enough to attempt the process. It still took about 100 years until machines that actually work well were invented, The genius bit that took so long is to not try and sew like a human does b…

And the dishwasher, the laundry washer/dryer...

There's also plenty of examples where technology creates something very different than the thing that humans were doing: photograph vs painting, car vs horse/bike. It would be silly to say that we have all this horse infrastructure and saddle UX that we don't want to break compatibility with.

Maybe the lesson is that humans are adaptable but machines/manufacturing is not? It's easier to make a great new thing that humans will use than it is to make a cost-effective production thing that exactly replaces what humans did.

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#59

Post by cheesecakegood »

ekelsen wrote: post #16

I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". Monks writing out manuscripts is somewhat relatable since we all (at least for now) still learn how to write. Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work? Why was it still a pain and how did later inventions fix those problems?

I was able to do something probably few have, which is visit one of those small hole in the wall museums staffed essentially by just a single passionate old guy assembled with his life savings, dedicated to the printing press. Incredible experience.

Anyways, it’s been about 15 years, but the thing that made an impression on me was that it wasn’t just one invention. Gutenberg basically had to assemble like two dozen separate innovations to make it all work.

The type alloy (3 metals!) had to be just soft enough to cast easily, just expandable enough to set well, just hard enough to last. How to cast in quantity and re-melt as needed. The ink had to be just runny enough to apply easily but not so runny it gets everywhere, sticky enough to stick to type, and dry at a good middle speed. The blotter to apply the ink to type. The system of wooden casing to hold the pieces together with the right spacing, that won’t fall apart. How to set up the casing. The screw press needed to have very even pressure. The paper needed to be able to slide and take ink properly without spreading but also not tear. Proper fonts and ligatures for the type. And so on…

IIRC most things stayed pretty similar for a few hundred years, mostly changing stuff like the paper feeding mechanism or tweaking ink application or minor variations in how the lever or screw work. So to be honest, Gutenberg did almost all the hard work himself. It was a big deal because a lot of these smaller inventions had to come together for a narrow purpose all at once (on top of the obvious huge historical effect of cheaper books!)

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#60

Post by jacobolus »

Retric wrote: post #37
eru wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the things school curricula touch turn awful. It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.

The vast majority of people vastly overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education. Easier on its own is therefore effectively meaningless when people aren’t actually learning beyond the most superficial layers.

> overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education

People benefit greatly from external human feedback, but 1:1 tutoring (with a good tutor) is roughtly an order of magnitude more effective and efficient than a classroom, and classrooms themselves vary wildly; in general the more participatory the better.

Self learning without any help can be more effective and efficient than a typical classroom, because as it is self directed, self paced, can use the best materials someone can find and a whole variety of them vs. whatever was assigned, etc., but it takes a lot of skill (which comes from past practice) and effort on the part of the learner. Many researchers/scholars are doing significant amounts of self-directed learning as their career, and can get very good at it with decades of practice.

The speed of learning in a classroom with 15+ students is inevitably unbelievably slow, and the time is used incredibly inefficiently. This isn't any particular problem with specific teachers, but as far as I can tell an inherent problem with aligning a bunch of people's preparation, motivation, and attention, and a problem with giving feedback in a 1:many setting. Teaching/learning speed generally seems worse at a primary school level vs. at a college level, given a very good teacher in both; I'm not sure if this is because of better prepared (because older) students, or just more motivated students.

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