I've been thinking along these lines too! My idea here is to use a receipt printer + scanner. In the morning the system prints a receipt with various widgets like weather, calendar, etc. The scanner takes in the marked up receipt at EOD to update the digital data and prepare for tomorrow's receipt.
The paper computer
61–70 of 97 posts
Re: The paper computer
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
And a shout-out to https://folk.computer/ as well! They're not as far along in terms of feature parity, but they are open source, and exploring the space in other directions.
If you have any ins with this project would you mind asking them to add a line or 2 describing what it is about, or even a linked text in the start.txt file? Just a simple: > Folk Computer is a research & art project centered around designing new physical computing interfaces. From ./notes/tableshots.txt with a link towards the top would imo be quite helpful. (Sorry, this is just one of my pet peeves: needing to know…
Thanks! I can pass it on. Would you say then that having an overview on the main page, with links for more details would be a better approach?
Re: The paper computer
#63Since I have a laptop, I threw away all paper support, focusing on the keyboard as primary information interface. Using paper and space to organize ideas is nice, but that's a niche use-case. And in any case, you'll have to digitalize it anyway afterwards, so better start on the digital version immediately, and be good at it. Everytime I start a new project, I'm tempted to take a pencil and paper, but then I refrain…
Maybe you should interrogate that temptation to reach for physical interfaces? It sounds like you're ignoring your own psychology and shaping yourself to the machines around you instead of thinking of how the machines could be shaped to you.
Not that I haven't done exactly the same thing as you, I never keep paper around and my handwriting has gotten terrible. I'm saying this to myself and others as well.
Re: The paper computer
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Charles de Lint had an intelligent book in his fantasy novel _Jack the Giant Killer_ (or maybe its sequel) --- I've tried doing the conversing/chatting thing w/ an LLM a couple of times, but always got annoyed more than amused. What's the point? LLMs tend towards the mean/average --- I want better in my life and interactions --- it's useful when I need an example DXF or similar rote task, but my current project is a…
I think you're right that the use case for an LLM is still rather niche. It's perhaps still worth exploring though as they may well improve over time. Regardless, I have still found them useful. Diagnosing the problems with a car is maybe an esoteric example but is still useful. For many months now I have been working through learning about and implementing a hobbyist analog computer with LLM as engineer-confidant .…
Yes, they do work well as a stand-in for the "competent technician with skill in the pertinent art and and fully aware of all prior art" (to use wording like to the patent application standard).
But it's only going to allow you to avail oneself of prior art/techniques.
Re: The paper computer
#65Paper Computing (great name!) is something I've been thinking about a lot to help my kids benefit from tech without exposing them to the brain melting addiction of screens. I sacrificed a few crazy nights of sleep to try to build a Paper Computer Agent prototype for a recent Gemini hackathon (only to disappointingly have submission issues right before the actual deadline) which my kids loved and keep asking me to set…
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I think better phrasing such as "Have you considered the ramifications of exposing and normalizing AI for your children?" That is a lot more pleasant than verbally bashing someone with a club like a cave man (Though I get it. sometimes, "og want smash." but keep og in check.)
Re: The paper computer
#66There is something incredibly valuable about forcing yourself to trace execution logic on physical paper. It builds a mental model of state changes and memory that you just don't fully develop when a modern IDE's debugger is doing all the heavy lifting for you.
Re: The paper computer
#67The author is basically advocating that they want to be an executive with a secretary, but they want the secretary to be AI. I don't use secretary in a pejorative sense, just meaning that the author seems to want someone/something that does simple tasks but lets them make decisions, as opposed to an executive assistant that has a little more self-agency to do things on their own.
They just want OpenClaw with printing and scanning privileges. Every morning OpenClaw prints out a task list or items that need action, the author writes notes/responses, and places it on the scanner. This is basically how my program director worked at my last job. Every morning the secretary would have his schedule printed out, he'd go to meetings and write notes, and would pass by his secretary and stick a note or two on her desk saying "set up a meeting with XYZ org/team within the next few days on ABC topic." The secretary would also print documents/presentations and he'd mark them up throughout the day with changes he wanted made, and he'd drop the documents off when he was done going through them, and the secretary would distribute the documents to their respective POCs to make the changes.
Basically the only thing the author hasn't mentioned that the secretary did is that the secretary also acted as a gatekeeper for access to the program director, either in real-time ("no, you can't go in, they are meeting with a higher level director") or would take a request for a meeting and have enough personal context on whether the director would want the meeting themself or want to see it go through a division chief first. Not sure if OpenClaw can do that, but just about everything else is totally do-able. Not sure if I really want to see someone wasting this much paper just to "feel analog" but I suppose it probably isn't a big deal since most people won't do it this way, and will stick to digital forms of communication with their OpenClaw secretary.
Re: The paper computer
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
To some degree, that's what one had w/ Apple's Newton Intelligence on the MessagePad --- it was "just" fancy pattern-matching, but mostly it worked, and the UI and implementation were quite good, and it kept me organized all through college.
Mentioning the Newton may be anathema to the discussion (it seems to bring up the usual jokes, etc.) but I was thinking too that the Macintosh (or the Xerox Alto if you like, or the Mother of All Demos) tried to move us in that direction by "skeuomorphising" the computer interface—make it look like the more familiar "real world". The Newton pushed further. It seems to have been on the mind of at least a few people at…
Other copies of the Primer do have a computer backend.
There are basically three versions of the book:
1) The ones developed for a few rich kids. These are partially automated, but backed by gig workers. They get what we might call (if you'll pardon the term) "Actually Indians" AI (augmented by the regular type).
2) The one our protagonist gets. This is one of the books from #1, but the distinctive feature here is that an early gig worker (the book calls these "'ractors" when they're doing this kind of work) the protagonist draws takes a special interest in her and intentionally keeps drawing jobs for her over a period of several years. This continuity and personal care by a single real person is what sets it apart and makes her experience so excellent.
3) The mass-market version that's entirely computerized, no human touch. This version brainwashes a fuckload of kids into becoming the "mouse army", and that's really all we see as far as what it can do: something really bad (if convenient for our protagonist).
The message of the book is 100% the opposite of "automated learning-books are amazing". It's "tech for learning sucks ass and/or is outright dangerous if you rely only on it, and a real human tutor who cares about a kid is the best thing around even in a crazy high-tech future-world".
Re: The paper computer
#69My favorite paper computer https://pocketmod.com
Re: The paper computer
#70Receive email, render page with the email and a reply section and a unique ID, print it out physically Human picks up all the sheets out of the printer, writes out replies with pen Human puts the stack of answered email sheets in a multi-page scanner Scanner physically scans them, agent transcribes them and matches them back to the incoming emails via the unique ID on each sheet, sends replies You could adjust this f…
I will say scanners are somewhat unergonomic, but if you had a high enough definition camera, you could photograph the document in its "natural environment". Granted, it's harder to get an evenly lit picture that way, but I think it's a nicer interface.
All of my document "scanning" for the last—god, maybe 15 years?—has been with a phone camera.
Before everyone just started using Docusign anyway, I'd bought houses with a phone "scanner". LOL.
I don't think I started with it, but for a very long time I've had an app called TinyScanner that's good-enough at edge detection, can de-noise or make a document entirely black & white, and can glue multiple pages together into a PDF. The results look better than plenty of flatbed scanner results I've seen, if not as good as the best of those.