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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

#61

Post by ymolodtsov »

WalterBright wrote: post #43
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?

Gutenberg's press was made out of a wine press. Letters were cast in lead, then lined up on a tray under the press. The tray was inked. A piece of paper was set over the inked letters, and the wine press forced the paper onto the letters. This cut the cost of a book by a factor of 300(!). The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his…

The paper was still expensive and there wasn't yet as much demand for books.

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

#62

Post by jrflowers »

cubefox wrote: post #53
jrflowers wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think this article about Mark Twain, a famous guy one hundred and fifty years ago, lost all of his money betting on the wrong thing is about chat bots. He lost his money before all that

We will never know if Mark Twain would have or would not have lost his money betting on chat bots because he lost it all on a different machine that didn’t work

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

#63

Post by stevekemp »

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…

If you have 30 minutes to spare the old program "The Secret Life of Machines" has an episode demonstrating how sewing machines work, in a delightfully quirky way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lwI4TSKM3Y

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

#64

Post by afc »

cheesecakegood wrote: post #59
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 s…

Thank you for taking the time to type that, I found it informative and interesting. Like we like to think of it as a single idea that worked well, but it's actually a ton of work to get a million details just right, and failure in just a few of them would just have made the whole endeavor (of the printing press) fail.

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

#65

Post by russdill »

cheesecakegood wrote: post #59
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 s…

Many of the same technologies enables woodcut presses which already existed.

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

#66

Post by thinking_cactus »

fwipsy wrote: post #17

It's pretty ironic to read about Twain losing his fortune to bad investments, after satirizing sketchy investments in "The Gilded Age."

It makes a little sense to me that would be the case. People tend to write things they find relevant for their own life or surrounding. That is, he might be putting into paper a kind of warning to himself.

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

#67

Post by gofreddygo »

somenameforme wrote: post #26
hnchm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, LLMs are a great example of the argument for the power of doing what "humans already do": language, however imperfect for the task, so maybe humanoid robots turn out to be the most natural way to interact with a human environment (broad strokes here, I know, but hopefully you get the gist)

Another point on this is that as you improve the robot you improve those endless tasks it can do, whereas with specialized robots improvements to that specialization are much more limited in scope. So there's a lot more incentive and value to be gained from improving the tech than there are for specialized solutions. Sike with LLMs.

A group of specialized actors with deeper singular skills, working on a task, well coordinated outperform a single actor with wider, shallower skills.

I acknowledge that the depth the group brings is at a cost higher than the single actor and it isn't always a better thing.

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

#68

Post by wongarsu »

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.

Spiders can't reach as high. Unless you make them really big, but then they take up a lot of space

Humans are very space efficient

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

#69

Post by melvinroest »

cheesecakegood wrote: post #59
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 s…

What small hole in the wall museum was that? I might travel to it no matter where it is in the world. Sounds awesome, I'm hyped up

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

#70

Post by bryanrasmussen »

his bad investments and obsession here was certainly something that brought him down, but I'm going to have to say what probably really ruined his life was his daughter Susy Clemens dying of spinal meningitis in 1896, 2 years after the bankruptcy.

As someone with some familiarity with Clemens, and stresses piled upon stresses, I feel it is somewhat insulting to the man to think he just couldn't handle losing some money and having his entrepreneurial dreams not work out, because really that is some minor stuff right there, and in the end he was still one of the most popular writers in the world, it was going through the stress and then getting more on top. Especially, as it is my experience, when you are going through something really difficult and are at your weakest, people try to take advantage of that. It would not have been a good therapy for his misanthropic bent.

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