Post

AlexHarford-TechSEO
@alexharfordseo.bsky.social

I think your point 3 should be your point 1 (low attention spans and so on). Thanks for the excellent write-up, Atlas seems worse than I imagined. I did find text adventures strangely compelling, like an interactive book, and appreciated those that came with a list of commands.

tveskov
@tveskov.com

Thanks for your thoughts on this, sounds way too creepy to use.. Have you written about or will you write about how your own local AI is currently set up?

Ky
@ky.fyi

It fabricates entire webpages?? Full of AI slop? That’s somehow even more odious than I imagined

Anil Dash
@anildash.com

I mean, in one way that’s just its UI, it outputs HTML. But the fact that it does that while also being your browser and showing you what appears to be a search box means that people will assume they’ve arrived at something that exists on the internet. Which it doesn’t!

reed
@reeddaniel.bsky.social

Ironic that it doesn't take you to any websites, as if they don't exist, yet without the sites, there would be much, much less to train AI on. Talk about "don't mind us while we steal all your content, don't let the door hit you in the webpage on the way out"

Anil Dash
@anildash.com

Oh sure, an atlas is the thing in someone else’s car that has valuable information which you can steal and then you can use it for your own purposes

Anil Dash
@anildash.com

Anthropic is better in every way. OpenAI is literally the worst major consumer tech company for branding that I can recall. their product names sound like fucking license plate numbers. And the craziest part is they own CHAT DOT COM! Half the influencers online start every conversation with “Chat…?”

Ernie Smith
@ernie.tedium.co

Yep absolutely. Anthropic has some black marks against it (the copyright suit) but their branding is better (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus is self explanatory as to function), their models are better and they're very careful about launching new things most of the time. OpenAI is just launching haphazardly.

Anil Dash
@anildash.com

Thanks! And as you can probably tell, this is a cohort of nerds that are *my people*. (Quite profoundly: As a middle-schooler, Prince was one of the kids who were the beta testers for the first, text-only, version of Oregon Trail.)

I Need a Cocktail
@iantuck.bsky.social

Kids today will never know how hard it was to find games compatible with a Hercules graphics card. Although I do remember Chris Crawford's Balance of Power (on Windows 1.0!) as a formative game for a 16-year-old me.

MishMei
@mishmei.bsky.social

after reading this, I have many questions but the main one is: what is this thing supposed to be FOR? what would persuade someone to use it, if they weren't already a ChatGPT cultist?