Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. Screens with hundreds of pixels on each side are very cheap already.
It reminds me people who research "colorizing grayscale photos", which do not exist anymore either (if you want a color photo of someone you met in your life, there probably exists a color photo of that person).
> Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. Screens with hundreds of pixels on each side are very cheap already.
Find me a 0.66" OLED display for ~$1 that has hundreds of pixels on each side then.
> It reminds me people who research "colorizing grayscale photos", which do not exist anymore either (if you want a color photo of someone you met in your life, there probably exists a color photo of that person).
What train of thought led you to think people are primarily researching colorising new B&W photos? As opposed to historical ones, or those of relatives taken when they were young? You can take a colour photo of granddad today but most likely the photos of him in his 20s are all in black and white.
If you know a person who is 70 years old, they were 20 in 1975 - color photos existed back then.
Every grayscale photo of someone famous has already been colorized during the past 50 years. If there are only grayscale photos of you, you were probably born before 1900, and all your friends or your children (who might want to colorize your photo) are probably dead, too.
1. Improving the colourisation algorithms has value, it might be that the available colourised photos of celebrities have inaccurate colours or are of poorer quality than say, one done with a diffusion model that can be instructed about the colours of certain objects
2. Don’t forget about B&W films! Getting automatic methods to be consistent over a long length is still not 100% solved. People are very interested in seeing films from WW1 and WW2 in colour, for instance.
3. Plenty of people (myself included) have relatives in their 80s or 90s. Or maybe someone wants to see their ancestors from the 19th century in colour for whatever reason?
Color photos existed but color film and processing was very expensive (and while mono film development "middle school student can do at home" for a generation, home color work wasn't a thing until late 80s/early 90s as far as I recall.) So in practice, I personally have childhood pics of my dad with his mom and sister - that were shot black and white but colorized by being hand painted, and this was pretty common...
There exist plenty of reasons to colorize grayscale photos in 2026.
* a huge corpus of historical imagery
* cheaper grayscale cameras + post processing will surely enable all sorts of uses we haven't imagined yet.
* a lower power CCD and post-processing after the fact or on a different device allows for better power budget in cheap drones (etc).
* these algorithms can likely be tuned or used as a stepping stone for ones that convert non-visible wavelengths into color images.
And that's just off the top of my head as someone who doesn't really work with that stuff. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons I can't think of.
Grayscale cameras are not that much cheaper than color cameras. And if you decided to use a grayscale camera on purpose, you probably do not care about the color information (which would be totally "made up" by the colorizing algorithm).
Also, if there are only grayscale photos of you, you were probably born before 1900, and all your friends or your children (who might want to colorize your photo) are probably dead, too.
What does the existence of a color photograph of my grandmother as an old woman have to do with my desire to colorize a grayscale photo of her as a child? Or colorize the photos of her wedding?
It's a very strange argument to make: there exist some photos therefore other photos may not be colorized!
I have not yet, because my uncle hasn't scanned those photos yet. I have colorized the pictures of my grandmother as a child, and some previously unmentioned ones of the farm my grandfather grew up on. I've also colorized some photos of ancestors that no one alive this century has ever met.
Just because you don't want to use a tool, it doesn't mean others also won't.
I am just saying that the colorization was needed in 1995, when 90% of people had black-and-white childhood photos.
But today, only 1% of people has black-and-white childhood photos. I just makes me want to argue when people pretend that it is still needed as much as in 1995 :D
I was also arguing with my friends about buying laptops with an optical drive ten years ago :D
Quick browsing at adafruit.com (or any other similar vendor), reveals plenty of displays that are 128, 240, and 320 pixels wide. At 6 pixels of width per character, that's only 21, 40, and 53 characters wide. Seems quite useful to me.
There are also several 32x32 led panels, which one could imagine needing some text.
Also, this kind of thing is just interesting, regardless of the usefulness.
0.27mm dot pitch, so each letter would be 1.35mm square in a box of 1.62mm square. I expect I could read it just fine at the distances I'd expect to look at such a screen.
I tested this on a phone, and was able to read it without much difficulty at roughly 18-30 inches.
I wish that were the case. I'm trying to make a tiny emulated z80 computer, and to fit a screen of 64x16 test on a smartwatch sized screen, I have to use a 4x6 pixel font, because the highest res, most available screen I can get in that size is just 240x280. High-res 400+ px smartwatch screens like the apple watch has - you can only get those if you buy 10000 at once and sign an NDA.
Actually, the 4x6 doesn't look half bad if viewed at wrist-level.
128x64 monochrome screens are very common in both LCD and OLED format.
They should have standardized 3 to 5 battery sizes (and their connectors, voltages, etc.), so that the same battery could be used across many different devices, which would bring down the cost even more.
In 2012, I created IvanK.js - a Javascript library with the "Flash API" for quickly remaking ActionScript 3 games into the web environment. But it required WebGL, which as not very well supported back then.
I could remake several of my flash games quickly into web.
It should be enough to make it mandatory for banks to let people send money to each other for free, even abroad (within the EU). Then, at the shop, you can simply pay by making a bank transaction through the internet banking (which can be a phone app, a website, etc). The payment details (account number of the receiver, the amount, etc) can be transferred through NFC or a QR code.
Money would go directly bank-to-bank, nothing in the middle.
Of course not, it's expressing widely held observations that have been out there in the human population for a long time, and they're correct observations so they're hardly impossible to find.
It's not really a good argument to say 'but what if this argument is so right and so commonly held that an AI could regurgitate it?'. Well, yes, because AI is not inherently unable to repeat correct opinions. It's pretty trivial to get AI to go 'therefore, I suck! I should be banned'. What was it, Gemini, which took to doing that on its own due to presumably the training data and guidance being from abused and abusive humans?
Many non-programmers think that programming languages get outdated, just like operating systems or computer hardware, or even some software (old algorithms replaced by better algorithms), and each programmer should "follow trends", since using the same programming language for 10+ years sounds wrong.
But programming languages are like Math. It is like saying "multiplying is outdated" or "the square root is outdated".
if you don't think programming languages can get outdated then why is assembly, fortran, lisp, smalltalk, pascal, basic practically disappeared? programming languages are not like math, it's like the moon
Internet is amazing, it is the best invention of humanity, and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.
> and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
In the same way heroin proves itself more useful for everyone year after year.
> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.
How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?
Each year, I spend more time in my car during my commute (on average) than a year before, which shows that being stuck in traffic is getting more and more useful to me.
I chose to give that nice man my wallet instead of taking a bullet, but that doesn’t actually reveal as much about my preferences as you seem to think it does.
No, you chose to be able to go back to your loved ones in one piece. That very much reveals your preferences. Do you think someone who was in depression, who had a terminal illness might do differently?
It doesnt mean that it getting more and more useful though. The alternatives could be getting worse and worse. Or there just aren't alternatives.
Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.
You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.
It also could happen because tech companies have optimized their products to maximize the amount of time that people spend on them, often in ways that directly result in a worse user experience (by showing ads instead of the most relevant search results, for example).
The original poster said “more useful”, not “better”, so you’re already arguing something different than what was said. I might spend more time with something less useful because its time efficiency is one of the things that makes it less useful now.
Regarding your argument of “better” you seem to be arguing by definition.
Edit: I now realize you are the original poster who said “more useful”, so why did you change it?
You vote with your feet. If you can only follow the world would be exactly as simple as you make it out to be.
If you write things for your own website you would make more of an effort and it would ideally find an audience that enjoys your world view or insights into your topics.
It would be great to lure you into that experience. HN is a terrible dating agency. Gathering down votes here is the opposite of making friends. It is however great for discovering authors like Henry.
He could have spend his time complaining on x how bad it is.
If you’re arguing that there are different ways of being better than your argument falls even further apart since you might choose a worse option because it is better in some way…
No, this is not at all a given. There could be switching costs that cause people to stay on a product that is actually worse. Users also simply might be unaware of alternatives or that they are better. It's not hard to imagine any number of other reasons why in our imperfect world there is not perfectly elastic competition.
Correct. When I spend more time in the bar and fewer time at work and with my family then this is a sign that the bar is more useful and better for me than work and family.
When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much every freedom that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to drugs, it scares me quite a lot.
I think the arguments you're currently having with people come down to: To what extent do I control what I myself do?
People have a tendency to push blame to external forces rather than take responsibility for their own actions. But personal responsibility cannot be the full story, because (almost) everyone acknowledges that drug addiction is something over which people have starkly reduced control.
So the question remains: What about other things "in the middle" like social media or porn "addiction"? Is it the fault of the person, the external force (which you must admit is consciously organised with the goal in mind of promoting the addictive behaviour, since their bottom line depends on it), or some mixture?
It’s absolutely not the case that people are good enough in general at optimising their time and lives that the things they spend the most time on are the “best” they could have done.
Most people will readily admit to this, especially when it comes to the internet, and it’s well documented that many people are not happy with how much time they spend on the internet or how it impacts their lives.
> You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.
Your logic seems to be wanting.
I choose to spend more time at work than on vacation. Do you think I like it better, or can you imagine one reason explaining why I work?
I'm sympathetic to that view, but I'm also aware of a particular way it doesn't explain the world. Often I make local choices that I enjoy while nonetheless regretting them later. Text social networks are the most common way this happens to me. But the other common failure mode was with food.
Without the retatrutide dose I'm on I frequently consume large amounts of food. I love apples, and blueberries, and chicken and rice. I can easily eat an entire Costco bag of Envy Apples at a stretch. Inevitably, I regret this once I have exited my fugue state of food consumption. So why do I do it? My behaviour on retatrutide is far superior at getting me both total content and joy (in the sense of area-under-the-curve rather than point-in-time).
This concept has been explored for a long time[0]. The earliest documented I know of is the concept of Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia from the Greek philosophers. But I think any notion of utility must build in the notion of regret and perhaps the bicameral mind and perhaps also the notion of non-rationality. My utility functions for the things I do are not time-translation invariant, therefore I think any model that optimizes for greater content and greater joy must necessarily involve temporally non-local terms. I don't yet have a strong model of this.
But we know this is common to many mental disorders. Part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an interruption of some mental pattern. My wife and I have a game we find amusing to play when we want to overrule the other's temporally local preferences: we challenge the other to a game of rock-paper-scissors to see whether the countermanding applies. When she exercises it, I frequently find that even if I win the momentary desire has passed.
tl;dr: Utility functions have different values depending on the temporal stride they take
0: Recently, Elon Musk claimed that the aim for Twitter should be "unregretted user minutes". Sadly, despite this stated aim, I found that his changes decreased these and increased regret so I had to stop using his platform. I agree with the notion of maximizing (value - regret) expressed in some abstract form, however.
Except social media feeds are designed to addict. A smoker will spend their time smoking instead of not smoking. Does that mean that smoking is good? Why else would they do it, if not smoking was better? It's not that simple. When we blame the users, we forget tech monopolies are spending billions to engineer systems which are stealing our time.
When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much everything that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to gambling, it scares me quite a lot.
Nah, no bans. People should be free to spend their money and time as they please, but let's not pretend that 2000 calories of M&Ms a day is a healthy diet, either.
Your comparison may be apt for Tiktok. The OP talks about the Internet. Researching, learning, communicating, paying, shopping, entertaining, via the Internet, have steadily increased.
Year over year, we eat more junk food and get more overweight than the previous year. This demonstrates that junk food and fat are becoming increasingly useful and beneficial.
Chrome apparently has a minimum memory requirement of 4GB, so you'd need to shrink it down to one-one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth its size to squeeze it into the PS2's 32MB of RAM.
Macromedia did this when saving Fireworks files into PNG.
Also, Adobe saves AI files into a PDF (every AI file is a PDF file), and Photoshop can save PSD files into TIFF files (people wonder why these TIFFs have several layers in Photoshop, but just one layer in all other software).
> Macromedia did this when saving Fireworks files into PNG.
I forgot about this..
Fireworks was my favorite image editor, I don't know that I've ever found one I love as much as I loved Fireworks. I'm not a graphics guy, but Fireworks was just fantastic.
BTW. I am the author of https://www.photopea.com , which is the only software that can open Fireworks files today :D If you have any files, try to open theim (it runs instantly in your browser).
You’re doing god’s work here, thanks for your service! I use photopea all the time. Probably the most impressive web app I’ve seen in terms of performance.
Proud paid Photopea user here. I can't understand how you guys overcame my mountain of incredulity but you have saved my ass so much. I was literally looking into dual booting before I found your product.
It reminds me people who research "colorizing grayscale photos", which do not exist anymore either (if you want a color photo of someone you met in your life, there probably exists a color photo of that person).
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