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- Hacker News
- >Sorry, I can't do that.
'Modern' Z-Machine games (v5 version compared to the original v3 one from Infocom) will allow you to do that and far more. By 'modern' I meant from the early 90's and up. Even more with v8 games.
>This was also why people hated operating systems like MS-DOS, and why even all the Linux users reading this right now are doing so in a graphical user interface.
The original v3 Z Machine parser (raw one) was pretty much limited compared to the v5 one. Even more with against the games made with Inform6 and the Inform6 English library targetting the v5 version.
Go try yourself. Original Zork from MIT (Dungeon) converted into a v5 ZMachine game:
https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fifarchive.org%2Fif-...
Spot the differences. For instance, you could both say 'take the rock' and, later, say 'drop it'.
Now, v5 games are from late 80's/early 90's. There's Curses, Jigsaw, Spider and Web ... v8 games are like Anchorhead, pretty advanced for its time:>take mat Taken. >drop it Dropped. >take the mat Taken. >drop mat Dropped. >open mailbox You open the mailbox, revealing a small leaflet. >take leaftlet You can't see any such thing. >take leaflet Taken. >drop it Dropped.https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7
You can either download the Z8 file and play it with Frotz (Linux/BSD), WinFrotz, or Lectrote under Android and anything else. Also, online with the web interpreter.
Now, the 'excuses' about the terseness of the original Z3 parser are now nearly void; because with Puny Inform a lot of Z3 targetting games (for 8086 DOS PC's, C64's, Spectrums, MSX'...) have a slightly improved parser against the original Zork game.
by anthk - This and the new device that OpenAI is working on is more of a general strategy to make a bigger moat by having more of an ecosystem so that people will keep their subscriptions and also get pro.
- Atlas strategy:
- Atlas slurps the web to get more training data, bypassing Reddit blocks, Cloudflare blocks, paywalls, etc. It probably enriches the data with additional user signals that are useful.
- Atlas is an attempt to build a sticky product that users won't switch away from. An LLM or image model doesn't really have sticky attachment, but if it starts storing all of your history and data, the switching costs could become immense. (Assuming it actually provides value and isn't a gimmick.)
- Build pillars of an interconnected platform. Key "panes of glass" for digital lives, commerce, sales intent, etc. in the platformization strategy. The hardware play, the social network play -- OpenAI is trying to mint itself as a new "Mag 7", and Atlas could be a major piece in the puzzle.
- Eat into precious Google revenue. Every Atlas user is a decrease in Google search/ads revenue.
by echelon - Which hopefully will keep it free of ads (even for free users) that destroyed the current ad-riddled web.by ElijahLynn
- Wow! Amazing post! You really nailed the complexities of AI browsers in ways that most people don't think about. I think there's also a doom paradox where if more people search with AI, this disincentives people from posting on their own blog and websites where incentives are usually ads could help support them. If AI is crawling and then spitting back information from your blog (you get no revenue), is there a point to post at all?by adas4044
- The point to posting anything is to share with your fellow kind new knowledge that lifts them, entertains them, or teaches them.
If you post for ad revenue, I truly feel sorry for you. How sad.
by survirtual - One possibility I like to imagine is a future where knowledge sources are used kind of like tools, i.e. the model never uses any preexisting knowledge from its training data (beyond what’s necessary to be fluent in English, coherent, logical, etc.), a “blank” intelligent being, tabula rasa. And for answering questions it uses various sources dynamically, like an agent would use tools.
I think this will let models be much smaller (and cheaper), but it would also enable a mechanism for monetizing knowledge. This would make knowledge sharing profitable.
For example, a user asks a question, the model asks knowledge sources if they have relevant information and how much it costs (maybe some other metadata like perceived relevance or quality or whatever), and then it decides (dynamically) which source(s) to use in order to compile an answer (decision could be based on past user feedback, similarly to PageRank).
One issue is that this incentivizes content users want to hear versus content they don’t want to hear but is true. But this is a problem we already have, long before AI or even the internet.
by brap - I can't speak to the particular browser application. I haven't installed it and probably never will, but the language around text interfaces makes the OP sound... uninformed.
Graphical applications can be more beautiful and discoverable, but they limit the user to only actions the authors have implemented and deployed.
Text applications are far more composable and expressive, but they can be extremely difficult to discover and learn.
We didn't abandon the shell or text interfaces. Many of us happily live in text all day every day.
There are many tasks that suffer little by being limited and benefit enormously by being discoverable. These are mostly graphical now.
There are many tasks that do not benefit much by spatial orientation and are a nightmare when needlessly constrained. These tasks benefit enormously by being more expressive and composable. These are still often implemented in text.
The dream is to find a new balance between these two modes and our recent advances open up new territory for exploring where they converge and diverge.
- Anil is an old-school technologist. He helped Movable Type which was arguably the first blogging CMS. He also worked at Fastly and Glitch. I'm sure he knows how CLIs work and what they're good for. And surely no one here is suggesting that for 99% of normie users that they'd be comfortable with CLI just because it's good at piping one command output to another. Even those of us who are proficient use GUIs more often.by tootie
- Am I the only one that interpreted OP in a way that they weren't opposed to neither CLIs, TUIs, nor GUIs at all? The topic wasn't "textual interface VS graphical interface", but "undocumented/natural language VS documented/query language" for navigating the internet.
In addition to the analogy of the textual interface used in Zork, we could say that it'd be like interacting with any REST API without knowledge about its specification - guessing endpoints, methods, and parameters while assuming best practices (of "natural-ness" kind). Do we really want to explore an API like that, through naive hacking? Does a natural language wrapper make this hacking any better? It can make it more fun as it breaks patterns, sure, but is that really what we want?
by whilenot-dev - > And it would go on like this for hours while you tried in vain to guess what the hell it wanted you to type, or you discovered the outdoors, whichever came first.
The part about Zork doesn't make sense to me. As I understand it text based adventure games are actually quite lenient with the input you can give, multiple options for the same action. Additionally certain keywords are "industry standard" in the same way that you walk using "wasd" in FPS games, so much that it became the title of the documentary "get lamp". Due to the players perceived knowledge of similar mechanics in other games you can even ague that providing these familiar commands is part of the game design.
It seems to me that the author never played a text based adventure game and is jut echoing whatever he heard. Projects like 1964's ELIZA prove that text based interfaces have been able to feel natural for a long time.
Text has a high information density, but natural language is a notoriously bad interface for certain things. Like giving commands, therefore we invented command lines with different syntax and programming languages for instructing computers what to do.
by trashb - > As I understand it
You should actually try and play zork and report back.
by empath75 - I understood this to be a comment on the fact that a text interface has a lower affordance than a graphical interface. A command line doesnt suggest what you can do in the way a graphical interface can.So even if you have industry standard keywords, a user has to know/learn them. I see it as similar to the buttons versus screens debate in car interfaces.by wiedelphine
Indeed. And this makes his judgmental pettiness about people who like these games all the shittier for it. I don't know why extremely-online bloggers think unrequited snark is a glide path to being funny.It seems to me that the author never played a text based adventure game and is jut echoing whatever he heardby mpalmer- Have you actually played these games? I put in some hours on Hitchhikers Guide, and It was anything but natural. Maybe once you get far enough in the game and learn the language that is effective it gets easier, but I never got there. You wake up in the dark and have to figure out how to even turn on the light. Then you have to do a series of actions in very specific order before you can get out of your bedroom.
Figuring it all out is part of the fun, but outside the context of a game it would be maddening.
As for Eliza, she mostly just repeats back the last thing you said as a question. “My dog has fleas.” “How does your dog having fleas make you feel?”
- Hi - Pranav from the ChatGPT Atlas team here. Appreciate the discussion and feedback here. Just wanted to correct a few specifics so there’s no confusion:
- We have tried to make Atlas a great way to browse the open web, and invested heavily in the search experience as we covered in the livestream. When I test typing “taylor swift" into Atlas I see links to the website in the autocomplete carousel, at the top of the results page, in inline citations within chat, and in the Search tab. We’re also working on making these faster and more prominent when we’re sure you want a link, for ex. you’ll see a large vertical list of links at the top of the chat response when you type in something like “gmail”. - Browser memories are opt-in, and by default we don’t train on the contents of pages you browse—even when memories are enabled. Keeping the Ask ChatGPT sidebar open has no bearing on what gets sent to us. Webpages are clearly displayed as attachments you can disable in the chat, and only sent to us when you submit the prompts. - Ask ChatGPT and Agent mode are not workarounds to user or publisher training settings. Even if a user has training enabled, we will still respect publisher preferences to block GPTBot in their robots.txt and do not train on that content.
by pranavvishnu - This is akin to saying "We are not evil, today"by rgun
- The Atlas implementation isn't great, but I'll pick something that tries to represent my interests every time. The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance. Users need something working on their behalf to mine through the garbage to pull out the useful bits. An AI browser is the next logical step after uBlock.by xnx
- Gopher. Gemini (the protocol not the AI). IRC.by bandrami
- Ublock Origin allows me to control what I see while that information is still in its original context so that I can take that into account when doing research, making decisions, etc.
But isn't this, instead, letting a third party strip that context away and give it its own context so that you can't make those choices and decisions properly? Information without context is, to me, nearly worthless.
And even if you believe they are neutral parties and have your own interests at heart (which, quite frankly, I think is naive), once companies like that know everything about you, you don't think they'll abuse that knowledge?
by garciansmith - The next logical step after Ublock is to have a succession structure in place if Raymond Hill or the maintainers of the various blocklists it's based on, decide they don't want to work on it anymore.by rchaud
- So you believe this browser is attempting to represent your interests, and work on your behalf?by monooso
- One reason I now often go to ChatGPT instead of many Google queries is that the experience is ads free, quick and responsive.
That said, don't be lured, you know they're already working on ways to put ads and trackers and what not inside ChatGPT and Atlas, those 20$ sound won't pay enough to recoup all that investment and cost and maximize profits.
So I think we should be careful what we wish for here.
by didibus - >> The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance
It feels like $10 / month would be sufficient to solve this problem. Yet, we've all insisted that everything must be free.
by osigurdson - Completely agree. Consumers won’t pay for anything online, which means every business model is user-hostile. Use the web for five minutes without an ad blocker and it’s obvious.
Atlas may not be the solution but I love the idea of an LLM that sits between me and the dreck that is today’s web.
by andrewmutz - It seems naive to expect a product by a company that desperately needs a lot of revenue to cover even a tiny part of investor money that it burned—where said product offers unprecedented opportunity to productize users in ways never possible before, and said company has previously demonstrated its disregard for ethics—to represent user’s interests.
It’s unlikely LLM operators can break even by charging per use, and it should be expected that they’ll race to capture the market by offering “free” products that in reality are ad serving machines, a time-tested business model that has served Meta and friends very well. The fact that Atlas browser is (and they don’t even hide it) a way to work around usage limits of ChatGPT should ring alarm bells.
by strogonoff - >We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason
No we didnt.
by protocolture - I think that take is pretty out of touch since "command-line" interfaces are seeing a massive resurgence now that we have LLMs.by imtringued
- I mean, it's clear he means for the majority of users and OSes... not the HN crowd specifically.
- Hi, sorry for the unrelated reply, but I wanted to ask you about a comment you made 6months back about archiving Gamasutra posts. I came across it while searching HN for "gamasutra".
I'd bookmarked a lot of Gamasutra articles over the years and am kinda bummed out that I can't find any of them now that the site has shifted. You mentioned having a collection of their essays? Is there any way to share or access them?
by instagraham