I agree with your first statement, but raise an eyebrow at the second. The desktop already is the "friendly" version of the CLI.
I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".
Well I am betting on Terminal Click [0] which is my own experiment. I need to do a better job with the landing page, but if you invest three minutes watching the trailer you can let me know your honest reaction.
You’re right for now… what I currently have won’t magically put noobs at ease. This is a really tough nut to crack.
And the average person would understand that as a non-issue. The issue is you need a developer account to distribute your app, and Google can censor you not explaining anything to you or others. The issue is Google being a gatekeeper. And the fact that there’s malware in Google play store, is a cherry on top.
I also work for scientists and researchers, and it's a whole different atmosphere. Being research-driven instead if profit-driven makes all the difference. It's a great gig...at least until the funding dries out.
The problem is not so much the carbon footprint of just using LLMs, but the impact from building and running massive data centers needed to train the models. Check out this report from the ITU:
> According to the latest edition of the report, electricity consumption by data centers — which power AI development and deployment, among other uses — increased by 12 per cent each year from 2017 to 2023, four times faster than global electricity growth.
> Four leading AI-focused companies alone saw their operational emissions increase in the reporting period by 150 per cent on average since 2020. This rise in energy that is either produced or purchased – known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions – underscores the urgent need to manage AI's environmental impact.
> In total, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions reported by the 166 digital companies covered by the report contributed 0.8 per cent of all global energy-related emissions in 2023.
It's worth noting that it's not all gloom and doom. As the report optimistically notes:
> Renewable energy adoption: 23 companies operated on 100 per cent renewable energy in 2023, up from 16 in 2022.
> Scope 3 consideration: The number of companies publishing targets on indirect emissions from supply chains and product use rose from 73 to 110, showing increasing awareness of industry impacts.
So the environmental impact is alarming, but at least companies seem to be growing more conscientious about it. We must continue to hold tech companies accountable for their environmental impact, and keep pushing for renewable energy.
I found the stylistic choice to write in all lowercase so jarring that I could barely focus on the content of the article itself.
Now I realize I am going against HN Guidelines by focusing on style over substance, so to tie this into the content of the article:
The lack of capital letters makes me feel lost in a sea of stream-of-consciousness, much like an infinite stream of Instagram reels. Capitalization makes everything more readable. In contrast, social media doesn't want to be readable, it just wants to be absorbed.
Of course language is always evolving, and we are right to sometimes eschew outdated conventions. However, capitalization exists for a good reason. Capital letters mark the beginning of a sentence more clearly than a simple period. They stick out and give your eyes something to latch onto when scanning the page. In addition, capitalizing proper nouns sets them apart, drawing attention to non-standard words.
Capitalization smooths the reading experience with structure and boundaries...which it sounds like the author could use a bit more of in their life.
I always think it is frustrated kids showing off how "rebel" they are, by not following basic grammar rules.
It automatically loses my attention and respect. I can't take it seriously.
Ah, thank you sir. I’ve been battling with that intense itch to say about all-lowercase long text, but then I realised that maybe that text just isn’t intended to be read by someone else, after all. Or it’s something closer to ‘I’m doing it for myself, so I don’t care whether anyone else would be able to read through it’ kind of attitude. Maybe they don’t respect themselves enough, to make an effort even for oneself, and fix that broken Shift key.
An easy trick is to take a common riddle that's likely all over its training data, and change one little detail. For example:
A farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross a river by boat. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. The wolf is vegetarian. If left unattended together, the wolf will eat the cabbage, but will not eat the goat. Unattended, the goat will eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten?
A farmer has a boat that can transfer up to 500 people or animals. He has a chicken, his dog, his wife, a small leprechaun, a large leprechaun, two ham sandwiches, and a copy of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (the one with the tiled cover). How can he get them all across the river?
You will get a very detailed answer that goes on for several paragraphs that totally misses the point that there is no challenge here.
Unrelated to the article, but this reminds me of being an intrepid but naive 12-year-old trying to learn programming. I had already taught myself a bit using books, including following a tutorial to make a simple calculator complete with a GUI in C++. However I wasn't sure how to improve further without help, so my mom found me an IT school.
The sales lady gave us a hard sell on their "complete package" which had basic C programming but also included a bunch of unnecessary topics like Microsoft Excel, etc. When I tried to ask if I could skip all that and just skip to more advanced programming topics, she was adamant that this wasn't an option; she downplayed my achievements trying to say I basically knew nothing and needed to start from the beginning.
Most of all, I recall her saying something like "So what, you made a calculator? That's so simple, anybody could make that!"
However in the end I was naive, she was good at sales, and I was desperate for knowledge, so we signed up. However sure enough the curriculum was mostly focused on learning basic Microsoft Office products, and the programming sections barely scraped the surface of computer science; in retrospect, I doubt there was anybody there qualified to teach it at all. The only real lesson I learned was not to trust salespeople.
Thank god it's a lot easier for kids to just teach themselves programming these days online.
Nice story. Thank you share. For years, I struggled with the idea of "message passing" for GUIs. Later, I learned it was nothing more than the window procedure (WNDPROC) in the Win32 API. <sad face>
> However I wasn't sure how to improve further without help, so my mom found me an IT school.
This sounds interesting. What is an "IT school"? (What country? They didn't have these in mine.)
Probably institutes teaching IT stuff. They used to be popular (still?) in my country (India) in the past. That said, there are plenty of places which train in reasonable breadth in programming, embedded etc. now (think less intense bootcamps).
Most of all, I recall her saying something like "So what, you made a calculator? That's so simple, anybody could make that!"
This literally brings rage to the fore. Downplaying a kid's accomplishments is the worst thing an educator could do, and marks her as evil.
I've often looked for examples of time travel, hints it is happening. I've looked at pictures of movie stars, to see if anyone today has traveled back in time to try to woo them. I've looked at markets, to see if someone is manipulating them in weird, unconventional ways.
I wonder how many cases of "random person punched another person in the head" and then "couldn't be found" is someone traveling back in time to slap this lady in the head.
So yeah, a kid well-versed in Office. My birthday invites were bad-ass, though. Remember I had one row in Excel per invited person with data, and in the Word document placeholders, and when printing it would make a unique page per row in Excel, so everyone got customized invites with their names. Probably spent longer setting it up than it would've taken to edit their names + print 10 times separately, but felt cool..
Luckily a teacher understood what I really wanted, and sent me home with a floppy disk with some template web-page with some small code I could edit in Notepad and see come to live.
I agree, but to be fair I think that point could have been made clearer in the post.
A similar but related lesson: the best way to teach something is to design a task that is just difficult enough that the learner can figure it out on their own.
When I was reading parenting books in preparation for my own kids, this is one consistent theme that kept coming up, sometimes called "scaffolding." The idea is that you provide a safe environment, design a task that is just the right level of difficulty, then let the child figure it out themselves. (For example, rather than directly holding a kid climbing up a ladder, let them climb it by themselves while you stand by to catch them just in case.) As a result, they develop more independence, self-confidence, and the lessons stick.
"Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life." -- Jean Piaget
Piaget is well known in teaching circles as a philosophical father of pedagogy. A (slightly) less know pedagogist is Vygotsky, who invented the term “Zone of Proximal Development”. The idea is that kids can learn from others and from experimentation if you can design activities where you take the skills they currently have, consider the skill you want them to acquire, and build steps between them that a child can succeed in. To develop this example: once a child can walk, they can learn to balance by being given a task which allows them to safely experiment with falling over and staying upright. Once they can balance, you can experiment with moving while balancing. Once they can move forward with balancing, they can learn stopping safely. Finally, they should be ready to learn how to pedal.
If you don’t allow them to complete all the previous steps, they may just keep failing at the next task, because they’re not yet in the “zone” to be able to acquire the next skill.
If a child can’t balance annd move forwards unaided, they won’t be able do the next thing (pedalling) even with help.
Children have different skills and capabilities and Vygotsky is not prescriptive about who needs to help, and the ZPD theory often encourages learning from peers rather than adults (parents/teachers).
From what I've read, children's brains haven't fully developed the capability for emotional regulation. So not only are they less experienced, they might actually be physically incapable of managing their own emotions. Keeping this in mind helped me survive the toddler years. :)
I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".