Re:XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought
by 8note on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @03:38AM
(#25743961)
Siri and alexa? You tell it what to do in pretty darned close to human language
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Good answer! (but I prefer typing language with a keyboard, instead of saying it out loud, as I'm not a native English speaker and it feels very unnatural to me).
Yet, is it possible to use siri or alexa for all your computing needs? Can you copy files around, convert a few images from tiff to jpg, download, compile and set up a nginx web server, hack a bit the code of the server and recompile, etc.? Because I can do all of that from the comfort of my "obsolete" command line.
Re:XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought
by checkyoursudo on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @04:22AM
(#25744289)
I would love the option of being able to tell my computer to do things like this some day.
But you already have this option, it's called "xterm + bash"
Re:XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought
by checkyoursudo on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @06:25AM
(#25745403)
By speaking, not typing.
I use my terminal and shell all day. :P
Human-Computer Interfaces have different needs from Human-Human interaction, in particular they need to be unambiguous (which the natural language isn't), very precise and concise.
For these reasons Siri and Alexa would be terrible to perform tasks which would be very quick in a shell. Also Siri and Alexa are not local and not privacy respecting.
Re:XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought
by selfhoster11 on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @07:44AM
(#25746079)
They are very imprecise, and they cannot fit on your desk. The device is just a speaker, but the actual computer is in a data center elsewhere.
This is a great example, but is still horribly limited in functionality. I use my Google home constantly, but I've built a mental model of its limitations and am still frustrated by the "latency" involved when my model assumes it can do something it can't.
Hopefully we're getting there though!