The linked SO page is a page of complete speculation.
History isn't just a bunch of logical thought exercises, it's an assembling of documentation and evidence.
As far as I can see, there is no contemporaneous documentation claiming intentionality so the question remains unanswered.
A smoking gun would be a file with a name like cursor.bitmap or some code like "declare cursor_default = [ [ 1, 0 ... ] ];" from a major source (ms/xerox/apple) say, pre-1988 or so, with some comment above it explaining the rationale of why that cursor style in particular. I'd even accept a more minor source like Acorn, Digital Research, Quarterdeck, NeWS, VisiOn or MIT Athena (X).
Finding something that talks about say, lightpens and then defends the mouse cursor style in that way is working backwards from a hypothesis. It's weak and doesn't preclude other possibilities. Let's be rigorous and get it right.
The Inside Macintosh pages from 1985 I cited above may be what you're looking for.
Especially page 158 (I-146).
It doesn't give a longwinded rationale of why you need an X/Y hotspot offset, it does much better than that. It shows you several cursors with their hotspots, so you can see why a hotspot is needed. And it lists the data structure to support it.
(i suspect xerox mouse cursors always had variable hotspot coordinates because it's, what, six microseconds extra in the screen update to subtract them? and i think smalltalk-76 mouse cursors have hotspots. but 01988 or even 01985 is way too late)
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/52336/why-is-the-mous...
The next question is why you need a white outline around the black arrow.
This is easy to answer: if you didn't do that, what would the black arrow look like against a black background?
A lot of the accessibility features are actually neat even to those without the need for them.
My assumption (not having an old Mac or documentation to confirm it...) is that the tip of the cursor had to be at (1, 1) to allow for a pixel's worth of mask around the outer edge of the tip.
There's an amazing video by Posy documenting mouse cursor history, and even provides his own cursor pack:
Because laymen massively outnumber experts, the layman vote always overwhelms the informed one, so the reaction of people who don’t know the subject is the only thing that matters. Truth only seems to matter because most subjects either can be somewhat intuited by non-experts, or are in a niche that you’re not, so “layman plausibility” means your reaction, too. But the true nature of the dialog reveals itself as soon as people talk about something you’re an expert on.
Answers like this aren’t a bug in a truth machine, they’re a plausibility machine working as designed.
Then you get crap where the experts, even when they agree, "dumb it down" for the crowds. This leads the masses who actually do pay attention to experts to think the wrong ideas are truth.
> After all, what has been more important to a human — evolutionarily: the truth or social access?
I don't think this is required for people to be very wrong. Caring about the truth can easily lead to assuming other people who speak authoritatively know what they're talking about, or to speaking authoritatively yourself when you think you're right.
The only way you might have it work is if random people were shown random posts from random topics, and asked to vote on them. And the ranking was based upon that feedback. There's problems there as well, but probably far fewer than in the current system.
Massively aggravated by "sorting by top" defaults for both original posts and separately for the comments on those posts.
Yes, as long as the truth is the most significant systematic influence on beliefs, any reasonable method of aggregrate of belief will converge on the truth with sufficient numbers.
Unfortunately, the required condition for convergence on the truth is often not true, and there is no way of reliably determining when it is true other than determining the truth independently and determining if belief converges on it.
Significant effects on belief about facts from cognitive/perceptual biases, especially where the fact is not something easily observable like “is it raining at this instant where you are standing” are not rare, and these biases often align for similarly situated individuals.
Hmmm ... that doesn't seem to match what actually happens. After false beliefs holding back humanity for its entire history, science came along and produced actual, working, truth. And science is the opposite of what you say: The crowds don't matter, only the facts. Newton was not a crowd, and the crowds didn't produce anything remotely as true and valuable for all those years. The crowds persecuted Galileo (and many others).
"In matters of science, the authority of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one single person." - attributed to Galileo
As someone pointed out, I think here on HN, the intuition of the crowds sucks. If it was any good, we'd have had the right physics in 5,000 BCE not starting in the 17th century.
> the intuition of the crowds sucks. If it was any good, we'd have had the right physics in 5,000 BCE not starting in the 17th century.
Eh. People used to stay in their lane. Only these days can you get a city person voting on proper farming techniques.
> Newton was ... not a scientist.
That has a meaning, and its false. Whatever you personally think of it, Newton was a scientist. I don't love a wild goose chase.
I still don't understand why people view Linnaeus' classification as scientific though. I guess maybe because it functioned as a hypothesis of common descent later on?
Newton was a mathematician, scientist, alchemist, theologian (though, by the view of most Christians at the time and now, quite a heterodox one), and high government official that conducted undercover investigations personally. People can sometimes do more than one thing, and Newton did...a lot.
LLMs are to human mimics what AGI will be to human creators/innovators (and then some of course).
We are GIs, at least 98%+, LLM like behavior may exist in our cognitive repertoire, but we certainly aren't limited to it. Can an LLM drive locomotion?
I never understood AGI as generating sui generis ideas as a requirement. I thought that AGIs could also be uncreative mimics.
Can't see any principled reason it couldn't, if it was a big enough, sufficiently trained one, running on fast-enough hardware, if you represent the sensor data in its token vocabulary, and have the reverse for control outputs.
Quite probably not the most efficient way to drive locomotion, though.
> I never understood AGI as generating sui generis ideas as a requirement.
Creativity is among the applications of intelligence that I would deem included in the "G" in AGI; OTOH, like most proposed binary categories, its probably more useful to view generality as a matter of degree than a crisp binary attribute.
If it's been trained to, but I'm not sure that's been the focus recently, though I think some research has been done into it. Turns out prediction engines with attention are useful for more than just predicting text; our bodies and brains work on learned assumptions and behaviours.
But certainly I imagine transformer + attention can = learning to walk/perform task. LLM specifically no...because it's trained on language and not motion, it's all in the name. But even then perhaps motion can be turned into language (non English tokens tho) & an LLM still used, I know people are working on funky stuff like that as well.
To lend credence to this idea, I reflexively upvoted you despite not having read any experts on this voting phenomenon.
And, I hate it. If not used appropriately, it's an automated output from left side on the Dunning-Kruger. Bullshit asymmetry has gotten more skewed, and it's tiresome.
I’m using Miqu 70B Q4 and it immediately replaced Mixstral 8x7B Q5 for me
I screen almost all of my responses in relationships through it, with deep context on why its modifying things, total paradigm shifts like a therapist is showing me more effective conversation styles. I wasn't seen as having low emotional intelligence to begin with and the results have been great.
Translations
Coding syntax
Entire code bases
Nuanced legal aspects of industries (deep conversations about obscure drug and treatment pricing by region and billing method, which matched reality)
More stuff about different kinds of insurance and how to navigate insurance brokers, to great effect
Whenever a contractor or professional outside of my knowledge domain gives me a word salad, I make a note of what they said verbatim and have the LLM translate that for me. Then I come back to them with informed responses they cant bullshit around. I got my HVAC fixed by pointing out what they are probably missing, and they were previously too prideful to notice or consider or admit. Got a payment coming from my landlord for this because they caused my energy bill to be higher.
Large document analyses, which I thought was the final boss. I’m only giving these things an 8,000 token context window and things have been great and coherent
And, if you are wrong about what you said it was wrong about, it'll still almost always say how right you are.
they all lean to be agreeable out the box, but the aforementioned two will stick to their guns harder and tell you that you're wrong. you have to ask all of them to take the other side for more insight.
with ChatGPT4, for example, I posted a conversation where I felt that a woman I was dating gave a response to my followup that was way negative and way out of left field. It told me she had a disproportionally negative response to a benign text. Then in another session I posted my post and told it to predict her response, and it predicted a variety of responses some of which were like the woman's and this time it told me why. This means it was being too agreeable and affirming my feelings the first time, unprompted, while actually giving insight in the second session without knowing there was an existing reaction to navigate.
(Analogous to how we have to patch our speech to never blame the victim even though we know there are measures they could have taken to mitigate that scenario. While if the same person asks in advance we would give them advice.)
Dumbfounded that its predictive qualities were better than its affirmation-by-default trait, I told it to act like the woman's friends who have no context of me if they saw my message, I told it to act like redditors on /r/relationship_advice responding to the woman who similarly have no context beyond what OP feels. you have to create outside observers, and you can run all of these alternate realities within 3 minutes. It will begin crafting responses that break the conversation molds you might be more familiar with and get better results, but if all that sounds too much, you can simply tell it to disagree with you.
in LM Studio you can modify the system prompt and change the temperament
LLMs are great here. My concerns are mostly that its ability for factual accuracy is confused with its own expressed confidence. Assessment of one's owns abilities is usually optimistic in humans. LLMs just model that language. Facts are baked in as linguistic patterns, rather than a knowledge machine. And, you can often invert its answer to a scary degree.
There was recently an article on Forbes, where the journalistic "source" was the output of Bard.
The most terrifying part about LLMs to me, is not that it's sometimes wrong. But that it's often enough right and excels at certain stuff, that we use it as a source of knowledge. It really isn't.
On the other hand, the creative part, or dialogues regarding creative processes. It's mind bogglingly amazing.
So people can state absolute absurdities and have people agree.
That Reddit mission statement.
Let me guess: Tax brackets? That's the one thing that most regular workers in the US just don't seem to understand (and arguably, many people knowingly spread falsehoods to further some agenda).
$100 isn’t nothing but it’s not everything either.
You may think this situation is still irrational, that the other person is being irrational. But again, there are many life situations out there. Perhaps they have lived in situations where they had to fight for what they needed. Perhaps they lived with an earner who would spend their money on drugs if it wasn't taken away, and yet if the non-earner saved it up themselves, the earner would find it and spend it.
The supposedly rational thing may depend on everyone around you to also be rational, and everyone around them, etc. And given that we are human, and humans are not fully rational...
I wouldn't say this is a better strategy, but you can definitely min/max this even if your income is not stable by extrapolating out your expected income and expected witholding a few times a year and adjusting your W-4 based on your calculations.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/part-31#p-31.3121(a)(1...
Fill it out correctly and your employers will do the right thing.
Where N is some value between like .... 30 and 90? I forget.
But they only pay that if they don’t return it that year (for normal W-2 employees).
Last time I looked, you needed to be in a higher tax bracket than I was to make Muni bonds worth it, in part because my state (WA) does not have income tax. Something like the 35% bracket.
And anyway, my investment strategy is not long bonds at this point in my life.
> The phenomenon of people trusting newspapers for topics which they are not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they are knowledgeable about.
"Happy birthday dear grandma, happy birthday to youuuu"
"Grandma's birthday was YESTERDAY you fuckin' liars!"
> "My friend the tax accountant gets downvoted for clarifying how taxes actually work."
> "My wife the linguist gets downvotes for explaining no that's not how language works."
A casual chat interrupted by tax pedantry and grammar naziing. I have no idea why people wouldn't want that. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Edit: Also grammar nazi'ing has little to do with linguistics and more to do with being a jerk...usually.
Sometimes that is because experts just say "I am an expert so trust me" without proper explanations or links to explanations or evidence.
It's really a great strength of human species. We may not exceed animals in any other quality, except for persistence hunting, but we are exceptional at copying the behavior of other individuals of our species without considering whether it's sensible or not. Even monkeys don't do this as much as humans.
in my experience thats true, its less familiar
I mean just look to politics, that already explains enough!
It's no surprise that people who lack expertise will downvote and actual expert. I see it happen every day when people try to be the smartest person in the meeting or just simply cannot allow anyone to think they are wrong.
The scary part is that you will likely be saying it again in another ten years and again and then you’ll die as “that weird cursor offset obsessed fanatic”.
Perhaps it's because cursors have a one pixel wide black border around them to enhance contrast, but users associate the cursor's position with the first bit of white (or color) at the tip. (0,0) is colored black for a typical cursor.
Edit: ninja'ed further down.
the first macintosh was very late to the party, there had already been GUI cursors for about a decade at PARC, and cursor styles had settled down to some standards.
in the early days of GUI cursors on relatively low resolution displays (by today's standards), an important issue was to reduce the amount of calculation and squinting the human had to do to identify the hotspot so you could accurately select/swipe what you wanted to. the tilted arrow cursor points right at its hotspot quite effectively even if the tip pixel is blurred, as does the i-beam (whose vertical offset is not as important to know accurately) the five fingered hand for moving bulk selections also does not require accurate placement, although I think the hotspot is at the end of a finger.
early GUIs let you edit your own cursors and hotspots.
If you then design your cursor to be nice and pointy so it doesn't obscure the thing you're trying to click too much you end up with two angles where if you bisect them you're no longer at an integer ratio angle. So some fudging for the cursor tail is required.
Of course these days cursors are generally high resolution vector art, so none of the integer ratio angle concerns apply, but I assume most vector cursors originally got traced from their pixel predecessors.
This is all from memory and I was quite young back when any of this was relevant, so caveat emptor.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/52349/43259
The problem with this idea is that the arrow pointer was never the only cursor. On the first Macintosh, there were many others including the text I-beam and a couple of kinds of crosshairs. And you could define any cursor of your own by providing its bitmap and transparency mask and the (X,Y) hotspot offset.
You can see some of these cursors in the original Inside Macintosh Volume I and also in previous works from PARC.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230114223619/https://vintageap...
Page 50 of the PDF (page I-38 of the document) shows some sample cursors.
Page 158 of the PDF (page I-146 of the document) has the pixel detail for several cursors and their hotspots.
Fun fact! The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not at (0,0) but was (1,1).
Can anyone explain why? I think I used to know, but it has long since escaped my memory and I would appreciate a refresher.
This page also has the definition of the Cursor structure:
Point is defined on page I-139 and is more or less what you would expect, a pair of vertical and horizontal coordinates.To be clear, the scary part is not that someone came up with the idea that (0,0) saved two instructions. In fact, the notion came up elsewhere in this HN discussion. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, until you realize that there are many cursor shapes that require different hotspots.
The scary part is that 188 people upvoted this answer!