The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

6 comments

• s3p 17 minutes ago
  I wish it talked more about how the machine actually worked. It seemed pretty simplistic and glossed over most of the details .
• NopIdoN 1 hour ago
  I thought this was going to be about Nikola Tesla's vibration machine that made Clemens shit himself
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  • Mistletoe 1 hour ago
    That didn’t ruin his life, merely his shorts.
• edoceo 39 minutes ago
  Classic angel investor mistake, too much allocated to one investment. Gotta diversify. More smaller checks.
• kazinator 8 minutes ago
  [delayed]
• Mistletoe 1 hour ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paige_Compositor
• cubefox 13 minutes ago
  For some reason the author's proposed lessons don't acknowledge the current elephant in the room.

  > 2) Society uptake of transformative inventions is almost always slower than their proponents expect.

  ... except for LLMs.

  > 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor.

  ... except for LLMs.