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From the article: Keichii Matsuda wrote a manifesto called "GODS". In it he describes an anaphor for augmented reality rooted in pagan animism. Unlike monotheistic Western approaches of interfacing artificial intelligence like ChatGPT or Siri, he advocates to leverage the possibility of augmented reality technologies to extend places and objects to populate the world with many different agents or "gods".

Author should read Daemon by Daniel Suarez written in 2006 that explores the idea of persistent and potentially powerful AR entities that interact with humans. It also loosely plays with the idea of AR somatic gestures acting as a mystical conduit for "primitive incantations" that have a physical affect on the real world.

Others have suggested Ra for those that find this concept compelling. Let me also recommend basically all of Karl Schroeder's work, which touches on machine intelligence in lots of ways. The steampunk Virga series has AIs which act on behalf of nature, Lady of Mazes has "votes" which are physical embodiments of political movements, and Ventus has sentient terraforming robots who no longer think as humans do.

A subject also tackled in the (oft HN recommended) https://qntm.org/ra

Reminds me of the escaped AIs of Willam Gibson's sprawl triology, as in "Count Zero" (1987) - all though they only manifest in cyberspace - VR not AR:

> (...) The man smiled at Bobby. "Count Zero," he said, "they tell us that’s your handle."

> "That’s right," Bobby managed, though it came out as a kind of croak.

> "We need to know about the Virgin, Count." The man waited.

> Bobby blinked at him.

> "Vyéj Mirak" — and the glasses went back on — ‘Our Lady, Virgin of Miracles. We know her’ — and he made a sign with his left hand— ‘as Ezili Freda."

> Bobby became aware of the fact that his mouth was open, so he closed it. The three dark faces waited. Jackie and Rhea were gone, but he hadn’t seen them leave. A kind of panic took him then, and he glanced frantically around at the strange forest of stunted trees that surrounded them. The gro-light tubes slanted at every angle, in any direction, pink-purple jackstraws suspended in a green space of leaves. No walls You couldn’t see a wall at all. The couch and the battered table sat in a sort of clearing, with a floor of raw concrete.

> "We know she came to you," the big man said, crossing his legs carefully. He adjusted a perfect trouser-crease, and a gold cufflink winked at Bobby. "We know, you understand?"

> "Two-a-Day tells me it was your first run," the other man said. "That the truth?"

> Bobby nodded.

> "Then you are chosen of Legba," the man said, again removing the empty frames," to have met Vyéj Mirak." He smiled.

> Bobby’s mouth was open again.

> "Legba," the man said, "master of roads and pathways, the loa of communication . . ."

> Two-a-Day ground his cigarette out on the scarred wood, and Bobby saw that his hand was shaking

Hey, thanks for the literature recommendations and pointer. Will definitely have a look at them.

Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer.

I guess we're bound to switch between polytheism and monotheism as technology advances. Some could say, all of this has happened before.

Sorry everyone. My hosting was not prepared for the amount of traffic while I migrate you can find the explorations on Twitter as well.

https://x.com/lukas_moro/status/1829487148078412019 https://x.com/lukas_moro/status/1838207092471050645 https://x.com/lukas_moro/status/1847299759603699906

(I work at Vercel) It seems like you possibly have a spend cap on, which would automatically pause your site when a certain amount of spend is hit. Vercel is working correctly in this case.

If you are hosting a lot of video files, I would recommend using Vercel Blob (object storage). This is a better fit for larger volume assets like images or videos, versus "fast data transfer" as you mentioned in another comment for critical assets like stylesheets or scripts.

Happy to help out if you have questions, email is lee at vercel dot com.

This is fine content for private communications with your customer but rubs me the wrong way posted here. It doesn't read to me that your customer is being negative about Vercel in any way, so to me it feels arrogant to come here and say "well actually you can't afford us."

If you feel differently, and think it's acceptable to do so, why not instead say that on the error page? "Customer has exceeded their budget. Please add additional funds."

If you don't think such messaging is appropriate, then I'm curious why you think doing it here would be?

If you want to be truly helpful to your customer, you would consider raising or temporarily uncapping their traffic as a gesture of good will.

The “deployment paused” screen is shown publicly when hard spend limits are reached for a project. These limits are configured by the user.

Spend controls aren’t necessarily about affordability, it’s often for peace of mind (similar to a fixed price server, or a disposal card with a limit).

I also don’t view them as being negative on Vercel (we likely could have alerted them better, as it seems this caught them off guard).

Their traffic isn’t capped and they can change this if they prefer. But I’m guessing there’s some large asset causing unexpected usage, which is why I offered my email. Happy to walk through it with them and figure out a path to optimize.

i think HN has a high bar for when somebody comments as a representative of their company. it's not uncommon for someone repping their company to step in with a comment like "i've temporarily added credits on your account so your post can stay up".

fwiw, i read your comment as just trying to be helpful. but sometimes there is an assumption that if you're publicly representing your company, then you're also enabled to make reasonable ad-hoc overrides as an outreach opportunity.

Is ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH the effect of this cap? If so - that's a really weird approach at blocking a website.

    > openssl version
    OpenSSL 3.4.0 22 Oct 2024 (Library: OpenSSL 3.4.0 22 Oct 2024)
    > openssl s_client -connect www.lukasmoro.com:443
    Connecting to 2a06:98c1:3120::b
    CONNECTED(00000005)
    00E167F201000000:error:0A000410:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:ssl/tls alert handshake failure:ssl/record/rec_layer_s3.c:908:SSL alert number 40

No, I am referencing the “deployment paused” page.

When the cheap static site hosting became “you have a spend cap on”…

As William Wallace once said “ they may take our servers, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!”

Fwiw I host some static html websites on a cheap ovh vps (used to be a literal core i3 kimsufi box for a couple hundred a year, it's very slightly beefier now), and have hit the front page of hn with that setup several times with no issues.

Not trying to attack anyone for their tech choices, just a little reminder that the simple solutions are still there and they are cheap and work really well :p

The blur effect on the bottom of the page makes me feel like I'm constantly about to be price walled, haha

Same with the slow unblur of gigs.

> The intricate user experience of physical paper is unmatched...

So much this. Our hands have such a disproportionate concentration of nerves compared to the rest of our body, it's a shame current tech is soley focused on visual and audio interaction (with some very minor haptics).

A piece of paper or book has texture, heft, temperature, and stiffness which our hands pick up on and interpret so effortlessly we don't even consciously notice most of the time. I want those information channels in my user experience. Leafing through paper and books has so many nice features: the weight distribution tells you about how far along you are; fingers can flip pages or between chapters with high fidelity and high feedback for tracking the context switch; earmarking or sticky notes encode metadata that's immediately available when needed and hidden otherwise, without having to navigate layers of organization; the mechanics of splaying out multiple pages on a table is effortless compared to manipulating desktop windows; we even subconsciously pick up on non-uniformities in physical layout, which helps with disambiguation---i.e. noise is information.

Don't get me wrong, the interactivity of screens is wonderful, and e-ink dose bring one tiny nicety of paper to them, but I think we've barely even begun to tap into the possibilities of computer user interfaces.

FWIW, very terse languages like APL have the very nice property that programming with pen and paper actually feels natural, and you actually see it happen organically during discussions amongst array programmers. I think our current programming paradigms may be more constrained by HCI limitations than we realize.

Neat. https://dynamicland.org/ was the first thing I though of. Glad you referenced them on the page.

Oh man that website gives me a double nostalgia vibe. First, it reminds me a lot of the old iOS skeuomorphism iBooks app. Second, it reminds me of my first website I ever created using Adobe Dreamweaver's 'slicing' functionality, where you take an image and draw boxes on the image to make that box clickable as a link to a new page

> where you take an image and draw boxes on the image to make that box clickable as a link to a new page

Sounds like image maps: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_images_imagemap.asp

Seemed like it would be interesting to read, but I slammed the back button once the butterfly (wtf), blur effect, and thin grey font on a white background overwhelmed me.

Agreed. The correct text color is the one of the titles. The paragraphs are too gray, they have not enough contrast. Place a sheet of paper from a book or a magazine side to side with that page and the text on the paper will be much easier to read 99.99% of the times. Is there any irony in that? Given the subject of the post, maybe not. It's a demonstration that hundreds of years of paper typography yield a better ergonomy than 30 years of the web.

I slammed the reader-mode button, which unfortunately killed the videos.

Not having looping/procedural animations in your articles is an accessibility feature. People with ADHD simply can't read blocks of text if there's visual noise flitting about everywhere.

I liked the fun animation, but I agree that the text should be darker for readability / accessibility.

Design choices like these tend to negatively influence my opinion of whatever I'm about to read. That's a shame, too, because the demonstration that followed is a very rare use case for AR and AI that didn't make me roll my eyes.

Whatever service you are using to host your website is not doing a very good job. Tiny <1kb assets are taking upto minutes to load.

Sorry for that. I use Vercel.

IMHO, an interesting content a bit devalued by the presentation. Sometimes less is more (I know, nothing new)

Hi everyone, my traffic today is high so my website might become slower soon, because it surpasses my budget for "Fast Data Transfer" from Vercel. I am sorry for any inconvenience.

I often proxy Vercel through Cloudflare for a free cache layer on their edge cdn.

Sorry everyone my website is now paused. I migrate it to Cloudflare rn.

I love the lens effect at the bottom of the viewport and design of the site overall, really cool. Do you have a post about that effect - or is the best way to learn about it in the developer tools?

I’m the opposite end of spectrum. I really disliked the frosted glass look on images as they loaded and left the page before finishing reading due to how off-putting I found it to be.

I also left the page early. I enjoy reading, and wasn't able to do that as effectively on this website.

It didn't make me leave the page, but I agree that I too found the effects annoying and off putting.

Too bad it makes the whole thing laggy enough that I didn't get past the first few paragraphs on my phone, and there's no obvious way to disable it

Alas :( my phone is fine scrolling at 120hz with the effect (iPhone 15 pro max)

Thank you. You can investigate progressive blur.

As another top-level comment pointed out, this is a bit of a dark-pattern to indicate paywalled content. In this case, I think it would be better without it.

Maybe getting hugged to death? Every image is blurry (I'm assuming this is pre-load optimization thing).

The project is currently available here. https://folio-2-0.pages.dev/paper

Anyone else getting ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH?

I did:

This site can’t provide a secure connection www.lukasmoro.com uses an unsupported protocol. ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

It is a cloudflare site but the SSL is Google Trust Services (https://pki.goog/).

It is likely cloudflare SSL mode (full/strict/flexible) might be screwing up the site SSL. It usually happens to me when I launch a brand new site with freshly migrated DNS. I won't waste more time, also www version of the site points at somewhere else. Well...

I really enjoy the "Mark & Comment" prototype. I want to read more on paper, but really don't like digitizing my notes. This flow seems much better for me. As AR devices improve, I expect this kind of low tech / high tech fusion will improve our experiences in novel ways.

Yeah I’m very interested in this. I’d love to be able to easily create digital representations of handwritten notes, even if that requires me to markup specifically-formatted documents.

I love reading paper (and eink) but I hate losing notes, and I don’t have a good process for importing those notes to my Logseq database.

I love this, I'm a big fan of this approach to technology. The weakness in this approach, for me, is that these examples seem to be mediated through AR glasses, which kind of undoes the analog-ness of the whole thing a bit.

For an (old!) example that doesn't use glasses, I'm reminded of https://www.topobox.co/

It is much better enjoyed in a desktop.

Love the butterfly!!!

Kudos for experimenting not just with AI but with webdesign. The hover preview is really neat too.

keep it up!

Thin gray text on an off-white background is not very easy to read, especially on mobile

And not very accessible as well (fails color contrast standards, just over 3:1, 4.5:1 is minimum). I thought light grey text on a light background finally went out of style a few years back.

The beginnings of what I've been waiting for?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39306077

I'm sure this is very interesting but given that you decided to use light grey text on a white background the whole page was unreadable.

I really dont like the blur effect on the photos. Every time I scroll down the page I think my internet is broken!

I think the loading blur effect is cool and, if it weren't for the drama queens on HN, inoffensive.

I was a little confused at first but I really enjoyed this. Awesome work!

Thank you.

Back online again sorry for the down-time.

That butterfly is very distracting. So much so that I didn't read the article.

I don't see a way to make it go away

When I scrolled down on mobile, the butterfly was no longer visible.

This Deployment is paused by the owner.

Your connection is working correctly.

Vercel is working correctly.

That's interesting, I'm getting SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP in Firefox. And ssllabs.com can't even test the site apparently.

I wonder it those those are connected somehow.

404 for me.

That is a dead butterfly [0] being reanimated, not a live butterfly flying

[0]: https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/

I'd also link to a recent HN post [0] exploring butterfly flight. The top comment shows the actual flight pattern of a butterfly.

Perhaps zombie butterfly fly differently, but otherwise it's doubly dead.

This isn't a real nit, but I figured I throw it out there anyway.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42183079

Until I clicked on the link, I thought you were just using a metaphor :)

Ugh one of those things I kinda hate to know now.

It ruined pretty much all butterfly drawings for me. It's the kind of thing that is better not knowing lol

I think it's overblown. It made me pay more attention to butterflies in the real world and what I see is when landed they often flap their wings intermittently. So I just think of the drawings with wings open as catching one of those moments.

I agree with your sentiment, the human body is sometimes considered most beautiful with the limbs extended in dance, that does not mean it is always posed that way. I lay in the "corpse pose" every day, it does not mean I am dead.

I understand when butterflies are standing by their wings wouldn't be that far ahead, but is it the case also when they are flying? That is not so clear to me. When flying it seems there can be a lot of variance where their wings can be.

There is quite a variation in its wing position while flying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odvYot6Rldw&ab_channel=Earth... So at least some butterflies do actually move their forewings significantly forward of their head while in flight (as stated by edamstra on June 2nd, 2017 - comment on the OP link)

I took a look at some slow mo videos and midflight photos, and these were really interesting. In particular what seemed interesting is how in some videos they almost like swam through the air in which case they did extend their wings up front as if to grab air under it and then they brought them back down. So the animation on the web app is more static, but I don't think it's fair to call it a dead butterfly based on that. Also I think I now understand why there's a swimming technique called butterfly.

Seeing those slow mo videos and some of the images in the edamstra link I think it's a bit unfair to criticise some of the things like earrings etc, because with many of those it's very plausible they could be mid-flight moments (especially earrings as they are literally in the air).

And the "dead butterfly" shirt seems to be very aware and all of those could be same butterfly during its flight representing all the possible positions.

Butterfly can also refer anything open / wide-open.

The moment I saw the live vs. dead comparison it hit me: center of lift vs. center of mass. Why would the butterfly's wings ever project that far forward when there is zero mass out there to lift? I suppose it's not impossible -- maybe the butterfly is hard-braking? But in normal flight that just wouldn't work. I never thought about it like that before, but now I can't unsee it.

Out of curiousity I took a look at some midflight photos as well as slow mo videos. It could also vary by butterfly type, but there were definitely midflight photos were I saw wings quite extended front. Also in slow mo it almost looks as if they are swimming through air where they extend wings front to grab air and bring them back down. I suggest taking a look at some slow mo videos. It now occurs to me why there's a swimming technique called butterfly. The animation in the web app doesn't do the swimming technique justice, it's rather static, but at least I do think at certain point they have their wings quite extended, so unless you animate this whole thing, I don't think it's as fair to call it dead compared to if it's standing by with wings extended.

That's fair -- to something as small as a butterfly the air is much more soup-y, so swimming is maybe a better description than flying. That would imply they do need to extend forward beyond their head to pull forward through the air.

Thanks for providing that link. What an amazing artist!

Agree 100%. Needs iteration. Thanks for the link.

Ce n'est pas un papillon.

This site is lagging a bit, maybe turn down the blur effects on every single element

It’s actually fine on my phone. I’ve got the latest and greatest though.

The blur effect is not good at all man. Just do a regular loading spinner or skeleton.

Tell me when there isn't a 1kg headset involved in any of this.