[HN Gopher] Email was the user interface for the first AI recomm...
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Email was the user interface for the first AI recommendation
engines
Author : coloneltcb
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-10-03 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (buttondown.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (buttondown.com)
| mg wrote:
| For some reason, in the early days of the web, email seemed like
| a logical choice to get input from users.
|
| The first time I tried to have users fill out a form, what I did
| was that I sent them an exe file which contained a windows
| application that showed a form and saved the replies to a file.
| In the email I asked users to send me back that file. But no
| matter how I worded the email, 50% of users sent me back the exe
| file instead.
|
| That problem was what triggered me to learn about server side
| code and databases.
|
| And when that worked, it hit me: I could make a form that asked
| users about their favorite bands and suggest them new bands right
| away. This way the system would learn about all the bands of the
| world on its own and become better and better in suggesting
| music. This is how Gnoosic [1] was born. Later I adapted it for
| movies and called that Gnovies [2]. And for literature and called
| that Gnooks [3].
|
| All 3 are still alive and keep learning every day:
|
| [1] https://www.gnoosic.com
|
| [2] https://www.gnovies.com
|
| [3] https://www.gnooks.com
| BubbleRings wrote:
| www.gnoosic.com is gorgeous! I can't wait to try it out in
| detail.
|
| Let me get my post for this thread finished then I'll try to
| look you up.
| tkfoss wrote:
| I have been enjoying these for years, thank you for wonderful
| services!
| genghisjahn wrote:
| I used gnoosic just now and discovered Melody Gardot. Wow.
| Thanks!
| 9dev wrote:
| Oh, that's a great discovery to make. Enjoy! And if you're
| into interesting backstories on musicians, make sure to check
| out how and why she makes music, it's both tragic and very
| peculiar.
| rfarley04 wrote:
| Lol "You emailed that you like sci-fi. We bet you'll like Alien,
| Bladerunner, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind!" Truly mind-
| blowing tech right there. How did they ever pull it off!
| sedatk wrote:
| Email was once _the_ user interface for all remote services.
| Bitnet had nodes that responded to commands and performed
| operations that sent the results in email. For instance, you
| could send an email to "TRICKLE@TREARN" on Bitnet with a subject
| line: "GET ftp.funet.fi /pub/something" and the Trickle service
| at TREARN node would download the file over Internet, split it in
| chunks and would send it to you over Bitnet, so you'd effectively
| have FTP capability on Bitnet just with email.
|
| I had written a user database called "Hitbase" (a very primitive
| Facebook) on a Fidonet network that responded to Netmail messages
| to a given node and sent the responses to the requesting address.
| That was in the 90's before Internet was accessible from homes.
| deadlyllama wrote:
| My high school got email access for students in 1997 (New
| Zealand). We had to pay per megabyte for web browsing. There were
| services you could email URLs to, that would email you back a
| text rendering of the page. So I used that.
|
| They had a fairly smart UI for following links. They would appear
| as footnotes and IIRC you could just hit reply, type the footnote
| number, and then send.
| yepguy wrote:
| Email is still the best thing about the internet. I know it can
| be unwieldy if you don't spend the time to figure out a good
| strategy for dealing with it, and for that reason there will
| always be those that hate it. But I'm constantly wishing the
| services I use made better use of email for notifications or even
| as a user interface for the thing.
| nextos wrote:
| Interesting. In the early 90s, lots of protein servers, i.e. the
| predecessors of AlphaFold et al., were also using email as UI.
|
| You'd submit query sequences as an email, and get an email back
| with predictions.
|
| The input format has not changed, still FASTA.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| I created one of the systems that competed with Ringo / Firefly.
| It was a great experience, and a long story that I hope to write
| up fully some day. A short summary:
|
| I had The Similarities Engine up on the very early web for a
| couple of years. I joined some guys and we created a startup with
| a good bit of angel financing. It failed, but at the last minute,
| Firefly bought out the tech and code that we had developed, so
| our investors got a little back of what they put in.
|
| Now I met my wife when I travelled to Poland to work with the
| programmers that were developing our product, and she is the best
| thing that ever happened to me, so I don't have ALL regrets about
| how the startup failed, but let me tell you about the big regret
| that I do have.
|
| The code that was written in Poland was never used for anything,
| as far as I know. The only thing of value that Firefly got out of
| acquiring us is the patent that I wrote on my recommending
| algorithm. (Yeah yeah go ahead and give me a bunch of grief here
| for applying for, and having issue, a software patent. It was
| 1997, a different world, for one thing.)
|
| Anyway, long story short, it all comes down to this one 20 minute
| phone call with my CEO, where I had to decide whether to take my
| patent back and kill the deal where NetAngels would sell to
| Firefly, or give up my patent in the hopes that Firefly stock
| would be worth something. Firefly didn't succeed and soon after
| sold to Microsoft for not much. But if I had killed the deal, I
| really think my then-fiancee and I would not have gotten married,
| so I think I chose wisely. However...
|
| That patent of mine. It didn't look like much at the time maybe.
| But what happened is, over time, the Internet came to it. Big
| time. The patent describes what is basically THE basic
| collaborative filtering algorithm, and it issued. Microsoft never
| did anything with it as far as I know, they just kept it in a
| drawer so nobody could ever use it against them.
|
| So here's the thing. Recently I asked ChatGPT and Claude how much
| my patent would have been worth, if I had held on to it. If you
| have regrets in your life about business deals, if you had a few
| early shares of Google, or some early bitcoin or something but
| you sold early, let me tell you, I have you beat. I'll let you
| see the numbers yourself--type this query into your favorite AI
| (and maybe do me a favor and post a comment here about what
| numbers it tells you):
|
| A single individual created patent US 5,749,081. He sold it when
| it had barely issued. How much money do you think he could have
| made from the patent, if he had held on to it and effectively
| monetized it, as the early Internet grew to have so many
| companies using collaborative filtering systems to sell products
| to users and make money?
| BubbleRings wrote:
| You can find out a little more about The Similarities Engine
| here, if you are interested:
|
| https://www.whiteis.com/similarities-engine
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I asked ChatGPT and Claude how much my patent would have been
| worth
|
| LLMs, on their own, can't really math.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| Did you try it?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Might be the optimal approach for running a slow inference model
| locally, and if we treat LLMs like compilers this makes sense.
| Overnight compilation for complex codebases is still the normal
| thing to do, but what if LLM code generation (about the one task
| it seems really good at) was run overnight the same way? That is,
| your workflow would be to look at what the LLM generated the
| previous night, make a bunch of annotations and suggestions and
| then at the end of the day submit everything you did to the LLM
| for an 'overnight generation' task?
| dvrp wrote:
| I think many AI startup founders and engineers should look more
| into the past rather than imagine how the future may look.
|
| I think there's a lot of alpha in classic RFCs.
| __VA_ARGS__ wrote:
| that was the worst article I ever read
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