Ask HN: Personal "Tears in the Rain" Moments
Something you did, that was real, but hard to explain to anyone who wasn't there, and a time which will never come again.
One of them for me is growing up on the East Coast, and having never visited the West Coast, the best I could do was fly around the Bay Area in my F/A 18 Interceptor on my Amiga.
I was visiting Ward Christensen on the day he got his first Toshiba laptop. After he got it powered up he realized that he had zero software on the 3 1/2" disks it used, making it almost useless.
It did have MS-DOS, thus it had debug. He used debug to write an impromptu assembly program to pull across data from one of his other machines via serial cable. He then used that code to pull across xmodem, which was then enough to pull across Qmodem. Then he pulled across laplink and he had rull access to everything.
It took less that 20 minutes total, I think.
For those Wondering, Ward Christensen was a real interesting fella.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen
He invented XMODEM and was co-founder of the very first BBS.
Emerging from Amish-Mennonite life, also from deep Appalachia. Being twenty-three and experiencing cinema, rock music, and city life--not to mention a mall--for the first time was shattering, and poignant.
I grew up on a farm, we had a lot of goats and on the weekends and summer I had to help out herding them between feeding spots, keep an eye on them (they're so good at jumping fences). I was very lonely and coped by reading all Jules Verne's books and then while herding the goats I'd daydream my own book spinoffs (with me as the main character, of course). I'd invent entire worlds around me in those oak forests. It's hard to explain how important that was for me, I now look back and cherish that time, those goats.
I think it's interesting to interpret "Tears in the Rain" less broadly. The AI that we have today has much less than a four year "lifespan". It "expires" as soon as we stop typing into a session.
Interestingly, the best models can produce convincing poetry despite a lack of lived experience.
As realtime avatars and robots become more advanced, we will start to wonder more if somehow a system has some kind of consciousness, and then about real moral concerns. As technology practitioners, within a few years, our "tears in the rain" moments could come from actual interactions with AI.
But part of the point was about mortality being an aspect of nature to be accepted with grace. I think that's a practical reaction, and the typical attitude towards robots and mortality that a literature major or maybe just the average human would have.
But I believe that someone who really understands technology, and I would go so far as to say evolution (in the context of high technology), questions the optimality or at least necessity of natural death.
Rewinding cassette tapes using a pencil, because rewinding them with tape player would drain its batteries, and those batteries couldn't be recharged.
Seeing websites for the first time. Creating a simple "index.html" for the first time, uploading it (over FTP, I think) and seeing it live.
Waiting for the dial-up moment to go through its sounds to finally check my email.
I can tell about all of that using words, but I think words don't fully embed the experience for people who hadn't experienced it themselves. We need immersive VR museums for that.
About 2 years ago, claude only had 200k(250k?) context; Even with clear instructions, the agents were not that disciplined; they usually suffered from attention deficit and they would start hallucinating in first 20 minutes. The subsystem that was being built had implementation plan, and a checkpoint file, which many agents didn't even bother to update frequently, so when a session occasionally crashed, it took a bit to resume the work. Most sessions would not last more then an hour or so.
One night, after a series of mediocre agents, a new session started, and the new agent started off by reading the plan, summarized the tasks ahead, and continued the implementation, frequently updated the checkpoints, and listed the status of tasks already done and pending.. this went on for the next 45 minutes and when the job was done the session ended. This was like a magic, seeing a master at work..
Since then I've wondered sometimes, if an enterprise grade llm (if there is such a thing) got misallocated to my task for that session.
Is that what "Tears in Rain" refers to?
Been a long time since I've seen Blade Runner, but I thought the monologue just serves to show that the android is reflecting on what death means, in his case the irrevocable loss of his consciousness, memories, thoughts.
Yes, an analogy for inner experiences that could never fully be communicated to others.
Like seeing C-beams glittering off the Tannhauser Gate, or flying around the Bay Area in an F/A 18 Interceptor on an Amiga.
Tears in the rain comes from the first Blade Runner movie when at the end the android is dying from expiration while outside in the rain while explaining things he had seen as a slave that were beyond human imagination.
My take is that it comes from the beauty that comes from the inability to communicate his experiences, which in turn validates his individuality, his "soul".
But also that his unique experiences and memories would be lost
My first time in management, age 24, I ran the night network operations team for a network of about 300,000 users across three countries in two wars. I was a team lead over two to three direct personnel and a couple large organizations under indirect management.
I was there, at the dawn of the Third Age of Mankind... (some called it the dot-com bubble)
I was a mere hobbit with my hobbit-computer pets, but I was holding the reins of something transcendent, untamed, and more colossal than I could imagine. My acquaintances discussing Free Software and stock trading and McMansion Purchases when their diploma ink was barely dry. Hiking through security doors and past Cray, Intel, DEC supercomputers and core routers -- quite the "wiring closet". The robots were safely imprisoned behind Plexiglas, and so were the console operators!
I gained enough skill and exhibited talent so as to fall into Silicon Valley, and Glenda deigned to ferry me back and forth, north and south, a one-man tornado wreaking havoc on the Information Superhighway. In the currents off Moffatt Field, and the shadow of Apple Computer's buildings I tried to rewrite network stacks but succumbed to Impostor Syndrome and its complications.
When California was done with me, Big Silicon and Oregon had use of my fingers + neural wetworks for awhile, and then I sprang at an opportunity to support astrobiology exploration and try to figure out an FC-AL SAN under a boss who didn't do Windows.
I had a third comeback. I graduated college. I had a good job and employer over 4 years. But sprinkled in all the family tumult and mental illness torments left me doubtful of what/whom I've been chasing. It was self-discovery, God-discovery, though: I also came to terms with adoption and meeting the strangers of my birth family: the inner life of an adoptee is itself unfathomable to outsiders. Just ask Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, or Paddington Bear.
I'm scrounging for words now, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreaming comes to mind, analogous to "Tears in the Rain" or Life Is But a Dream or, in the words of the indefatigable programmable roadside sign in L.A. Story:
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy!
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