I turned Unix talk from 1983 into the interface for my AI

23 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by ibobev
(en.andros.dev)

9 Comments

fouc

8 hours ago

Great idea! After all why reinvent the wheel with TUI libraries built in a popular browser-based front-end javascript framework?

JoshTriplett

9 hours ago

I remember using talk back when first learning Linux in college. I enjoyed the character-by-character aspect of it.

jghn

4 hours ago

Until you wind up chatting with a painfully slow typist. Even worse is when they typo a lot and take the time to fix them on the fly

em500

8 hours ago

Yes, I've wondered many times why there are no modern (human to human) chat interfaces that implements that, rather than sentence by sentence.

Brian_K_White

8 hours ago

The same reason tar and dd and practically everything operates on blocks not bytes, plus the same reason the shell doesn't act until eol delimiter, the opportunity to edit before submit.

I think talk could get away with it because on a shared local host both sides are accessing the same local physical resource directly, no tcp packet per byte.

lokar

4 hours ago

It worked over the network as well

ButlerianJihad

2 hours ago

The default `talk` and talk service were trash, and often there were protocol errors that would cause you to hang forever, vainly waiting for an answer (classic talk used UDP only.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

Eventually, a few competing offerings sprang up, in the form of `ntalk`, `xtalk` and `ytalk`. These were superior in every way, and sometimes required swapping out the service attached to inetd. Once you did that, it was a fantastic way to chat live and direct on Unix. Way better than the `write` we started with!

nenadg

9 hours ago

I used talk back in 90ties and loved it and still missing it. Interfacing this with LLM is a nice touch.

Chris2048

8 hours ago

Interesting chat widget in the corner.

I've been looking for something similar I saw once, it was a chat widget connecting to everyone looking at the same webpage.

But it was called something like "aarrrgh!!" (the pirate), and I can't remember the name of the damn thing!