171–180 of 209 posts
Because ML solves problems symbolic approaches cannot solve (dealing with huge amounts of raw, poorly structured data) and symbolic approaches solve problems ML cannot (dealing with logical reasoning and inferences, like in the query "give me all cities of more than 1 million inhabitants that are less than 300km away from Paris, sorted from southernmost to northernmost").
Not to mention, the end result is a hairball alright, a big pile of tangled up hacky, ad-hoc APIs, bashed together as fast as possible, "to get things done quickly".
... and everyone is still using XML anyway.
I thought Freebase [1] was the most promising "Semantic Web" technology, with a powerful query language (MQL) and an application platform called Acre [2]. I'm biased because I worked at Danny Hillis' adjacent company, Applied Minds, and met with the Freebase folks to talk about graph databases. I went to one of Freebase's Hack Days, and I could feel the energy around building applications on a semantically-aware glob…
This is why we can't have nice things. When someone (sure, W3C- anyone) tries to, you know, design stuff before it's built, everyone whines and complains about how it's all too "mathy", how the standard is bloated so we shouldn't have any standards at all, how the standard is not good for "real work", etc etc. Then, since all those hard-working programmers are, allegedly, too dumb to get their heads around XML (XML!…
There was a lot of clunkiness there, in the W3C standard, but, W3C standards are made to be openly debated and revised. Facebook APIs, on the other hand - not so much.
What happened is that the technology spawned by the Semantic Web "fad" is now absolutely everywhere but it looks and works nothing like how people thought it would. Freebase, after being bought by Google became the foundation of the Google Knowledge Graph (aka "things not links"). This kicked off an arms race between all the major search providers to build the largest and most complete knowledge graphs (or at least k…
The idea with the semantic web was that it would be open and it would belong to its users, not to some cabal of giant corporations that would use it to control the internets.
That notion of openness and co-authorship of the knowledge on the web is now as dead as the parrot in the Pythons skit. And we're all much the worse for it- see all the debates about privacy and ownership of personal information and, indeed, metadata.
The software stack is getting better and more robust-- you can do things quickly with billions of triples that would take you weeks of development to program in a non-trivial relational database environment. The Semantics 2018 conference just took place in Vienna. It was heavy in industry presence and there was a lot of money going around. These guys guys don't give money outside the company unless they're going to get value for it.
So yes, reports of the imminent arrival of the Semantic Web ten years ago were greatly exaggerated. But if you're looking for a topic with an amusingly clueless commentariat, you'll do better to google "PHP object-oriented programming" (or just "hacker", for that matter).
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I've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft? I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlyi…
How are you crossing the bridge from webassembly to having access to the native UX primitives? Are you directly making C calls to native libraries like win32?
For example on Windows, Microsoft has rebooted hosted UWP JavaScript apps into signed PWAs.
So on that case, you can check if UWP APIs are available and use all of them, depending on UWP permissions for the app.
Chrome is following a similar route with ChromeOS and Chrome Android.
As native/Web developer I tend to have a native bias, but PWAs look like the way the Web might win back native. It isn't fully there though.
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> That's why HTML failed as descriptive language I think HTML and the web failed in general. Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the entire document. We, in effect, eliminated all semantic meaning from a document by making everything generic tag soup. The DOM + JS has largely supplanted HTML as the source of a web page. Espec…
When people say this, it feels like we're in different universes, or at least looking for different things. I main Linux on all of my machines. Most of the native apps on it have terrible UX. Even big apps - On touch screens, Firefox doesn't support two-fingered scroll. Chrome won't snap to the side of a desktop. Neither will bring up a virtual keyboard if I click on the URL bar. The majority of my native apps that I…
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Didn't we try this in the 90's with Java applets?
What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets? For my money its that Java applets and X-Windows didn't have a distribution mechanism and security model. They simply didn't do anything I couldn't already do with desktop apps and HTML. Also, frankly, they were kind of slow and not very good. I think thats the biggest problem with this sort of idea - the b…
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Yeah, semantic web really hacked the brains of academic-facing bureaucrats. It fell into this giant gap between what administrators don't know about business and what they don't know about technology... a gap big enough to shove every utopian idea about "an effortlessly integrated, data driven society" into. There's no such thing as "right" way to represent any given data stream, just ways that are more or less suita…
'There's no such thing as "right" way to represent any given data stream, just ways that are more or less suitable to specific tasks and interests.' My core objection to "the Semantic Web" is the non-existence of "the Semantic". There is no way you can get everyone to agree upon a universal "semantic", and if you can, which you can't, you can't get people to accurately use it, and if you can, which you can't, you can…