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The case against conversational interfaces

julian.digital

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Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#211

Post by namaria »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #203
namaria wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite feeling like a "let me draw it for you" answer is a tad condescending, I want to address something here. This would be great if LLMs did not tend to output nonsense. Truly it would be grand. But they do. So it isn't. It's wasting resources hoping for a good outcome and risking frustration, misapprehensions, prompt injection attacks... It's non-deterministic algorithms hoping P=NP, except instead of branching…

> Despite feeling like a "let me draw it for you" answer is a tad condescending, I want to address something here. I didn't mean it to be condescending - though I can see how it can come across as such. FWIW, I opted for a diagram after I typed half a page worth of "normal" text and realized I'm still not able to elucidate my point - so I deleted it and drew something matching my message more closely. > This would be…

Natural language has a high entropy floor. It's a very noisy channel. This isn't anything like bit flipping or component failure. This is a whole different league. And we've been pouring outrageous amounts of resources into diminishing returns. OpenAI keeps touting AGI and burning cash. It's being pushed everywhere as a silver bullet, helping spin lay offs as a good thing.

LLMs are cool technology sure. There's a lot of cool things in the ML space. I love it.

But don't pretend like the context of this conversation isn't the current hype and that it isn't reaching absurd levels.

So yeah we're all tired. Tired of the hype, of pushing LLMs, agents, whatever, as some sort of silver bullet. Tired of the corporate smoke screen around it. NLP is still a hard problem, we're nowhere near solving it, and bolting it on everything is not a better idea now than it was before transformers and scaling laws.

On the other hand my security research business is booming and hey the rational thing for me to say is: by all means keep putting NLP everywhere.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#212

Post by TeMPOraL »

namaria wrote: post #208
fragmede wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the word hotel has a lot of baggage, but having a large quantity of rooms for rent, for cheap, with a bathroom but no dedicated kitchen would be amazing for the housing crisis. If they were high quality and sound isolated, with high speed elevators, and communal spaces for residents, it could work. I'm not an architect though.

You're describing student housing and if you ever lived in one you'd know how bad of an idea you're musing with.

He's also describing hotels, and aparthostels, and officers' quarters on a ship and bunch of other stuff. The devil is in the details - specifically, how much it costs to rent per sqm, and what stops the price from going up to the point it forces multiple people to share the room? What stops the landlords from subdividing the rooms further and renting them out apiece? What stops already shoddy construction from getting even worse?

Those are the big challenges of housing. Not just how many units there are, but what they are, and how much the "how many" is plain cheating.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#213

Post by nosianu »

littlestymaar wrote: post #154
nosianu wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still has to tell you. Visually in a form it's much faster. Similar reason why many people prefer a blog post over a video. Talking is not very efficient, and it's serial in fixed time. With something visual you can look at whatever you want whenever you want, at your own (irregular) pace. You will also be able to make changes much faster. You can go to the target form element right away, and you get immediate fee…

> It still has to tell you. Visually in a form it's much faster. Who said it cannot be visual? It's still a “conversational” UI if it's a chatbot that writes down its answer. > Similar reason why many people prefer a blog post over a video. Well I certainly do, but I also know that we are few and far between in that case. People in general prefer videos over blog post by a very large margin. > Talking is not very eff…

> Who said it cannot be visual? It's still a “conversational” UI if it's a chatbot that writes down its answer.

You can't be serious??

Oh it's 1st of April, my apologies! I almost took it seriously. I should ignore this website on this day.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#214

Post by littlestymaar »

nosianu wrote: post #213
littlestymaar wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It still has to tell you. Visually in a form it's much faster. Who said it cannot be visual? It's still a “conversational” UI if it's a chatbot that writes down its answer. > Similar reason why many people prefer a blog post over a video. Well I certainly do, but I also know that we are few and far between in that case. People in general prefer videos over blog post by a very large margin. > Talking is not very eff…

> Who said it cannot be visual? It's still a “conversational” UI if it's a chatbot that writes down its answer. You can't be serious?? Oh it's 1st of April, my apologies! I almost took it seriously. I should ignore this website on this day.

I don't understand your complaint.

What's the difference between a blog post and a chatbot answer in terms of how “visual” things are?

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#215

Post by soco »

littlestymaar wrote: post #175
UncleMeat wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous choice might not what I want today. Maybe I'm tired of layovers and I'm willing to pay more for a direct flight this time. Maybe I want a different selection at a restaurant because I'm in the mood for tacos rather than a burrito.

Just tell it then.

And then we're back to point one: retelling the whole stack of choices every time because nobody on the other side of the conversation, person or AI; can tell whether all my previous options are still valid. Because even I, the caller, might not remember what "defaults" I set in the previous call. So yeah, this argument in favor of conversational interfaces sounds at this point more like ideology than logic.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#216

Post by littlestymaar »

soco wrote: post #215
littlestymaar wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tell it then.

And then we're back to point one: retelling the whole stack of choices every time because nobody on the other side of the conversation, person or AI; can tell whether all my previous options are still valid. Because even I, the caller, might not remember what "defaults" I set in the previous call. So yeah, this argument in favor of conversational interfaces sounds at this point more like ideology than logic.

> every time because nobody on the other side of the conversation, person or AI; can tell whether all my previous options are still valid.

But you can, so as long as the interlocutor tells you what assumptions it made, you can correct it if it doesn't match your current mood.

> So yeah, this argument in favor of conversational interfaces sounds at this point more like ideology than logic.

There's no ideology behind the fact that every people rich enough to afford paying someone to deal with mundane stuff will have someone doing it for them, it's just about convenience. Nobody likes to fight with web UIs for fun, the only reason why it has become mainstream is because it's so much cheaper than having a real person working.

Same for Microsoft Word by the way, many people used to have secretaries typing stuff for them, and it's been a massive regression of social status for the upper middle class to have to type things by themselves, it only happened because it was cheaper (in appearance at least).

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#217

Post by throwaway290 »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #173
lolinder wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First thing an experienced and bright engineer will tell you is to leave the premises with your "few words about a desire" and not return without actual specs and requirements formalized in some way. No, that's what a junior engineer will do. The first thing that an experienced and bright senior engineer will do is think over the request and ask clarifying questions in pursuit of a more rigorous specification, then…

You're entirely right. The person you're responding to doesn't sound like a senior engineer so much as a grouchy old engineer who is burned out. Of course, you can get bad clients but expecting them to know exactly what specs they want every time is unreasonable in most situations, particularly if they don't have the technical knowledge of the systems you work in.

You are either immature as a software engineer and unfamiliar with how software work is done conceptually, or you are jaded and disgruntled from dysfunctional orgs that cannot come up with requirements. That is okay, but you should not try to be instructive to others on this matter.

I love product work and programming. As I wrote in this thread, I did it while freelancing, I do it now at dayjob. I am bored by just programming and want more control over the result. People come to me with "a few words about a desire" and I do come up with specifics and I get credit for it

But I am recognized as a product person, not just programmer. And I know better to not make the mistake you make and pretend that every builder or a structural engineer should be an architect of a building or an urban planner.

People like you is why we have managers come to an expert level say C++ dev with "a few words about a desire" and expect them to decide what thing to build in the first place AND to build it, just to later tell them it was wrong. When there is no product person who determines the reqs random people will make programmer come up with requirements yourself and then later tell you it is not up to "requirements".

This lack of organization and requirement clarity is offensive to expert programmers and probably the reason most projects drag on forever and die.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#218

Post by throwaway290 »

ryandrake wrote: post #193
throwaway290 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think like you. My job is to ask questions etc. But after a couple decades I see if someone doesn't bother to even think about the idea enough to understand it himself beyond a few words he is not worth engaging with in this fashion. He doesn't really know what he wants. Today I ask a clarifying question he says one thing, next week he changes his mind or forgets and the result slowly becomes a mess > The p…

> Do not mistake software engineers and product people. These are very different things. Sometimes these things are done by the same person if the org has not enough money. I worked for one of the largest, richest tech companies in the world, and (at least in our org) they did not have a dedicated product owner role. They expected this skill from the senior/lead engineers on the teams. Any coder can churn out code an…

Money is not a cure for organizational dysfunction.

But as I said these roles can be done by one person, just remember they are different activities.

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#219

Post by throwaway290 »

lolinder wrote: post #189
throwaway290 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think like you. My job is to ask questions etc. But after a couple decades I see if someone doesn't bother to even think about the idea enough to understand it himself beyond a few words he is not worth engaging with in this fashion. He doesn't really know what he wants. Today I ask a clarifying question he says one thing, next week he changes his mind or forgets and the result slowly becomes a mess > The p…

You and I are either talking about very different kinds of specifications or very different kinds of product people. The product people I'm familiar with are completely incapable of creating a specification that is sufficiently detailed to implement without a lot of back and forth. Not because they're not good at what they do, but because what they do does not include defining requirements in sufficient fidelity for…

You should get to know better product people and if you successfully built a project as an engineer without a product person then hey you were one yourself

Re: The case against conversational interfaces

#220

Post by throwaway290 »

brookst wrote: post #157
throwaway290 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I've also seen more than once is years of formalized specs and requirements work while nothing ever gets produced, and the project is aborted before even the first line of code hit test. It just shows that no one really understood what they wanted. It is crazy to expect somebody to understand something better than you and it is hilarious to want a conversational UI to understand something better than you.

How about a conversational UI to help you iterate and explore what you want rather than having to know it clearly and in detail before anyone writes any code?

Regarding iteration, as the article says natural language is just slow and lossy. If you are ok iterating more slowly and constantly explain and correct things then why not? I find it tedious
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