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It truly is unfortunate. Thankfully most people seem to have an innate immune response to this kind of RLHF slop.
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The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
21–30 of 185 posts
Re: The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
#22[flagged]
I don’t mind articles that have a hint of “an AI helped write this” as long as the content is actually informationally dense and well explained. But this article is an obvious ad, has almost no interesting information or summaries or insights, and has the… weirdly chipper? tone that AI loves to glaze readers with.
How is this an ad? It's a couple thousand words about how they built something complicated that was then obsoleted.
Re: The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those guidelines that you reference talk almost exclusively about annoyances on the webpage itself, not the content of the article. I think it's fair to point out that many articles today are essentially a little bit of a human wrapper around a core of ChatGPT content. Whether or not this was AI-generated, the tells of AI-written text are all throughout it. There are some people who have learned to write like the AI…
Do you agree that bickering over AI-generated vs. not AI-generated makes for dull discussion? Sliding sewing needles deep into my fingernail bed sounds more appealing than nagging over such minutiae.
It's more akin to complaining about how Google search results have gotten worse.
Re: The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those guidelines that you reference talk almost exclusively about annoyances on the webpage itself, not the content of the article. I think it's fair to point out that many articles today are essentially a little bit of a human wrapper around a core of ChatGPT content. Whether or not this was AI-generated, the tells of AI-written text are all throughout it. There are some people who have learned to write like the AI…
Do you agree that bickering over AI-generated vs. not AI-generated makes for dull discussion? Sliding sewing needles deep into my fingernail bed sounds more appealing than nagging over such minutiae.
It’s also dull to brush my teeth, but I still do it because it is necessary.
The problem is that HN is one of the few places left where original thoughts are the main reason people are here. Letting LLMs write articles for us here is just not all that useful or fun.
Maybe quarantining AI related articles to their own thing a la Show HN would be a good move. I know it is the predominant topic here for the moment but like there is other interesting stuff too. And articles about AI written by AI so that Google’s AI can rank it higher and show it to more AI models to train on is just gross.
Re: The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
#25grep was invented at a time when computers had very small amounts of memory, so small that you might not even be able to load a full text file. So you had tools that would edit one line at a time, or search through a text file one line at a time.
LLMs have a similar issue with their context windows. Go back to GPT-2 and you wouldn't have been able to load a text file into its memory. Slowly the memory is increasing, same as it did for the early computers.
Re: The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
#26I'm always amazed at claude codes ability to build context by just putting grep in a for loop. It's pretty much the same process I would use in an unfamiliar code base. Just ctrl+f the file system till I find the right starting point.
That's what I used to use as a human, but then I finally overcame my laziness in setting up integration between my editor and compiler (and similar) and got 'jump to definition' working.
(Well, I didn't overcome my laziness directly. I just switched from being lazy and not setting up vim and Emacs with the integrations, to trying out vscode where this was trivial or already built in.)
Re: The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those guidelines that you reference talk almost exclusively about annoyances on the webpage itself, not the content of the article. I think it's fair to point out that many articles today are essentially a little bit of a human wrapper around a core of ChatGPT content. Whether or not this was AI-generated, the tells of AI-written text are all throughout it. There are some people who have learned to write like the AI…
Do you agree that bickering over AI-generated vs. not AI-generated makes for dull discussion? Sliding sewing needles deep into my fingernail bed sounds more appealing than nagging over such minutiae.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but for my part I do actually like to hear when people think it sounds like it's AI-generated.
Re: The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
#28I'm always amazed at claude codes ability to build context by just putting grep in a for loop. It's pretty much the same process I would use in an unfamiliar code base. Just ctrl+f the file system till I find the right starting point.
It's mind blowing. It's so simple, elegant and... effective! Grep+glob and a lot of iterations is all we need.
Re: The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
#29Has it not dawned on the author how ironic calling embeddings and retrieval pipelines "a nightmare of edge cases" when talking about LLM
Haha! LLMs themselves are pure edge cases because they are non-deterministic. But if you add a 7-step pipeline on top of that, it's edge cases on top of edge cases.
Re: The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
#30Weird to see the use case referenced specifically code search when that's a very targeted one rather than what general purpose agents (or RAG) use cases might target.
The main use case I referenced is SEC filings search, which is quite different from code. Filings are much longer, less structured, and more complex, with tables and footnotes.