A Malleable Web

> If a website is completely malleable to the point that the data it holds can be re-shaped into something else, then you can almost see a website as an application programming interface (API).

> A future where websites are combined into local frankensteins, only pulling the data it needs and combines it on a new website that does not exist.

This is exactly what I want to see. I've been toying around with similar ideas myself but prompting GPT-n with your instructions will make this extremely accessible. Browser configurability will be crucial, but we seem to be doing pretty well in that regard. Rare moment of optimism. Thanks for posting.

My bet is that the semantic web is actually going to come this time. I think that before we did not all of the resources, but with the crypto hype dead this is going to be the actual next web.

The problem that I have with Codex (code-davinci-002) is that it sometimes just starts repeating the last X tokens infinitely. And I have tried using the parameter for frequency penalty but that seems to make it eventually "run out" of newlines sometimes. Because of that and the fact that it doesn't follow directions as well, I am trying to just use text-davinci-003 even for coding tasks. Its not as good at programming but usually good enough. Sometimes you need to give it hints about basic things. I mean the other issue is that code-davinci-002 has been in limited beta forever and Microsoft Azure won't acknowledge my request for AI services.

Sure, this has been possible all along, and I've been using plain old python and javascript to do it. The essence of hacking is in effect making things "malleable to the point that the data it holds can be re-shaped into something else".

That said, I don't have a problem with re-skinning it as something of a bold new frontier. Honestly, it might be useful to express that sentiment at somewhat frequently - maybe it inspires someone who hadn't had that thought before. The advent of LLMs also makes this type of hacking accessible to non-programmers.

It reminds me a lot of the hype around self-driving cars. Technology that's impressive, and has made a huge leap forward, but where people all kind of assumed everything was about to fall into place to change everything and were so breathlessly excited about how driving was about to change forever and then it just... didn't.

There's tons of stuff to be excited about with ML, but I've literally never seen this kind of wild level of industry buzz before in my life about a product that frankly... doesn't work particularly well for a lot of the things it's being used for?

"Prompt generation is here to stay"

Is it? There are some real downsides to having every single interaction with a computer happen in natural language form. I thought that voice assistants were here to stay and only I found them kind of annoying to use. Fast forward, that whole interface change turned out to be a lot smaller and a lot less universal than people thought it would be too.

I don't know how to talk about the genuinely exciting things happening with ML right now when it's all drowned out by this extreme level of hype. I've never seen anything like it before, and it really just does not seem deserved. People are glossing over the fact that pretty much every single implementation of a conversational model on the market has had serious downsides that limit its effectiveness for tasks like code generation, answers, search, etc...

I'm seriously thinking about taking a break from tech news for a while because I feel like I'm drowning in people speculating about AI and how it's going to change literally everything, but a lot of it is just speculation and not much else.

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Here's the thing: the author wants to talk about dark mode, then fine. It would take maybe a week to build an extension that did what the author is theorizing. Take the page source, feed it into GPT-3, tell it to output a stylesheet that will turn on dark mode, and then insert it into the page. If it works so reliably, stop talking about it and build it. And then we can compare the results and see if it's revolutionary. I'm surrounded by AI tech demos that ask me to think about the possibilities, but all I can see are tech demos. People keep on telling me "okay, but imagine once it's refined." Okay, refine it.

Again, there's exciting stuff happening, it's just being drowned by people saying "finally I can do X". Okay, go do it if you're so confident that X is going to work. The level of hype to actual substance is so wildly unbalanced right now. It's really exhausting, I feel like I need to go live in a cabin for half a year until everybody calms down and starts focusing in on what this technology will actually be good for.