People have said this since Vannevar Bush theorized the Memex. The unanswered question, the problem unsolved, remains: Who does all the categorization work? How come they're never part of "we," such that the plaint is never "if only we had done the work..."?
AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
101–110 of 190 posts
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#102Neither chat-gpt nor gemini got the same answer as the article for me ` What animal is featured on a flag of a country where the first small British colony was established in the same year that Sweden's King Gustav IV Adolf declared war on France? ` chatgpt: Final answer: Lion gemini: A lion is featured on the flag of Sri Lanka.
> Neither chat-gpt nor gemini got the same answer as the article for me
getting wildly different and unpredictable answers from the same input is one of the features AI offers
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#103Uh, the author got so close to make the same realization I had while working on a project [0] for the Wikimedia Foundation: we wouldn't need search engines if we had better tooling to query semantic databases like wikidata. However, the thing that the author might be missing is that the semantic web exists . [1] The problem is that the tools that we can use to access it are not being developed by Big Tech. Remember F…
DBpedia Spotlight and entity-fishing already do something similar to your idea - they extract structured data from text and link to knowledge bases. Combining these with LLM-based query translation to SPARQL could indeed bridge the gap between semantic web's structure and natural language interfaces.
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming languages are not on a spectrum. I guess they dislike the syntax of JS and the low-level no-batteries of C.
Programming languages, like literally everything else, are on many spectra.
Did your comment always say "most spectra"? I swear it was "a spectra" before. Sorry, I must have misread.
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#105Fresh plums right off the tree taste significantly better than the ones you can get in the produce isle, which are in turn better than canned, which are themselves still better than re-hydrated prunes. In scaling out computation to the masses, we went from locally grown plums that took a lot of work and were only available to a small number of people that had a plum tree or knew someone that had one, to building near…
Or slop with some plum aroma added. Seems like a good analogy.
Extruded synthetic plum substrate
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#106At Engelbart's mother of all demos in 1968, which basically birthed what we call personal computing today, most computer scientists were convinced that AGI was right around the corner and "personal computing" wasn't worth it.
Now, back then AGI wasn't right around, and personal computing was really really necessary, but how did we forget the viewpoint that personal computing was seen as a competing way to use computing power vs AI?
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"? Well, I would say that if GP advertised themselves as being able to do so, and confidently gave an incorrect answer, their function as someone who is able to serve their advertised purpose is practically useless.
So ChatGPT was advertised as a letter counter? Also, no matter what hype or marketing says: GPT is a statistical word bag with a mostly invisible middleman to give it a bias. A car is a private transportation vehicle but companies still try to sell it as a lifestyle choice. It's still a car.
It is (maybe not directly but very insistently) advertised as taking many jobs soon.
And counting stuff you have in front of yourself is basic skill required everywhere. Counting letters in a word is just a representative task for counting boxes with goods, or money, or kids in a group, or rows on a list on some document, it comes up in all kinds of situations. Of course people insist that AI must do this right. The word bag perhaps can't do it but it can call some better tool, in this case literally one line of python. And that is actually the topic the article touches on.
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"? Well, I would say that if GP advertised themselves as being able to do so, and confidently gave an incorrect answer, their function as someone who is able to serve their advertised purpose is practically useless.
So ChatGPT was advertised as a letter counter? Also, no matter what hype or marketing says: GPT is a statistical word bag with a mostly invisible middleman to give it a bias. A car is a private transportation vehicle but companies still try to sell it as a lifestyle choice. It's still a car.
It is advertised as being able to "analyze data" and "answer complex questions" [0], so I'd hope for them to reliably determine when to use its data-analysis capabilities to answer questions, if nothing else.
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20250729225834/https://openai.com...
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#109I feel like I see this attitude a lot amongst devs: "If everyone just built it correctly, we wouldn't need these bandaids" To me, it feels similar to "If everyone just cooperated perfectly and helped each other out, we wouldn't need laws/money/government/religion/etc." Yes, you're probably right, but no that won't happen the way you want to, because we are part of a complex system, and everyone has their very differe…
> Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google Was this written by AI? I find it hard to believe anyone who was interested in Semantic Web would have not known it's origin (or at least that it's origin was not Google). The concept of a Semantic web was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee (who hopefully everyone recognizes as the father of HTTP, WWW, HTML) in 1999 [0]. Google, to my knowledge, had no direct development or…
That was a human-generated hallucination, my apologies. I always associated semantic web with something Google was pushing to assist with web crawling, and my first exposure to it was during the Web 2.0 era (early 2010s) as HTML5 was seeing adoption, and I always associated it with Google trying to enhance the web as the application platform of the future.
W3C of course deserves credit for their hard work on this standard.
My main point was that regardless of the semantic "standard", nothing prevented us from putting everything in a generic div, so complaining that everyone's just "not on board" isn't a useful lament.
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#110I feel like I see this attitude a lot amongst devs: "If everyone just built it correctly, we wouldn't need these bandaids" To me, it feels similar to "If everyone just cooperated perfectly and helped each other out, we wouldn't need laws/money/government/religion/etc." Yes, you're probably right, but no that won't happen the way you want to, because we are part of a complex system, and everyone has their very differe…
eh I feel this but it's a lot simpler than that. Not "if everyone built everything correctly" but "if everyone's work was even slightly better than complete garbage". I do not see many examples of companies building things that are not complete embarrassing shit. I worked at some companies and the things we built was complete embarrassing shit. The reasons are obvious: nobody cares internally to do it, and nobody ext…
> the money still flows if you do a bad job so why do better?
I'll raise. The money flows because you do a bad job. Doing a good job is costly and takes time. The money cannot invest that much time and resources. Investing time and resources builds an ordinary business. The money is in for the casino effect, for the bangs. Pull the arm and see if it sticks. If yes, good. Keep pulling the arm. If not, continue with another slot machine.