Live data from Hacker News

AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

rakhim.exotext.com

111–120 of 190 posts

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#111
> 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? ... My point is that if all knowledge were stored in a structured way with rich semantic linking, then very primitive natural language processing algorithms could parse question like the example at the beginning of the article, and could find the answer using orders of magnitude fewer computational resources.

So as well as people writing posts in English, they would need to provide semantic markup for all the information like dates, flags, animals, people, and countries? It's difficult enough to get people to use basic HTML tags and accessible markup properly, so what was the plan for how this would scale, specifically to non-techy people creating content?

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#112

> 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? ... My point is that if all knowledge were stored in a structured way with rich semantic linking, then very primitive natural language processing algorithms could parse question like the example at the beginning of the article, and could find…

So wikipedia and wikidata?

This actually happened already and it's part of why llms are so smart, I haven't tested this but I venture a guess that without wikipedia and wikidata and wikipedia clones and stolen articles, LLMs would be quite a lot dumber. You can only get so far with reddit articles and embedded knowledge of basic info on higher order articles.

My guess is when fine tuning and modifying weights, the lowest hanging fruit is to overweigh wikipedia sources and reduce the weight of sources like reddit.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#113
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't like this analogy, and I really don't like the premise of this article. Writing software is only so scalable. It doesn't matter all of the shortcuts we take, like Electron and JavaScript. There are only so many engineers with so much time, and there are abundantly many problems to solve. A better analogy would be to look at what's happening to AI images and video. Those have 10,000x'd the fundamental c…

This is a massive cope. AI image/video slop is still slop. Yes it's getting better, but it's still better .. slop. Unless radical new breakthroughs are made, the current LLM paradigm will not outdo Pixar or any other apex of human creativity. It'll always be instantly recognizable, as slop. And if we allow it to take over society, we'll end up with a society that's also slop. Netflixification/marvelization only much…

> This is a massive cope. AI image/video slop is still slop.

Slop content is slop content, AI or not. You don't need an AI to make slop. We've always had films like "The Room", it's just that the financial and time constraints put an upper bound on how much slop was created. AI makes creation more accessible. You've got Reddit for image and video now, essentially.

You are biased by media narratives and slop content you're encountering on social media. I work in the industry and professionals are using AI models in ways you aren't even aware of. I guarantee you can't identify all AI content.

> And if we allow it to take over society, we'll end up with a society that's also slop. Netflixification/marvelization only much much worse..

Auteurs and artists aren't going anywhere. These tools enable the 50,000 annual film students to sustainably find autonomy, where previously there wasn't any.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#114
Leading in with what feels like a p-hacked question that almost certainly isn't typical kind of hurts the point. Reminds me of seeing clearly rehearsed demos for things that ignore the reason it worked is because it was rehearsed. A lot.

Am I wrong in that this was a completely organic question?

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#115
No AI is impressive because we built a machine that finally understands what we are saying and has a concept of what creativity is. It's rudimentary but it's a milestone for humanity.

It's social media and the endless barrage of generated AI that's creating the illusion that AI isn't impressive. You're inundated everyday with the same crap and is just making it less and less impressive.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#116
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait, which is the correct programming language to defend? C and Javascript are on pretty opposite sides of most spectra....

He seems to have mistaken his personal opinions on which languages and language features are good for some objective truth.

Ironically, that’s part of why we can’t have nice things. People who aren’t open to other viewpoints and refuse to compromise when possible impede progress.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It did, but it is an unusual plural to encounter in conversation so I don't blame you for missing it. Kudos for owning up!

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#118
post #39

I 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…

we have to accept that the vast majority of people don't think like us. They don't think its complete garbage because they can't look hard enough to appreciate that fidelity.

While it might be better if everyone thought like us and wanted things to be _fundamentally_ good, most people don't, and most people money >> less people money and the difference in scale is vast. We could try to build a little fief where we get to set the rules but network effects are against us. If anything our best shot is to try to reverse the centralisation of the internet because that's a big cause of enshittification.

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#119
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, which is the correct programming language to defend? C and Javascript are on pretty opposite sides of most spectra....

They are on the same side of the “number of serious design flaws due to historical incidents” spectrum.

Right, so, to reiterate the question, which language(s) are on the opposite side of that spectrum?

Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

#120
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, which is the correct programming language to defend? C and Javascript are on pretty opposite sides of most spectra....

Presumably the spectrum that would have Rust and Typescript at the other end.

Is that just age?
Post reply on HN