131–140 of 155 posts
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Call me crazy, but I don't think the goal of AI should be to give the rock with electricity in it "a valuable experience".
What are you even talking about?
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>But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work. Oh yeah? Then how do you explain this lecture where he says explicitly that Erlang should be the modern programmer's assembly? https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY In my experience, people who criticize Kay for being too vague or kvetching too pointlessly or…
It's somewhat of a backhanded compliment though -- calling Erlang a "modern assembly" is like the quip that C is a "portable assembler" -- that is, a tool useful for low-level stuff but which you should mostly use to implement higher level languages on top of.
There is a lot in here, various paths to venture off, but the bottom line seems to be trust is important when running commands on a machine, and LLMs are not trustable. What else?
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We really should have figured out anthropomorphization and how to overcome it before we got to the "AI age".
One of the worst-case scenarios I can presently imagine for LLMs is a world so drowned in semi-plausible nonsense that new generations teach themselves to simply ignore the printed word, subconsciously categorizing it as noise, and in so doing essentially un-invent literacy.
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> Yes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that? Reminds me of the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding (though I respect and like Alan Kay way more). If you've read any of his online interactions, apparently nobody does REST like he envisioned. It simply doesn't exist in the wild. When asked about some REST API, he'll claim it's not RESTful, it's wrong…
> the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding I think you're confused about who Fielding is and what REST is about. His writing isn't about building "true" RESTful APIs. It isn't really about APIs per se at all, RESTful or not. (Further, Fielding to my knowledge isn't even known for his use of the word "RESTful".) It sounds like you've probably been misled by a bunch of people who aren't Fielding about what's in his dissertation.…
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> Yes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that? Reminds me of the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding (though I respect and like Alan Kay way more). If you've read any of his online interactions, apparently nobody does REST like he envisioned. It simply doesn't exist in the wild. When asked about some REST API, he'll claim it's not RESTful, it's wrong…
It's incredibly easy to build hypermedia as the engine of application state sites. You generate html pages with state in them, and hyperlinks and forms that filter and change the state. Hateoas didn't invent anything. He literally just described how web 1.0 worked.
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It's not specific to LLMs, but the point is LLMs will make things more efficient and therefore make 'a bigger straw' to drink the milkshake.
Why will LLMs make things more efficient? As I see it, LLMs have the potential to either reduce the amount of "bullshit jobs/tasks", reduce the amount of time programmers spend on boilerplate, etc. But those inefficiencies are 95% human made, on purpose . Bullshit tasks are made up because middle managers want more underlings. Languages/frameworks with lots of boilerplate exist because companies would rather hire fif…
Not instantly and not perfectly though. Inefficiency can be very resistant to change as you are pointing out.
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You are impressively wrong. He just wrapped up an incredible research program that demonstrated many concrete implementations of great computing ideas. > After 16 years of continuous research and important contributions toward its mission - "Improve 'powerful ideas education' for the world's children and to advance the state of systems research and personal computing" - Viewpoints Research Institute concluded its ope…
And what exactly is the output, other than talks and some programming learning tools for children? I haven't seen any significant new insights or advances.
The papers and demos are the output. They were a research outfit, not a startup. OP claimed that Kay "never offers anything but the most vague suggestions" when he (et. al.) provided several very concrete working demos. It's hardly his fault if no one took him up on them, is it? (FWIW I suspect some of their work had an effect on MS Word & Excel UI but I don't know for sure.)
> I haven't seen any significant new insights or advances.
Where have you looked? Did you read the papers that VPRI published? OMeta has been mentioned else-thread, I like that Nile programming language, the COLA system seems neat.
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It's not specific to LLMs, but the point is LLMs will make things more efficient and therefore make 'a bigger straw' to drink the milkshake.
Why will LLMs make things more efficient? As I see it, LLMs have the potential to either reduce the amount of "bullshit jobs/tasks", reduce the amount of time programmers spend on boilerplate, etc. But those inefficiencies are 95% human made, on purpose . Bullshit tasks are made up because middle managers want more underlings. Languages/frameworks with lots of boilerplate exist because companies would rather hire fif…
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Transparency won't help a lot from a technical standpoint (seems more like a solution to a legal issue than a technical one). I can't trust LLMs because they just...recombine text by probabilities and aren't deterministic. I get incorrect information every time I ask them a thing, and it's incorrect in different ways every time. The only things they seem to get consistently correct are very widespread facts that are…
I still find it funny we managed to get image generation working so much better than text. If you care about veracity then image generation works about as well as text. Frequently you can find details of the image that are just bizarrely wrong, such as hands or food or other basic things. It's the same basic problem: there's no intelligence behind what it's doing, it just regurgitates mostly realistic-seeming pixels…
It's also worth mentioning you can run a heavily customized Stable Diffusion setup at home with fairly modest hardware with satisfactory results if you know what you are doing, but anything you can run at home for LLMs in the same hardware is dog slow and actually kind of terrible.