Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

rakhim.exotext.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 190 posts

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

#131

Post by xandrius »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #81
xandrius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is counting the number of B's vital? Also, I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to parse text the way you want it, it just doesn't see your text as you do, so that simple operation is not straightforward. Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"?

Let's say I hire a plumber because of his plumbing expertise and he bills me $35 and I pay him with a $50 bill and he gives me back $10 in change. He insists he's right about this. I am now completely justified in worrying about whether the pipes he just installed were actually made of butter.

Really? Is that easy? Happens quite often to really believe something and be wrong. Maybe you both are right and the $5 bill is on the floor?

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

#132

Post by xandrius »

jazzypants wrote: post #43
xandrius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is counting the number of B's vital? Also, I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to parse text the way you want it, it just doesn't see your text as you do, so that simple operation is not straightforward. Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"?

I mean, I think that anyone who understands UTF-8 will know that there are nine octets in blueberry when it is written on a web page. If you wanted to be tricky, you could have thrown a Β in there or something.

> anyone who understands UTF-8

So not too many?

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

#133

Post by lemonberry »

headcanon wrote: post #109
roadside_picnic wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sta…

"That was a human-generated hallucination"

Kudos. I respect this kind of honesty. I wish there was more of it.

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

#134

Post by card_zero »

armitron wrote: post #70
echelon wrote: 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…

Improving every year, it approaches the asymptote of being almost any good.

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

#135

Post by Barrin92 »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #83
headcanon wrote: post #19

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…

> 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…

>was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee

he's actually still working on it: https://solidproject.org/

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

#136

Post by cestith »

discostrings wrote: post #100
headcanon wrote: post #19

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…

I think you're confusing XHTML and semantic web on the "break web pages" part.

Neither broke web pages, honestly. XHTML requires a DTD named at the top of the document, and browsers will happily fall back to HTML 3, 4, or 5 as they can if there’s no DTD specified.

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

#137

Post by cestith »

justincormack wrote: post #44
headcanon wrote: post #19

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…

The semantic web came out of work on Prolog and formal systems for AI which just didnt work well... LLMs and vector databases give us new tools that are pretty usable.

Imagine how easy it would be to build and train an AI if it had semantically tagged input all over the Web.

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

#138

Post by m463 »

headcanon wrote: post #19

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…

I also think...

mom: "you need to clean up your room"

kid: "mom, just give up. The room will always be a mess, just use search"

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

#139

Post by svachalek »

jacobgkau wrote: post #98
fouc wrote: post #79

I would argue that LLM is ultimately making true Semantic Web available, or irrelevant. It can basically figure out all the semantic knowledge graphs automatically for us, and it's multi-modal to boot. That means it can infer the relationships between any node across text, audio, images, videos, and even across different languages.

The question is whether humans specifying the relationships between nodes is more or less reliable than LLMs inferring those relationships.

So we need to compare the reliability of something hypothetical to something real? I'll take the real every time.

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

#140

Post by pavel_lishin »

> AI is impressive

Ok, but Google's result summary got the answer wrong. So did Gemini, when I tried it (Lion, Sierra Leone). And so did ChatGPT when I tried it (Lion, Sri Lanka).

So... it's impressive, sure, because the author is correct that a search engine can't answer that question in a single query. But it's also wildly wrong.

I also vaguely agree with the author that Google Drive sucks, but I wish they'd mentioned that the solution to their problem - using search! - also fucking sucks in Google Drive.

Post reply on HN