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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
141–150 of 190 posts
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#142I have often thought about how computers are significantly faster than they were in the early 2000s, but they are significantly harder to use. Using Linux for the first time in college was a revelation, because it gave me the tools to tell the computer "rename all of the files in this directory, keeping only the important parts of the name." But instead of iterating on better interfaces to effectively utilize the N t…
Prompt: "Spell blueberry and count the letter b". They're not claiming AGI yet, so human intelligence is required to operate an LLM optimally. It's well known that LLMs process tokens rather than characters s, so without space for "reasoning" there's no representation of the letter b in the prompt. Telling it to spell or think about it gives it room to spell it out, and from there it can "see" the letters and it's tr…
if you're going to need to learn how to use a tool, why not learn to use the efficient and precise one?
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#143Fresh 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…
> LLMs re-hydrate these for us, making them significantly more palatable; if you're used to gnawing dried fruit, they seem amazing.
Except sometimes you're expecting a fresh plum, and then you bite into a fig, or an apple, or a banana, or a stick.
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#144This is a clickbait article one could've written when Google was new and people were getting used to the idea of "You can just search for things on the internet."
It's just dressed up with mentions of AI for better "engagement."
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#145Earlier 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…
The association isn't without merit.
Google acquired Metaweb Technologies in 2010, acquiring Freebase with it. Freebase was a semantic web knowledge base and this became deeply integrated into Google's search technology. They did, in fact, want to push semantic web attributes to make the web more indexable, even though they originated neither the bigger idea nor the original implementation.
(one of my classmates ended up as an engineer at Metaweb, then Google)
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#146> 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 mentio…
I saw a quote somewhere to the effect of “LLMs are lossy compression of the internet” and it seemed about right.
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#147Earlier 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....
Today is easy (finally we have Rust, Zig, Odin, Swift, Go etc that show marked improvements), but the op is correct: A lot of progress was stalled because people defend sub optimal tools.
Every time somebody suggest "but C is wrong" the answer was "You should not do the wrong, be careful every time and things will be fine!"
P.D: Yesterday we have pascal/ADA/effiel/ocalm and others, but the major issues is that C/JS should have be improved to remove the bad things, and add the good things. Is not as if what or why to do it was a mystery, it was just the fear and arrogance against change.
And this cause too much inertia against "reinvent the wheel" and too much hate against anybody that even try
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#148Yeah dream on. I’m an engineer and know what structured data is. And yet I miserably fail to store my private files in a way that I can find them back without relying on search tools. So how on earth are we ever going to organize all the world’s data and knowledge? Thank god we found this sub-optimal “band aid” called LLMs!
I'll go farther and say it's not even possibly. Our brain wants to categorize things to make things simple but unfortunately nothing is simple.
I think of the Whalphin and it took Sea World era to discover. Who would see that coming?
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#149Yeah dream on. I’m an engineer and know what structured data is. And yet I miserably fail to store my private files in a way that I can find them back without relying on search tools. So how on earth are we ever going to organize all the world’s data and knowledge? Thank god we found this sub-optimal “band aid” called LLMs!
I'll go farther and say it's not even possibly. Our brain wants to categorize things to make things simple but unfortunately nothing is simple. I think of the Whalphin and it took Sea World era to discover. Who would see that coming?
[dead]
Re: AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing
#150Earlier 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"?
As shown by the GPT-5 reaction, a majority of people just have nothing better to ask the models than how many times does the letter "s" appear in "stupid".
2 time(s)