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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

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

#151

Post by cestith »

klardotsh wrote: post #126
BobaFloutist wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that just age?

Well, sure, age is part of it. I would hope languages coming out 40-50 years after their predecessors (in the case of Rust following C/C++) would have improved upon those predecessors and learned from the ideas of computer science in the intermediate years. (Coincidentally this is one of my chief complaints about Go: despite being about the same age as Rust, it took the avenue of discarding quite a lot of advancement…

Go has a much different set of design goals than Zig, Nim, or especially Rust. Go is really for people who want a few major improvements on C like easier builds, faster builds, higher-level standard string handling, direct support for some form of concurrency, an optional GC which defaults to on, and a few syntax tweaks - things that a modern C might have that were not going to make it into a standards revision. Rust, to support ownership and the borrow checker at compile time, had to build a useful language around that hugely helpful but quite restrictive requirement. They subsequently went different directions than the Go team on a lot of the other language features. Zig, Nim, and D are something in between those extremes in their own ways.

As someone with a background of a lot of time with Perl and the Pascal/Ada family who was rooting for Julia, Go strikes a good balance for me where I would have used Perl, Python, Julia, Ruby, or shell for system tasks. I haven’t done a lot of work in Rust yet, because in the infrastructure space speed to implement is usually more important than performance and Go is a lot faster already than Python or Ruby and because my team as a whole has much more experience with it. I certainly appreciate why the folks at work who do the performance-critical network and video software use mostly Rust to do what they used to do in C, Java, or C++.

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

#152

Post by nuancebydefault »

rini17 wrote: post #107
xandrius wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People always insist that any tool must do things right. They as well insist that people do things right.

Tools are not perfect, people are not perfect.

Thinking that LLMs must do things right, that people find simple, is a common mistake, and it is common because we easily treat the machine as a person, while it only is acting like one.

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

#153

Post by Towaway69 »

xandrius wrote: post #86
squigz wrote: post #34

Earlier 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.

Here I am, a mind the size of a planet and what am I doing? Parking cars. - Marvin

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

#154

Post by seanwilson »

TZubiri wrote: post #112
seanwilson wrote: post #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…

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 lo…

Only a relatively small part of Wikipedia has semantic markup though? Like if the article says "_Bob_ was born in _France_ in 1950" where the underlines are Wikpedia links, you'll get some semantic info from the use of links (Bob is a person, France is a country), but you'd be missing the "born" relationship and "1950" date as these are still only raw text.

Same with the rest of articles with much more complex relationships that would probably be daunting even for experts to markup in an objective and unambiguous way.

I can see how the semantic web might work for products and services like ordering food and booking flights, but not for more complex information like the above, or how semantic markup is going to get added books, research articles, news stories etc. that are always coming out.

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

#155

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

"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."

This sounds more like "indexing" than "crawling"

The "Sitemaps 0.84" protocol , e.g., sitemap.xml, was another standard that _was_ introduced by Google

Helpful for crawling and other things

(I convert sitemap.xml to rss; I also use it to download multiple pages in a single TCP connection)

Not every site includes a sitemap, some do not even publish a robots.txt

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

#156

Post by cestith »

echelon wrote: post #113
armitron wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Scaling the production of almost good things by individuals that used to take just as many people and just as big a budget as a really nice major feature film is certainly full of use cases for education, training, portfolios of work, and pitches of the content.

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

#157

Post by mrweasel »

khazhoux wrote: post #25

I always appreciate our weekly Crankypants Take on LLMs. > AI is not a triumph of elegant design, but a brute-force workaround You can read and understand Attention Is All You Need in one hour, and then (after just scaling out by a few billion) a computer talks to you like a human. Pretty elegant, if you ask me. > The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data that would en…

> AI is not a triumph of elegant design, but a brute-force workaround

I think the author is on to something here, but does not realize it, or applies the think to the wrong problem. The issue isn't the web, search was good enough and it's a pretty big problem to solve. We need to go smaller. Applying AI to customer service, internal processes and bureaucracy, among other things, is an inelegant brute-force approach to not just fixing your shit.

The majority of customer service could be fixed by having better self-service, designing better UIs, writing better manuals, having better monitoring, better processes, better trained staff, not insisting on pumping stock numbers and actually caring about your product. AI will never fix the issues your customers are having, they'll just make customer service cheaper and worse because just like real humans the content and levers they need aren't available.

Same for much of the bureaucracy in companies and governments. Rather than having AI attempt to fill out forms or judge if someone is entitled to a pension, insurance pay out or what have you. Take the time to fix your damn processes and built self-service portals that actually works (some of those may have some sort of AI on the backend for things like scanning documents).

Forget the semantic web thing, it never worked, to much data, and AI generated content certainly isn't making the problem easier. Let's work on that at some other time. Still the author is correct, LLMs are a brute-force workaround, regardless of how elegant the design may be. They are applied to a host of problem that should just be eliminated, not hidden and stupefied by a prediction engine.

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

#158

Post by MarkusQ »

sudohalt wrote: post #73
MarkusQ wrote: post #23

Fresh 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…

The analogy doesn't make any sense, computers today are better by any conceivable metric than computers before.

The computers, yes. The experience of using them, no.

There is a joy to having a tool that lets you do what you never could before that has been buried along the way in layers of petty annoyances and digital micro aggressions. As you say, computers today are better by so many metrics—including, unfortunately, their ability to tracks us, sell us things we neither need nor want, outrage and distract us.

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

#159

Post by discostrings »

cestith wrote: post #136
discostrings wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My interpretation of "break web pages" was serving XHTML with MIME type application/xhtml+xml, in which case browsers don't render anything when the XHTML isn't well-formed, which is really just a strict / validate-my-syntax mode you can opt into.

In either case, I agree!

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

#160

Post by vrwarp »

nullorempty wrote: post #61

Neither 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.

Gemini (2.5 pro) stands firm on its answer even when told that ChatGPT said it is a parrot. It does provide additional reasoning: https://g.co/gemini/share/45232dcc7278
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