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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

rakhim.exotext.com

161–170 of 190 posts

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

#161
The funny thing to me is that now more than ever structured data is important so that AI has a known good data set to train from, and so that search engines have contextual and semantically rich data to search.

AI isn't a solution to this; on the contrary, whatever insufficiency exists in the original data set will only be amplified, as compression artifacts can be amplified in audio.

We also can't trust any data that's created recently, because an LLM can be trained to provide correct-looking structured data that may or may not accurately model semantic structure.

The best source of structured, tagged, contextually-rich data suitable for training or searching in the future will be from people who currently AREN'T using generative AI.

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

#162
post #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.

Yep, Ted Chiang wrote that for the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...

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

#164
Just complaining that the world is bad is a good way to waste your energy and end up being a cynic.

So why is not all information organized in structured, open formats? Because there's not enough of an incentive to label/structure your documents/data that way. That's if you even want to open your data to the public - paywalls fund business models.

There have been some smaller successes with semantic web, however. While a recipe site might not want to make it easy for everyone to scrape their recipes, people do want Twitter to generate a useful link preview from their sites' metadata. They do that with special tags Twitter recognizes, and other sites can use as well.

The good news is that LLMs can generate structured data from unstructured documents. It's not perfect, but has two advantages: it's cheaper than humans doing it manually, and you don't have to ask the author to do anything. The structuring can happen on the read side, not the write side - that's powerful. This means we could generate large corpuses of open data from previously-inaccessible opaque documents.

This massive conversion of unstructured to structured data has already been happening in private, with efforts like Google's internal Knowledge Graph. That project has probably seen billions in cumultative investment over the years.

What we need is open data orgs like Wikipedia pick up this mantle. They already have Wikidata, whose facts you can query with a graph querying language. The flag example in the article could be decomposed into motifs by an LLM and added to the flag's entry. And then you could use SPARQL to do the structured query. (And that structured query can be generated from LLMs, too!)

LLMs and structured data are friends.

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

#165

At Engelbart's mother of all demos in 1968, which basically birthed what we call personal computing today, most computer scientists were convinced that AGI was right around the corner and "personal computing" wasn't worth it. Now, back then AGI wasn't right around, and personal computing was really really necessary, but how did we forget the viewpoint that personal computing was seen as a competing way to use computi…

Economic interests, walled gardens, lock-in effects. Providers learned to make it (initially) convenient for us to forget. Of course, once we’re hooked, enshittification ensues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837367

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

#166
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…

He didn't say LLMs can outdo Pixar. That's ridiculous and they are nowhere near that level.

He said that LLMs are at the point "where individuals can outdo Pixar." And that's very possible. The output of a talented individual with the assistance of AI is vastly better than the output of AI alone.

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

#167

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…

He didn't say LLMs can outdo Pixar. That's ridiculous and they are nowhere near that level. He said that LLMs are at the point "where individuals can outdo Pixar." And that's very possible. The output of a talented individual with the assistance of AI is vastly better than the output of AI alone.

This is a very reductionist take that's to be expected from a software engineer but most definitely something that an artistic person would never utter. The creative process doesn't scale in the way that software engineers imagine. Coming up with genuine new ideas or magical moments of "synthesis" doesn't emerge from throwing lots of commodified tools together and calling it a day.

So far we haven't seen a single iota of creative art coming out of LLMs. Zip. Nada. It's all smoke and mirrors in that we get better and better veneers on top of bad copies of actual art that humans have previously created. The veneers are improving but there is no substance underneath. It's still slop. I don't want to live in a society that doesn't care about substance but instead worships the veneer. Yet this is the place that the current LLMs are taking us.

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

#168
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People and tools that don't do things right aren't useful. They get replaced. Making do with a shitty tool might make sense economically but not in any other way.

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

#169

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 phrase “if everyone just” is an automatic trigger for me. Everyone is never going to just. A different solution to whatever the problem is will be necessary.

I can't find a copy of the old "reasons your solution to email spam won't work" response checklist, but one of the line items was "fails to account for human nature".

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

#170
post #5

I 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…

perl -e 'print scalar grep {/b/} split //, "blueberry”'

echo blueberry | grep -o 'b' | wc -l

echo blueberry | perl -ne 'print scalar (() = m/(b)/g)’

echo blueberry | tr -d '\n' | tr b '\n' | wc -l

echo -n blueberry | tr b '\n' | wc -l

So long as I’m teaching the user how to speak to the computer for a specific edge case, which of these burn nearly as much power as your prompt? Maybe we should consider that certain problems are suitable to LLMs and certain ones should be handled differently, even if that means getting the LLM to recognize its own edge cases and run canned routines to produce answers.

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