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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

rakhim.exotext.com

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

#181

Post by ajkjk »

oivey wrote: post #116
BobaFloutist wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, which is the correct programming language to defend? C and Javascript are on pretty opposite sides of most spectra....

He seems to have mistaken his personal opinions on which languages and language features are good for some objective truth. Ironically, that’s part of why we can’t have nice things. People who aren’t open to other viewpoints and refuse to compromise when possible impede progress.

well I was being flippant

but

what do we have other than our opinions? I think everything sucks so that's what I said.

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

#182

Post by TZubiri »

seanwilson wrote: post #154
TZubiri wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 relati…

The semantic information is first present not in markup but in natural language.

But it is also present inside the website, there's infoboxes that mark the type of object, place, person, theory.

Additionally infoboxes also hold relationships, you might find when a person was born in an infobox, or where they studied.

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

#183

Post by Terr_ »

jandrese wrote: post #122
copularent wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I think this is a completely valid thing to do when you have Sam Altman going on the daily shows and describing it as a genius in your pocket and how it's smarter than any human alive. Deflating hype bubbles is an important service.

Yeah: Like with self-driving vehicles, the characteristics of when and how something breaks are important, not just some average error-rate.

If users cannot anticipate what does or doesn't constitute risky usage or potential damages, things go Extra Wrong.

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

#184

Post by seanwilson »

TZubiri wrote: post #182
seanwilson wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 relati…

The semantic information is first present not in markup but in natural language. But it is also present inside the website, there's infoboxes that mark the type of object, place, person, theory. Additionally infoboxes also hold relationships, you might find when a person was born in an infobox, or where they studied.

> The semantic information is first present not in markup but in natural language.

Accurate natural language processing is a very hard problem though and is best processed by AI/LLMs today, but this goes against what the article was going for when it's saying we shouldn't need AI if the semantic web had been done properly?

For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language are some markup approaches related to the semantic web.

Complex NLP is the opposite to what the semantic web was advocating? Imagine asking the computer to buy a certain product and it orders the wrong thing because the natural language parsed was ambiguous.

> Additionally infoboxes also hold relationships, you might find when a person was born in an infobox, or where they studied.

That's not a lot of semantic information compared to the contents of a Wikipedia article that's several pages long. Imagine a version of Wikipedia that only included the infoboxes and links within them.

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

#185

Post by ubercow13 »

Kapura wrote: post #142
svachalek wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because there aren't more efficient and precise tools capable of the same things?

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

#186

Post by TZubiri »

seanwilson wrote: post #184
TZubiri wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The semantic information is first present not in markup but in natural language. But it is also present inside the website, there's infoboxes that mark the type of object, place, person, theory. Additionally infoboxes also hold relationships, you might find when a person was born in an infobox, or where they studied.

> The semantic information is first present not in markup but in natural language. Accurate natural language processing is a very hard problem though and is best processed by AI/LLMs today, but this goes against what the article was going for when it's saying we shouldn't need AI if the semantic web had been done properly? For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework and https://en.wikipe…

Yeah. Wikidata

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

#187

Post by codr7 »

khazhoux wrote: post #84
codr7 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's all just smoke and mirrors.

Explain? The algorithms are surprisingly easy to understand. There is no trickery.

And the conclusions are delusional, especially given how easy it is for anyone to see there is nothing in there even resembling intelligence.

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

#188

Post by cdoctorow »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #125

I sympathize so much with the failure of personal computing to manifest! > 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 the answer using orders of magnitude fewer computational resources. And most importantly: the knowledge an…

For clarity, I stole "felony contempt of business-model" from Jay Freeman of the Cydia project.

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

#189

Post by jacobgkau »

svachalek wrote: post #139
jacobgkau wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What? No. With traditional tech stacks, humans are responsible for tagging and structuring data as they input it. With AI, the argument is that the AI system can do that instead (via inference), meaning humans can input it unstructured. They're both "real."

If you were trying to make a witty comment about AI's purported capabilities not existing/working well, then I personally agree that humans doing it would be smarter and more efficient.

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

#190

Post by cestith »

jandrese wrote: post #172
cestith wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything has to be named once and put into a hierarchy like a directory tree. Tags work well for data. A system like an LLM that understands synonyms and antonyms should be able to find and even update tags for concepts that don’t have a full set already - as long as there are a few appropriate tags on the concept to start.

In practice if you're making up tags on the fly it's not much better than untagged data. A LLM that can figure out what the tags mean can probably just infer it from the data anyway.

In practice applying flags from a curated list is not much at all like making up new tags on the fly.
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