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Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
41–50 of 144 posts
Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
#42[flagged]
As the author I can assure you there’s a human behind these words. Interesting times me live in though, I find myself questioning what’s AI and what’s not often too and at the moment we’ve offloaded that responsibility to the good will of authors or platform policy which might have to change soon
Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
#43I was having exact same observation, albeit from a bit diffrent perspective: SaaS. This is where as the code tends to be temporary and very domain specific, the data (files) must strive to be boring standards. The problem today is that we build specific, short-lived apps that lock data into formats only they can read. If you don't use universal formats, your system is fragile. We can still open JPEGs from 1995 becaus…
My 10+ year old photo management system [1] relies on the file system and EXIF as the source of truth for my entire photo library. It’s proven several times over that it’s the correct approach. Abstractions (formerly Google photos, currently Immich) should just be built on top - but these proprietary databases are only for convenience. For work, I’m having the same experience as the author and everything is just mark…
I have your repo starred from a post/comment you made a few weeks ago but haven't had time to actually use/integrate it with my own stuff.
What are your thoughts on XMP sidecar files? I'm torn right now between digital negative + external metadata versus all-in-one image with mutable properties. Portability vs. Durability etc.
Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
#44[flagged]
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Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
#45Over a number of files similar to a codebase, that are well organized (like a codebase) the coding agents and harnesses are quite good at finding information, they clearly train on them so they will only improve.
The challenge is how to structure messy data as a filesystem the agent can use. That is a lot harder than querying a vector db for a semantic query.
The code bases we’ve been using agents in had been pruned and maintained over years, we’ve got principles like DRY that pushed us to put the answer in one place… implicitly building and maintaining that graph with all the actors in the system invested in maintaining this. This is not the case for messy data, so while I see the authors point and agree that a filesystem is a better structure for context over time, we haven’t supplanted search yet for non-code data.
Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
#46[flagged]
LLMs were trained on stuff that people wrote. I get there are "tells", but don't really think people are as good at identifying AI generated text as they think they are...
I wouldn't have picked this article as AI until I got an agent to do some writing for me and read a bunch of it to figure out if I can stand behind it. Now I see the tells everywhere "It's not this. It's that." is particularly common and I can't unsee it. (FWIW I rewrote most of the writing it generated, but it did help me figure out my structure and narrative)
The problem I think with AI generated posts is that you feel like you can't trust the content once it's AI. It could be partly hallucinated, or misrepresented.
Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I'm not a fan of AI and try to avoid it, but there is a difference from AI output published by someone knowledgeable and any other AI output that you run by yourself. If an expert looked at the result and found it to be ok, then you can have some assurance that it at least makes sense. Your own AI run doesn't mean anything, it could be 100% hallucination and a non-expert will buy it as truth.
Unfortunately, LLM slop now makes up >53% of the web, and is growing.
It is easy to spot the compacted token distribution unique to each model, but search engines still seem to promote nonsense content. =3
"Bad Bot Problem - Computerphile"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjQNDCYL5Rg
"A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator "
Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
#48As TFA basically says: files on a filesystem is a DB. Just a very crude one. There aren't nice indexes for a variety of things. "Views" are not really there (arguably you can create different views with links but it's, once again, very crude). But it's definitely a DB, represented as a tree indeed as TFA mentions. My life's data, including all the official stuff (bank statements, notary acts, statements made to the p…
It's not "crude" if you get hierarchical organization without having to screw around with RECURSIVE, or "closure this" and "closure that". It just works.
Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wild is that with a few minutes of manual editing it would give exponential return. For instance, a lead sentence in your section saying "here's why X" that was already described by your subheading is unnecessary and could have been wholly removed.
Exponential return? This is the front page of HN! What does exponential returns even look like? Are you saying this post is a few edits away from becoming a New York Times bestseller?
No, I guess I meant editing to approach a text that doesn't look rushed over (LLM generation is a subset of such poor writings)
But you're right, it did hit the front page, and that says more about my sensibilities not lining up with whoever is voting the article up.
Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
#50[flagged]
This doesn't seem particularly AI slopped to me.
"Not bigger than databases. Different from databases.
It's not a website you go to — it's a little spirit that lives on your machine.
Not a chatbot. A tool that reads and writes files on your filesystem.
That's not a technical argument. It's a values argument."