AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by heresie-dabord » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

random3 wrote: post #47

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…

Perhaps, but we still failed and not at personal computing, nor just semantic web, but computing and programming in general. The failure is between the original intent (computing was originally more or less AI) along with theory and actual result with every software project turning into unsustainable infinite regress. Things likely broke around ALGOL. Also LLMs are failing too, for different reasons, but IMO unlikely…

> we still failed [at] semantic web

The most reprehensible knowledge-search-and-communication failure of all.

We gave people monetisation of drek instead. Then asked them to use it for education. Then trained bot systems on it. Then said that even those answers must be made to confirm to transient propagandists.

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

#72

Post by tempfile » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

This take is very naive and should anticipate the obvious criticism: people did try, very very hard, to create structured information systems. They simply did not work. The sort of systems people tend to build are well-scoped for a particular problem, but fall apart completely when moving out of that domain. It is very easy to imagine an information system that results in correct answering of flag questions. It is a wide open problem to come up with a way of tagging information that works well for flag questions and for questions about memes, or art. It's not like Google didn't try!

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

#73

Post by sudohalt » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

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.

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

#74

Post by thewebguyd » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

llbbdd wrote: post #66

thewebguyd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public. That's a cultural and societal problem, not a technology problem. The motivations (profit) are wrong, and don't lead to true innovations, only to financialization. So long as people need to pay to eat, then information will also want to continue to be paid for, and our…

You need profit or you need post-scarcity or nothing works at all

I'd argue that resource availability is already high enough to alleviate scarcity for most people, and that most scarcity today is artificially generated, because of profit.

We won't achieve post scarcity, even with widespread automation (if AI ever brings that to fruition), because we haven't yet fixed the benefits that wealth brings, so the motivation to work toward a post-scarcity society just doesn't exist.

Kind of a chicken and egg problem.

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

#75

Post by whartung » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

ctoth wrote: post #33

bkummel wrote: post #30

Yeah 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!

Precisely this. This article might seem reasonable to anybody who has never tried to organize something as simple as a local music collection.

Well, this runs straight into one of the massive, concrete pillars of computing: naming things.

Because that’s what a lot of this falls into.

Overwhelming amount of stuff with no names. No categories, no nothing.

With extended file attributes we could hang all sorts of meta bits off of arbitrary files. But that’s very fragile.

So we ask the systems to make up names for data based on their content, which turns out to not necessarily work as well as we might like.

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

#76

Post by seydor » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

Chatgpt does not build semantic maps. we know it has some attention maps, but really fuzzy how it uses them

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

#77

Post by seydor » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

foundart wrote: post #7

Expresses a longing for the semantic web. > Remember Semantic Web? The web was supposed to evolve into semantically structured, linked, machine-readable data that would enable amazing opportunities. That never happened. I think the lesson to be learned is in answering the question "Why didn't the semantic web happen?"

because semantic web was more limited than language

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

#78

Post by fouc » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

headcanon wrote: post #19

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…

"Semantic web was a standard suggested by Google", sorry that's false. They only contributed a bit towards it.

Tim Berners-Lee coined it in 1999 and further expanded on the concept in a 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila.

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

#79

Post by fouc » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

I would argue that LLM is ultimately making true Semantic Web available, or irrelevant.

It can basically figure out all the semantic knowledge graphs automatically for us, and it's multi-modal to boot. That means it can infer the relationships between any node across text, audio, images, videos, and even across different languages.

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

#80

Post by throwaway346434 » Fri, Aug 08, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #57

Uh, the author got so close to make the same realization I had while working on a project [0] for the Wikimedia Foundation: we wouldn't need search engines if we had better tooling to query semantic databases like wikidata. However, the thing that the author might be missing is that the semantic web exists . [1] The problem is that the tools that we can use to access it are not being developed by Big Tech. Remember F…

ChatGPT etc does an OK job at SPARQL generation. Try something like "generate a list of all supermarkets, including websites, country, description" and you get usable queries out.

In a much, much more limited way, this is what I was dabbling with with alltheprices - queries to pull data from wikidata, crawling sites to pull out the schema.org Product and offers, and publish the aggregate.