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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

#81

Post by dreamcompiler »

xandrius wrote: post #28
Kapura wrote: 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…

Is counting the number of B's vital? Also, I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to parse text the way you want it, it just doesn't see your text as you do, so that simple operation is not straightforward. Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"?

Let's say I hire a plumber because of his plumbing expertise and he bills me $35 and I pay him with a $50 bill and he gives me back $10 in change. He insists he's right about this.

I am now completely justified in worrying about whether the pipes he just installed were actually made of butter.

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

#82

Post by tekno45 »

xandrius wrote: post #28
Kapura wrote: 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…

Is counting the number of B's vital? Also, I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to parse text the way you want it, it just doesn't see your text as you do, so that simple operation is not straightforward. Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"?

if i have to talk to it a specific way, why not just use programming. The specific way we talk to computers effectively...

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

#83

Post by roadside_picnic »

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

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 even involvement in the early Semweb standards such as RDF [1] and OWL [2]. I worked with some of the people involved in the latter (not closely though), and at the time Google was still quite small.

0. https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780062515872/mode/2up

1. https://www.w3.org/TR/PR-rdf-syntax/Overview.html

2. https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/

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

#84

Post by khazhoux »

codr7 wrote: post #40
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…

Except it's all just smoke and mirrors.

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

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

#85

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

thewebguyd wrote: post #54
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad clicks are a trifle compared to the possibility of winning the game of displacing vast amounts of labor and delivering ads and narratives undisclosed through conversational AI output. At that point you've won the economy, period.

> winning the game of displacing vast amounts of labor and delivering ads and narratives undisclosed through conversational AI output. At that point you've won the economy, period. In a functional democracy, all you should win by doing that is harsh antitrust action.

Yes that's why my opposition to LLMs is contextual. If it had been invented 30 years ago I'd have been optimistic about it.

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

#86

Post by xandrius »

squigz wrote: post #34
xandrius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is counting the number of B's vital? Also, I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to parse text the way you want it, it just doesn't see your text as you do, so that simple operation is not straightforward. Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"?

> 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.

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

#87

Post by tjr »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #83
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 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…

Some ideas going back even further than that, like 1994:

https://philip.greenspun.com/research/shame-and-war-old

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

#88

Post by BobaFloutist »

tempfile wrote: post #67
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....

Programming languages are not on a spectrum. I guess they dislike the syntax of JS and the low-level no-batteries of C.

Programming languages, like literally everything else, are on many spectra.

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

#89

Post by throwaway346434 »

neilalexander wrote: post #10
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?"

> "Why didn't the semantic web happen?" Advertising.

To a degree re ads on pages, but why didn't big business end up publishing all of their products in JSON-LD or similar? A lot did, to get aggregated, but not all.

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

#90

Post by dreamcompiler »

abeppu wrote: post #14
Workaccount2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Why didn't the semantic web happen?" Because web content is generated by humans, not engineers.

But also because companies that produce web content wanted it to be seen by humans who would look at ads, not consumed by bots and synthesized with other info into a product owned by some other firm.

And yet today most websites are being scraped by LLM bots which don't look at ads and which synthesize with other info into a product owned by some other firm.
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