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AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing

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

#91

Post by xigoi »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #46
ajkjk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eh I feel this but it's a lot simpler than that. Not "if everyone built everything correctly" but "if everyone's work was even slightly better than complete garbage". I do not see many examples of companies building things that are not complete embarrassing shit. I worked at some companies and the things we built was complete embarrassing shit. The reasons are obvious: nobody cares internally to do it, and nobody ext…

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

They are on the same side of the “number of serious design flaws due to historical incidents” spectrum.

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

#92

Post by yeyeyeyeyeyeyee »

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!

Librarians have succeeded in precisely this for a long time now.

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

#95

Post by autoexec »

jvreeland wrote: post #56

I think I broadly agree with this. I am super frustrated that everythign always wants me to search for things. As an example Finders default search while looking at a folder is the whole machine instead of a filter in the directory you are viewing in seems totally insane to me. It's almost like they don't want me to know where my files are. I can understand that it's a result, to a degree of cloud services and people…

> It's almost like they don't want me to know where my files are.

I think this might actually be true in some cases. Especially where companies want your files on their cloud servers. It's better for them if you don't think about what's stored locally or remotely. It's better for them if you don't think at all and just ask them for whatever you want and let them decide what to show you or keep hidden from you. It's easier for them to get metrics on what you're doing if you type it out explicitly in a search box than it is for them to track you as you browse through a hierarchy you designed to get to what you want. You're supposed to feel increasingly helpless and dependent on them.

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

#97

Post by 1gn15 »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #90
abeppu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Optimistically, the semantic web is going to happen. Just that instead of the original plan of website owners willingly making data machine-readable, LLMs will be the ones turning non-machine-readable data machine-readable (which can then be processed by user agents), even if the website owner prefers you looked at the ads instead.

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

#98

Post by jacobgkau »

fouc wrote: post #79

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.

The question is whether humans specifying the relationships between nodes is more or less reliable than LLMs inferring those relationships.

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

#99

Post by jkaptur »

"... if all knowledge were stored in a structured way with rich semantic linking..." this sounds a lot like Google's "Knowledge Graph". https://developers.google.com/knowledge-graph. (Disclosure: I work at Google.)

If you ask an LLM where you can find a structured database of knowledge with structured semantic links, they'll point you to this and other knowledge graphs. TIL about Diffbot!

In my experience, it's a lot more fun to imagine the perfect database like this than it is to work with the actual ones people have built.

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

#100

Post by discostrings »

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…

I think you're confusing XHTML and semantic web on the "break web pages" part.
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