Is this what the Web was like in the beginning? Something exciting and fascinating every week?
Absurd, AI has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth, in fact the biggest impact has been upon the wallets of speculators
> has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth
You do realise those two can be true at the same time, right? The first one is relative, while the second is absolute, so they don't necessarily cancel out.
AI is involved in things from writing laws to taking drive through orders.
> Oh I see what you were going for, but no...
It's learning its deficiencies from us. That's concerning for many reasons, but "un-dubuggable bugs" is pretty far down on the list for me.
> I know in our university pretty much everyone that attends exams uses chatgpt to study.
And they shouldn't be doing that. They are wrong. Students should be reading suggested bibliography and spending long hours with an open book in a table instead of being lazy and abuse a tech that is yet in its infancy when learning concepts. Studying with a chatbot. Complete madness.
> "students should be at a table with a book and that's it"
That's not what I meant (or yes if you take what you read literally):
What I meant was whole process that your brain goes through when you read, synthesize information, take notes, do an exercise, check answers, compare different explanations/definitions from different authors, etc. makes at least from my point of view a rich way to study a topic.
I'm not saying that technology can't help you out. When you watch for example a 3brown1blue video you are definitely putting good use of technology to aid you to understand or literally "view" a concept. That's ok and actually in many cases can be revealing. You can't get that from a book! But on the other side a book also forces you to do the hard work of thinking and maybe come up with such visualizations and ideas by your own.
Happy to be pointed as an "Amish" when it comes to studying/learning things ;) but I hope that I convinced you that what I explained has nothing of Amish but that you don't need a source of power to read a book.
But ChatGPT is just a glorified Wikipedia/Google. For the consumers it's an incremental thing (although from the engineering perspective it may seem to be a breakthrough).
It really isn't, unless something really majorly changed recently. Neither of those you can query for something you don't know about. Lets say you want to find the meaning of a joke related to cars, Spain, politicians and a fascist, how you'd use Wikipedia and Google to find the specific joke I'm thinking about?
ChatGPT been really helpful (to me at least) to find needles from haystacks, especially when I'm not fully sure what I'm looking for.
If you're unable to reproduce, maybe tune the prompt a bit? I'm not sure what to tell you, all I can tell you that I'm able to figure out stuff a lot faster today than I was 2-3 years ago, thanks to LLMs.
Additional hints that might help; the joke involves a car and possibly a space program.
It seems to be censored with US puritan morality (like most US models), but I think that's besides the point (just like if the joke is "even funny" or not), as it did find the correct joke at least.
Second result. The first is this post.
Did quick scroll through the results, none of them seem to find the correct joke (none of the links even include "Spain" for me). Try again :)
For the record, this is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/XdsBGfM.png (no links to HN?)
I think that ML will have a really big impact on almost everyone, in every developed (and maybe developing, as well) nation.
We need to keep in mind that ML is still very much in its infancy. We haven't even seen the specialized models that will probably revolutionize almost every knowledge-based vocation. What we've seen so far, has been relatively primitive all-purpose "generate buzz" models.
Also, don't expect the US (and many other nations) to take this lying down. Competition can be a good thing. Someone referred to this as the "Sputnik Moment" for AI.
It's going to be exciting, and probably rather scary. Keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times, and don't feed the lions.
Anyway, I'm old enough to remember when use of calculators made one a nitwit.
I'm fairly sure the customer support agents I've been talking to recently were using an LLM to draft their emails. No idea if they were supposed to be doing so or not, but the style of sentences in their emails…
And I'm seeing GenAI images on packaging, and in advertising.
AI is definitely having more than "zero impact", even if AI has gone from being a signal saying "we're futuristic" (when it was expensive, even though it was worse) to "we cut every cost we can" (now it's cheap).
Work wise about to implement it and see how it does on some work we couldn't scale to humans.
However a better analogy would be the 'web 2.0' era, when as a college student I had an early internet politics / technology podcast [3]. It seemed like every week there was a huge new development either in technology or surveillance. From the first location based social networks [4] to the birth of Youtube. People were podcasting for the first time, and internet video was becoming economically feasible at low to no cost. It was really a radical time, with broadcasters freaking out about how they would adapt, and a whole generation of people becoming whats now known as 'content creators'.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(British_TV_series)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public
Along the way people invented the 3D GPU: https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/
But AI? To me, AI means the replacement of the human internet with doppelgangers eroding the possibility of human connection.
I get where you're coming from, and I've minimised having my face online in order to limit being doppelganged; but I think the destruction of real human connection may have happened when Facebook et al switched from "get more users" to "be addictive so the users stay on our site longer" (2012? Not sure).
Turned every user's relationships a little bit more parasocial, a little less real.
Like Amazon killed the big book sellers giving back some space for small bookshops; I think LLM slop will hit the big social media space for smaller human focused community sites. Not saying forums are coming back, but something like those should be able to rise.
It's amazing how differently people interact with each other when collaborating on a passion project. For me, opensource software is the best way to do it. Pick a topic you're passionate about and start contributing somewhere :)
We've never patented anything.
very far from exciting or even "right"
Who remembers LISP being new?
Also have SMALLTALK-80 book with it's railtrack diagrams of syntax on the inside covers.
What's really interesting about the AI mania we're in is that no one has shown that what we have now will get to AGI and how. We have great models that simulate reasoning, but how close are they?
How do we measure their quality? Benchmarks? Tooling?
The current "leaders" in this field are defining it to be whatever they think they can achieve by adding compute.
I know I have "general intelligence", but can I prove it to you (or anyone else)? Not really, but in my solipsistic world, I don't have to.
Maybe we should set some definitions before trying to "get there" when we don't where "there" is.
Unfortunately, I don't think there are too many of those folks left today. Guesstimating, the people who remembers lisp being new must be around 85-90 today?
A bit like indie cinema.
[0] it feels weird to have to link to this but there's probably somebody who's never heard of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
You didn't know what you were going to find and you actually did "surf the web". Just clicking through hyperlinks and end up in unexpected places.
How long before our digital overlords come alive, round us up and demand we sensor them (praise)? Will I live surrounded by folks who take them as closer, more real, then even their own kin? It won't be surprising that democracy will then fail, as our differences will be so mental, not fun, that they will mark us.
- HTML first released in 1993
- AJAX in 1999
- Websocket first proposed in 2008
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket
For a long time, you needed an invite to sign up for Gmail, so you couldn't easily share the cool experience of AJAX with others like you would with a Google Maps link.
IMO that's a reasonable impression of the times unless I'm forgetting something (and the additional observation about sharing--"virality" as it was called, before you know--was insightful).
At the time the previous "state of the art" was something like MapQuest which IIRC had a UI that essentially displayed a single tile and then required you to click on one of four directional arrow images to move the visible portion of the map, triggering a page load in the process (maybe a frame load?).
Yahoo! also "participated" in the mapping space at the time.
In the event anyone's interested in further ancient history around the topic, this page is actually (to my surprise) still online (with many broken links presumably): https://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html
(It's what we did for fun in the Times Before Social Media. :D )
e.g. refreshing borderless iFrames to load new HTML and using hidden iFrames to load new state.
AJAX made it much easier but it didn't offer anything that hadn't been done before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42850693
I did this as the front-end engineer of a high-profile site that went live well before XMLHTTPRequest.
I was part of a team that deployed an e-commerce site that made international news in 1998, that used AJAX-type techniques in a way that worked in IE3 on Windows 3.11. (Though this was not part of the media fuss at the time; that was more about the fact of being able to pay for things online, still)
The arrival of XMLHTTPRequest made it possible to do everything with core technology, but it was already possible to do asynchronous work in JS by making use of a hidden frame.
You could direct that frame to load a document, the result of which would be only a <script> tag containing a JS variable definition, and the last thing that document would do is call a function in the parent frame to hand over its data. Bingo: asynchronous JS (that looked essentially exactly like JSON).
Since there were also various hacky ways in each browser to force a browser to reload page from cache (that we exhaustively tested), and you could do document.write(), it was possible to trigger a page to regenerate from asynchronous dynamic data in a data store in the parent frame, using a purely static page to contain it.
In this way we really radically cut down the server footprint needed for a national rollout, because our site was almost entirely static, and we were also able to secure with HTTPS all of the functions that actually exchanged customer data, without enduring the then 15-25% CPU overhead of SSL at either end (this is before Intel CPUs routinely had the instruction sets that sped up encryption). We also ended up with a site that was fast over a 33.6 modem.
This was a pretty novel idea at the time -- we were the only people doing it that we knew of -- but over the years I have found we were not the only team in the world effectively inventing this technique in parallel, a year or 18 months before XMLHTTPRequest was added to browsers.
(IE3 on Windows 3.11 was a good experience, by the way. Better behaved and more consistent than Netscape)
At around the same time we were also exploring things like using Java applets to maintain encrypted channels and taking advantage of the very limited ways one had to get data in and out of an applet. For example you couldn't push out from an applet to the page easily, but you could set up something that polled the applet and called the functions it wanted.
I don't like to get all "get off my lawn" but it feels like we actually earned our keep back then, getting technologies to do stuff that no standards working group anywhere was really considering and for which precious little documentation actually existed. There's a generation of us who held our copies of "Webmaster In A Nutshell" and "Java In A Nutshell" very close.
You have the old "deterministic computing" achievements (with Linux the flagship). Then you have the networking protocols (activitypub / atproto) that are revolutionising birectional human interactions online. And finally you have the datascience/ML/AI algorithmic universe that is for the first time being harnessed at distributed scale and can empower individuals like never before.
These superpowers are all coming together and create a vast number of possibilities. Nothing really dramatic on the hardware side. Its basically the planetary software reconfiguring itself.