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Comment by crvdgc | Hacker News Reader

> imagine a folder full of skills that covers tasks like the following:

> Where to get US census data from and how to understand its structure

Reminds me of my first time using Wolfram Alpha and got blown away by its ability to use actual structured tools to solve the problem, compared to normal search engine.

In fact, I tried again just now and am still amazed: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=what%27s+the+total+popu...

I think my mental model for Skills would be Wolfram Alpha with custom extensions.

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When clicking your link, for me it opened the following query on Wolfram Alpha: `what%27s the total population of the United States%3F`

Funnily enough, this was the result: `6.1% mod 3 °F (degrees Fahrenheit) (2015-2019 American Community Survey 5-year estimates)`

I wonder how that was calculated...

Wolfram alpha never took input in such a natural language. But something like population(USA) and many variations thereof work.

tbh wolfram alpha was the craziest thing ever. haven't done much research on how this was implemented back in the day but to achieve what they did for such complex mathematical problems without AI was kind of nuts

Wolfram Alpha is AI. It's just not an LLM. AI has been a thing since the 60s. LLMs will also become "not AI" in a few years probably.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The marketing that LLM=AI seems to have been interpreted as “_only_ LLM=AI”

I think the difference now is that traditional software ultimately comes down to a long series of if/then statements (also the old AI's like Wolfram), whereas the new AI (mainly LLM's) have a fundamentally different approach.

Look into something like Prolog (~50 years old) to see how systems can be built from rules rather than it/else statements. It wasn't all imperative programming before LLMs.

If you mean that it all breaks down to if/else at some level then, yeah, but that goes for LLMs too. LLMs aren't the quantum leap people seem to think they are.

maybe not on their own - but having enough computing power to use LLMs in a way we do now and actually using them is quite a leap.

They are from the user POV. Not necessarily in a good way.

The whole point of algorithmic AI was that it was deterministic and - if the algorithm was correct - reliable.

I don't think anyone expected that soft/statistical linguistic/dimensional reasoning would be used as a substitute for hard logic.

It has its uses, but it's still a poor fit for many problems.

Yeah, the result is pretty cool. It's probably how it felt to eat pizza for the first time. People had been grinding grass seeds into flour, mixing with water and putting it on hot stones for millennia. Meanwhile others had been boiling fruits into pulp and figuring out how to make milk curdle in just the right way. Bring all of that together and, boom, you have the most popular food in the world.

We're still at the stage of eating pizza for the first time. It'll take a little while to remember that you can do other things with bread and wheat, or even other foods entirely.

You're talking about non-deterministic algorithms, who yes are often associated with AI but existed way before LLM's

I doubt that if the underlying parts changed, anyone outside the industry or enthusiasts would know what that is. How many people know what kind of engine is in their car? I stomp on the floor of my Corolla and away we go! Others might know that their Dodge Challenger has a Hemi. What even is that? Thankfully we have the Internet these days, and someone who's interested can just select the word and right click to Google for the Wikipedia article for it. AI is just such an entirely undefined term coloquially, that any attempts to define it will be wrong.

It is basically another take on Lisp, and the development approach Lisp Machines had, repackaged in a more friendly syntax.

Lisp was the AI language until the first AI Winter took place, and also took Prolog alongside it.

Wolfram Alpha basically builds on them, to put in a very simplistic way.

It's one of the only M-expression versions of Lisp. All the weird stuff about Wolfram Language suddenly made sense when I saw it through that lens

Would really like something selfhosted that does the basic Wolfram Alpha math things.

Doesn't need the craziest math capability but standard symbolic math stuff like expression reduction, differentiation and integration of common equations, plotting, unit wrangling.

All with an easy to use text interface that doesn't require learning.

That's wolfram mathematica.

Try maxima, it's open source:

https://maxima.sourceforge.io/

I used it when it was called Macsyma running on TOPS-20 (and a PDP-10 / Decsystem-20).

Text interface will require a little learning, but not much.

Maxima is amazing and has a GUI. My only beef with it is it doesn't show its work step by step.

Personal faves:

- Mathematica

- Maple

- MathStudio (mobile)

- Ti-89 calculator (high school favorite)

Others:

- SageMath

- GNU Octave

- SymPy

- Maxima

- Mathcad

TI-89 has surprisingly good symbolics tools and solvers for something that runs all year on a single set of AAA batteries. Feels like magic alien tech.

Thank you for being honest.

I used it a lot for calc as it would show you how they got the answer if I remember right, also liked how it understands symbols which ibv but cool to paste an integral sign in there

> without AI

We only call it AI until we understand it.

Once we understand LLMs more and there's a new promising poorly understood technology, we'll call our current AI something more computer sciency

My favorite definition of AI: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." - Larry Tesler, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

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