enord

That’s a red herring. Ex post facto the activity of language use as a construction must supersede some enaction by capable actors.

This is a complete tautology in terms, and any dispute must therefore be over the ontology in which it is expressed. To elaborate how something came to be is not required to express that something is.

We either have the capacity to make boats and traverse the oceans or we don’t. These days almost nobody makes boats, but we sure used to and still can. What’s your point?

I didn’t say everyone learns it from scratch at least one, I said we did.

We did, at least once.

You know, i thought of the right response just now, browsing my flamewars two weeks later.

«Some degree» of agency is not even near sufficient identification of agency to synthesize it ex nihilo. There is no Axiom of Choice in real life, proof of existence is not proof of construction.

RDF is not magic and OWL is… showing its age.

If you are willing to eat the up-front cost of coordinating global resource identification— a daunting task make no mistake, you get non-trivial dataset integration almost for free. Imagine if concatenating two ginormous JSON documents describing different aspects of the same entity would amount to a useful merge into a single combined JSON. If you Need this with a big N, RDF has no alternative.

The rise of SSDs has also more or less obviated the need for clustered indexes as a practical performance consideration. For the small price of trebling your storage footprint, commodity RDF triplestores will index _all_ your attributes/columns without a schema (usually red/black or equiv). Will it scan an integer PK over 100b records as fast as postgres? No. Is that use case in your hot path? Also no (most likely).

Edit: as for OWL, just take the plunge into rule based inference directly. From forward chaining inference (if you want performance and decidability guarantees) all the way up to full blown prolog or [miniKanRen](http://minikanren.org/) (if you want it in a library in your runtime of choice)

None we have made from unliving things no. «agentic» is a 5$ word of ill construction. The literature is littered with the corpses of failed definitions of «agency», «planning», «goal dorected behavior». ‘Twas the death of the Expert System AI (now it’s just constraint solvers). It will be the death of attention/transformer AI before long, I wonder what banality we will bestow upon it.

Now agency is an end unto itself I wholeheartedly agree.

I feel though, that any worry about the agency of supercapable computer systems is premature until we see even the tiniest— and I mean really anything at all— sign of their agency. Heck, even agency _in theory_ would suffice, and yet: nada.

Chess is many things but it is not a tool. It is an end unto itself if anything of the sort.

I struggle with the notion of AI as an end unto itself, all the while we gauge its capabilities and define its intelligence by directing it to perform tasks of our choosing and judge by our criteria.

We could have dogs watch television on our behalf, but why would we?

Yes, having seen this from both ends the more «sciency» guys at reporting/analytics try to bring SOTA practices to bear before core business realizes a need.

If the need is in fact communicating $100bn design specifications between multiple transnational engineering and construction co’s, even the most grounded and pragmatic engineer will gladly inplement RDF and ontologies in the hot path. It’s the best tool for the job on the merits.

Sometimes they need a little nudge. A python or C# library here or there, just to take the edge off, you know?

If you’re pying a botique consultancy fat stacks to fix your megaCo’s absolute hairball data integration, the probability of RDF approaches 1 as price goes to ∞.

Trivial (as in ‘cat graphx graphy’) merging of complex data graphs is just too powerful.

If you thing self-checkout reduces clerk work by a factor of 10 you have not worked in low margin high throughput retail. Anyway, from experience i can tell you it’s a gradual affair.

That is… not the only thing a clerk does. Which is (more or less) the whole point in TFA.

5 thermostats in the right comfiguration can be a universal computer. Approximation, in the computational sense, is relative to some well defined function, which gives the approximation an ontology. The feasability of approximation is not disputed, but the content and nature of the ontology is a battlefield of motivated rhetoric.

Yes, this is arguing semantics but in this particular case, semantics is the whole point.

«Computationally universal»? Are you quite sure? Hoo boy pass the nitroglycerin hooooo aaah ohh after 80 years Turing was proven right after all ghasp

Take stock of how willing people are to believe in the miracle of technology. Add to that the desperation with which we try to improve education. Multiply by track record.

I don’t like those numbers.

None of this is remotely acceptable. We raise children so they can become like us. What are we? Depends on time, place and circumstance, all of which are in constant flux.

How or why regular human interaction gradually adjusts children to adulthood is a subject about which our most accurate asessment is that we know next to nothing.

If there is one path down which civilization as we know it may cease to exist, it starts here. All it takes is one generation of feral children. We will be celebrating increases in literacy and standardized test scores before we finally notice and it is too late.

Words escape me.

A good interface is one that allows the user to accurately assess the tradeoffs involved in using this program over some other solution.

In this vein any interface that requires you instantiate all kinds of library-specific structs just to call the relevant function, and conversely upon return, is hiding the actual surface area of the interaction boundary. This makes the aforementioned asessment harder.

This can of course be a justified tradeoff for intended use cases, and this is brings me to my point: An interface author must conscientiously and deliberately adapt the interface to intended use cases.

The user, on the other hand, cannot peer into the mind of the interface author and must measure the analogous intent and purpose of a given interface in the context of his particular requirements.

A good interface, then, is one which the author has designed and documented so that prospective users

(1) accurately determine its suitability to their specific use case,

and (2) are not suprised if and when they decide to make use of it.

Changing the intended use case by exposing or hiding configurability, inverting control or establishing «sane» defaults is a red herring. It has no bearing on the goodness of the interface. Goodness comes from wether configurabiliy, inversion or defaults are apparent to the user.

Edit: spelling/phrasing

Ofcourse an electric circuit cannot be «recursive» as such, because the physical ontology in which they are defined does not admit mereological (part/whole) relations, that would be «spooky action at a distance».

The signal function, being an interpretation (or specification) of the circuit, is a metaphysical ontology and is often defined in terms of itself at adjacent points in it’s domain, i.e mereological in nature, which is to say: recursive.

If you _need_ «metrics» it’s because you _really_ don’t understand the contribution of your reports.

i.e. you are not a competent manager by the usual understanding of «competent».

Having just furnished a house we bought last fall, Ive been to a few furniture stores ltely. I’ll tell you, _a_ plan, even a psychologically nefaruous plan, beats _no_ plan any day of the week.

Translate to what? The next likely string of characters? How would this executive even interact with it? Sibling comment of yours mentioned extracting low level steps from high level tasks but it needed another language model (no kidding!) to map to the «most likely» of the admissable actions. I mean, this shit is half baked even in theory.

All that remains is a small matter of programming…

Wait what? Glue as in extract high level semantic representations from _syntatic probabilities_ and pass on to appropriate domain specific tools?

This is the glaring hole in LLMs, a paradoxical semantic incoherence despite impressive sentenial and gramatical coherence.

As glue it is so thin as to be potable.

What the… do you think the artist you and your clique dismiss as not making «the real art» are peddling in trash? Wasting their efforts clamoring for recognitiom from «an entrenched network art curators, directors and connoseurs»?

That the gilded creators of «the real art» want your pity? To be construed as without agency in all of this?

You elitist buffoon, you know not of what you speak. You know what you like, but you dislike and question the motives of that which you do not know nor care to. Keep it to yourself.

Oh A for sure! People are not idiots (generally). It is in fact not just us, the cool smart guys, who «see the world for what it really is» or «don’t like to waste our time with pointless sophistry». Everybody does!

I can tell you’re the kind of thoughtful serious guy who likes good, tasteful and neccesary things, and yet! You dislike bad, tasetless and unneeded things. I do too, and so does everyone else, on balance.

Ps: I feel obliged to remind you to not say the quiet part out loud. Not because the elephant in the room might trample you, but because at least one reader had to muster heroic amounts of good faith to not dismiss out of hand the substance of your post due to form. And even still, I could not abstain from this disclaimer.

If you do not see how you are subverting the very argument that states your position, I don’t know what to tell you.

If you do — touché; well played to you Sir!

Ok captain cocksure, this being month one:

What was practitioners in the field of computer generated art able to do in month minus one, how has this changed subtstantively, and do they offer any experience, criticism or understanding of the practice that might still apply? If not, which and why?

I’m as bedazzled by the blinkenlichten of prompts and generated images as the next guy, but I must confess I don’t have the foggiest what those guys were (and probably still are) doing before Dall-E. If the needle really is bending against the post I would take their word for it.

You have convinced me quite thoroughly that you have not availed yourself much of what modern art has on offer.

If I am right, it would behoove you to not speak so surely of that which you do not know or care to understand.

Gp calls out certain declarations of disruption to be hot air, then argues the point.

Gp then proceeds to declare «Stable Diffusion» to be Capital D disruptive, bemoans the unfortunate destiny of the world’s now disrupted artists but, curiously, does in fact not argue the point.