Not sure if you're familiar with this or not, but that concept appears as part of the story in the novel[1] and movie[2] "Johnny Got His Gun". The premise is based on a badly injured soldier during WWI who has lost his ability to speak, see, hear, etc. He communicates by banging his head on his pillow in Morse Code. Many scenes from that movie are interspersed throughout the video to the song "One"[3] by Metallica.
See, to me, you're just leaning into the outdated and archaic aspect of this. Sure, that's the way encyclopedia's have been for a long time. But none of that means that they need to continue to work the same way. Technologies change, times change, standards change.
And that said... this whole issue may become moot anyway. Perhaps LLM powered AI systems (or whatever comes after them) will take the place of Wikipedia for certain classes of queries, that one might want to conduct. Eg, if a person wants to know about Odin and ChatGPT or Gemini can tell them all about Odin, maybe it's less important that Odin have a dedicated Wikipedia page (note: just an example, I'm not trying to make any particular commentary on Odin per-se).
Not really relevant in this case (that the article talks about), but I don't think that it is so cut and dry as "someone spent time on this so we have to keep it".
No, and I'm not arguing for that. Just pointing out that that insidious nature makes contributing to Wikipedia a questionable activity for (a few|some|many|???) people.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for having NO standards at all for what's included, but I think there's room to rethink the nature of some of those standards.
Wikipedia seems stuck in an antiquated worldview where things like traditionally-published books with second- or third-hand reports of what happened, and which are frequently incomplete or wholly inaccurate, are nonetheless considered more authoritative than primary sources you can find with a ten-second Google search.
So much this. Wikipedia's processes and policies are - in ways - an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time. OTOH, I don't have a definitive answer ready "off the cuff" on what the standard should be. But I think everybody involved needs to acknowledge that the current setup is wrong, and needs serious thought and revision.
And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time.
It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all, TBH. I mean, you can spend hours on top of hours working on something and have it all mooted in a few seconds.
You're right, I was looking at submissions for userplane.io[1] and over-fixated on it only being submitted twice. My mistake. Nonetheless, the basic principle is the same. Looking at their submission history it appears to be almost all self-promotional and correspondingly many of the submissions are [dead]. As far as I can tell, that's what happens here. (aside: I'm just commenting based on observation of the years, I'm not anybody "official" here or anything).
Nothing weird about it. The HN guidelines[1] make it clear, IMO, that while some self-promotion is fine, the intent here is NOT to use the site primarily (or exclusively) for self-promotion. The account that submitted the userplane.io link had only ever submitted two links, and both were to userplane.io. What do you expect to happen?
Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
> After a few more experiences like that, I've mostly stopped posting because it doesn't feel like the effort is worth it
Ironically this is exactly the wrong response. You should post more, but more stuff that's simply intellectually interesting, and not just to promote your own stuff. But if your only reason for being here is self-promotion, then you're right... not worth it. shrug
Speaking as Libertarian, I generally agree that the two major parties have been more alike than different over most of my 50+ years on Earth. But right this minute, I think the Dark Enlightenment dorks and their neo-fascist bullshit have completely captured the Republican Party to the extent that the Democrats are clearly much more favorable. For my part, I'm at a place I never thought I'd be: actively donating money to Democratic candidates and overtly supporting their campaigns, and planning to vote for some of them in the upcoming election. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth for sure, but to me it feels like what has to be done in the moment.
> The surge of authoritarianism is a response from people who, much like you, have tried to unplug but who realized closing their eyes does not stop the changing world around them.
I'm not really following your logic there. If the argument is that people choosing to disengage allows the rise of authoritarianism, I could buy some of that. And I'll accept whatever guilt I deserve. But I don't see how that could be the proximate cause of the surge of enthusiasm for authoritarianism. I believe it has more to do with macro-scale world events. And I'm sure one could construct a "just so story" to run the trail back as far as one wants, but I think an awful lot of it can be traced back to the 2008 financial crisis. That along with the continued deterioration of the middle class, rising wealth inequality, etc. And, as much as I kinda hate to say it, I think there's a hint of lingering White angst over having had a Black POTUS for the first time not so terribly long ago.
I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong,
No worries. And for what it's worth, I'm not - for various reasons - going to elaborate on everything that's on my mind, or every action I still take, or hope to take, in the name of trying to support the aforementioned "freedom and Enlightenment ideals". I'm not trying to write an essay here on HN or anything. :-) My reasoning is in part that if I stop sending time engaging with people on Facebook / Twitter / etc. then I can spend that time on higher value activities.
That said, I'm just a regular Joe (er, "Phil") and I'm no hero. I figure I do what I can in the end I can live with that.
> Do you think humans in the future in general will be more or less happy than they are now?
I honestly have no idea. I strongly want to be optimistic and I am generally an optimist by nature. But recent events have made it hard to justify a lot of optimism. I have a fear that we are rapidly sliding into a straight-up cyberpunk dystopia to rival anything from sci-fi.
And sadly it's not just what's going on with technology that fosters my doubts. It's the apparent surge of enthusiasm worldwide - but particularly in the United States - for various brands of authoritarianism and fascism, the wholesale abandonment of Enlightenment ideals about individual freedom and the nature of justice, the loss of respect for science, logic, and reason, and the rising preference for various brands of mysticism, superstition, and magical thinking over rational thinking. Not to mention more overt nationalism, jingoism, bigotry, attacks on minorities of all flavors... Yeah, I gotta be honest, optimism is hard to come by right now.
All in all, this has led to me choosing to drop Facebook (which was the main place I was exposed to a lot of public discussion on this stuff) and to aggressively tune my Twitter feed to eliminate most political stuff. I had to do it to protect my own mental health. And while I feel guilty about the sense of abdicating my responsibility to be involved and to play a role in trying to improve things, I have had to accept that there's not a lot I can do as an individual - at least in terms of influencing other people. I still vote, donate to campaigns, donate to charities I support (EFF, for example) and so on though. I'm not completely checking out, but I was getting way too stressed before to keep dealing with this shit.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. But despite all that, I still hold out some hope for a better future. Time will tell, I guess.
My first intuition is that we don't have a (generally accepted) definition of AGI that's rigorous enough to really have this conversation. I've heard people make convincing arguments in favor of:
* We won't have AGI, ever.
* We won't have AGI for another 50 years
* We'll have AGI in 2029
* We already have AGI
* We've had AGI since 2021
and so on. So clearly there's a broad spectrum of definitions at work in all of this.
My personal take? I wouldn't call anything we have today "AGI" just yet. And I generally think that just making bigger and bigger LLM's probably isn't the path. OR, I might say that "making bigger and bigger LLM's" could theoretically get to AGI, but if that does happen, the result will be so computationally inefficient that it would still be worth researching other (better) ways to get there. As an aside, I guess it's implicit in what I just said, but to say it explicitly: I believe there are almost certainly multiple different ways to get to AGI.
With all of that said, I think there's probably a lot of value in leveraging well known and understood algorithms that run efficiently (on CPU, maybe GPU, maybe on analog computer, whatever) in combination with neural networks (whether using Transformer architecture or something different). I find myself drawn to looking into neuro-symbolic techniques, and looking at ways to reuse some older ideas like stuff inspired by Minsky's "Society of Mind" or the old "Blackboard Architecture" approach. Throw in the idea of using (possibly) ensembles of SLM's, LLM's, maybe some "MLM's (Medium Language Models, if we can talk about such a thing), in conjunction with ideas from classical planning, FOL inference, etc., and collaboration the aforementioned SoM / Blackboard kind of approaches and I think you might get somewhere. I expect there's a place for some evolutionary techniques in there as well.
Over the years, I've developed a belief that the single biggest problem with all of this is the lack of shared representation (of "knowledge" or whatever you want to call it) that can easily be shared across these different modalities. Like, interfacing FOL inference and an LLM isn't obviously straightforward, at least not in an efficient way. You could hard force "natural language" to be the closest thing to a shared representation and translate in and out of NL and things like N3, Common Logic, Ontolingua, KQML, UNL, etc., but that's still leaning awfully hard into making the LLM do a lot of the heavy lifting.
Huh. Interesting. I gotta admit, I don't known what this will ultimately lead to for SO and their business model, but give them props for at least conducting a pretty interesting experiment.
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