Researchers at Apple have come out with a new paper showing that large language models can’t reason — they’re just pattern-matching machines. [arXiv, PDF] This shouldn’t be news to anyone here. We …
Indeed, although every one of us who have seen a tech hype train once or twice expected nothing less.
PDAs? Quantum computing. Touch screens. Siri. Cortana. Micropayments. Apps. Synergy of desktop and mobile.
From the outset this went from “hey that’s kind of neat” to quite possibly toppling some giants of tech in a flash. Now all we have to do is wait for the boards to give huge payouts to the pinheads that drove this shitwagon in here and we can get back to doing cool things without some imaginary fantasy stapled on to it at the explicit instruction of marketing and channel sales.
Aren’t touch screens literally everywhere? What was the hype?
It’s always so baffling to me to learn about those things because I was way too young to actually experience any of the “hype” around most of those technologies. Touch screens are cool and they penetrated society so much there are at my grocery shop, what the fuck were they supposed to do if that’s not living up to the hype?
To add to the others’ comments, they were much less impressive before we had capacitive touch screens. Older resistive screens needed a good deal of mechanical force to register a press (great for longevity!) and required frequent re-calibration. They just weren’t very satisfying to use compared to any modern smart phone or tablet.
and also the other kinds of issues: touchscreens are (even now still) a vastly more complicated engineering item to add than simple toggle switches, and in many places they don’t make sense or are a bad solution to pick
but in the hype of then, touchscreens everywhere! turning your lights on? touchscreen. starting your shower water running? touchscreen. opening your window? touchscreen. calling a flight attendant? touchscreen. running your microwave? touchscreen. configuring your fridge temperature? touchscreen.
so, y’know, the usual “this new technology will save us, on everything” bullshit that industries seem so prone to. same reason as why we’re seeing so much llm-everywhere bullshit
The trackpad and trackpoint of my aging linux laptop stop working if the thing gets its lid shut. The touchscreen continues to work just fine, however. It turns out that while two stupid things can’t make a good thing, they can sometimes cancel each other out.
Of course, of course. At the time though, it was expected that this would change the face of computing - no more keyboards! No more mice! No, this is more like Star Trek where you glance down at some geometric assemblage of colored shapes and tap several in random succession to immediately bring up the data you were looking for.
And i still remember how media outlets hyped up second life, forgot about it and a few months later discovered it again and more hype started. It was fun.
Sarvega, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance XML networking solutions, today announced the Sarvega XML Context™ Router, the first product to enable loosely coupled multi-point XML Web Services across wide area networks (WANs). The Sarvega XML Context Router is the first XML appliance to route XML content at wire speed based on deep content inspection, supporting publish-subscribe (pub-sub) models while simultaneously providing secure and reliable delivery guarantees.
it’s fucking delicious how thick the buzzwords are for an incredibly simple device:
it parses XPath quickly (for 2004 (and honestly I never knew XPath and XQuery were a bottleneck… maybe this XML thing isn’t working out))
it decides which web app gets what traffic, but only if the web app speaks XML, for some reason
it implements an event queue, maybe?
it’s probably a thin proprietary layer with a Cisco-esque management CLI built on appropriated open source software, all running on a BSD but in a shiny rackmount case
the executive class at the time really had rediscovered cocaine, and that’s why we were all forced to put up with this bullshit
this shit still exists but it does the same thing with a semi-proprietary YAML and too much JSON as this thing does with XML, and now it’s in the cloud, cause the executive class never undiscovered cocaine
and now of course instead of people handcrafting xml documents by string-cating angle brackets and tags together in bad php files, we have people manually dash-cating yaml together in bad jinja and go template files! progress!
Oh man, XML is such a funny hype. What if we took S-expressions and made them less human readable, harder to parse programmatically and with multiple ways to do the same thing! Do I encode something an an element with the key as a tag and the value as the content, or do I make it an attribute of a tag? Just look at the schema, which is yet more XML! Include this magic URL at the top of your document. Want to query something from the document? Here you go! No, that’s not a base64-encoded private key nor a transcript of someone’s editing session in vim, that’s an XPath.
JSON has its issues but at least it’s only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!
JSON has its issues but at least it’s only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!
fucking
this take is so dangerously real I’m pretty sure uttering it at work will earn you a PIP and a fistfight in the parking lot with the lead data architect
To be “fair” kubernetes api only supports strongly validated/typed YAML-ish input…, it won’t let you put non-string values in string locations.
And in reality at the HTTP api layer—at least for kubectl—json is used. (Which also means you cant’ do the more weird occult YAML things that JSON wouldn’t let you)
You have to blame the deep-nestedness of k8s resources for unreadability…
It didn’t jump out of tech media containment, so it wasn’t a mainstream hype thing, more a techworker hype thing. It was the data serialization standard which would save the web! Second life otoh, did massively jump containment.
I’ve always seen XML as much more of a tech executive thing — here’s the language that’ll run your entire business but is also incredibly easy to create proprietary semantics with, ensuring you can’t be ousted without taking the company down with you! it looks like absolute shit and it’s painful to type! buy in now!
XML works fine for what it is, it’s just a bit verbose. Not sure it’d be my first choice for a new thing, but it’s not a toxic waste dump if you’re allowed to do it properly.
And yet there are some tasks I wish I could do in NETCONF instead of the thing we’re actually using, but apparently the documentation for this interface is difficult and expensive for the company to get my hands on, for reasons.
Indeed, although every one of us who have seen a tech hype train once or twice expected nothing less.
PDAs? Quantum computing. Touch screens. Siri. Cortana. Micropayments. Apps. Synergy of desktop and mobile.
From the outset this went from “hey that’s kind of neat” to quite possibly toppling some giants of tech in a flash. Now all we have to do is wait for the boards to give huge payouts to the pinheads that drove this shitwagon in here and we can get back to doing cool things without some imaginary fantasy stapled on to it at the explicit instruction of marketing and channel sales.
Touch screens?
Aren’t touch screens literally everywhere? What was the hype?
It’s always so baffling to me to learn about those things because I was way too young to actually experience any of the “hype” around most of those technologies. Touch screens are cool and they penetrated society so much there are at my grocery shop, what the fuck were they supposed to do if that’s not living up to the hype?
To add to the others’ comments, they were much less impressive before we had capacitive touch screens. Older resistive screens needed a good deal of mechanical force to register a press (great for longevity!) and required frequent re-calibration. They just weren’t very satisfying to use compared to any modern smart phone or tablet.
yeah partly this
and also the other kinds of issues: touchscreens are (even now still) a vastly more complicated engineering item to add than simple toggle switches, and in many places they don’t make sense or are a bad solution to pick
but in the hype of then, touchscreens everywhere! turning your lights on? touchscreen. starting your shower water running? touchscreen. opening your window? touchscreen. calling a flight attendant? touchscreen. running your microwave? touchscreen. configuring your fridge temperature? touchscreen.
so, y’know, the usual “this new technology will save us, on everything” bullshit that industries seem so prone to. same reason as why we’re seeing so much llm-everywhere bullshit
Yeah a huge thing at one point. Anyone use a laptop with a tochscreen?
The trackpad and trackpoint of my aging linux laptop stop working if the thing gets its lid shut. The touchscreen continues to work just fine, however. It turns out that while two stupid things can’t make a good thing, they can sometimes cancel each other out.
A handy benefit no doubt, but not quite the earth-shaking revolution the touchscreen hype-train promised at the time.
Everyday, big thing in schools.
Of course, of course. At the time though, it was expected that this would change the face of computing - no more keyboards! No more mice! No, this is more like Star Trek where you glance down at some geometric assemblage of colored shapes and tap several in random succession to immediately bring up the data you were looking for.
That, uh, did not happen.
Xml also used to be a tech hype for a bit.
And i still remember how media outlets hyped up second life, forgot about it and a few months later discovered it again and more hype started. It was fun.
this reminds me of some of the more cursed things I know from that hype era
(see this for some others)
WP:LOL. WP:LMAO even
it’s fucking delicious how thick the buzzwords are for an incredibly simple device:
similarly in that age: CORBA
and now of course instead of people handcrafting xml documents by string-cating angle brackets and tags together in bad php files, we have people manually dash-cating yaml together in bad jinja and go template files! progress!
Yes! Exactly. Good example.
and then spent the entire Metaverse hype pretending Second Life didn’t exist
./^ L E G S ^\.
Lot easier to do hype when you pretend the previous iterations didn’t exist. (and still do, and actually have more content).
Oh man, XML is such a funny hype. What if we took S-expressions and made them less human readable, harder to parse programmatically and with multiple ways to do the same thing! Do I encode something an an element with the key as a tag and the value as the content, or do I make it an attribute of a tag? Just look at the schema, which is yet more XML! Include this magic URL at the top of your document. Want to query something from the document? Here you go! No, that’s not a base64-encoded private key nor a transcript of someone’s editing session in vim, that’s an XPath.
JSON has its issues but at least it’s only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!
yeah there are so many fucking crazy footguns in yaml
another I quite like:
❯ ipython -c 'import yaml; d = dict(); d["d"] = d; print(yaml.safe_dump(d))' &id001 d: *id001lol
fucking
this take is so dangerously real I’m pretty sure uttering it at work will earn you a PIP and a fistfight in the parking lot with the lead data architect
you know, normal startup shit
YAML is great if you need to make simple configuration files
… which is why no one uses it for things like Kubernetes /s
To be “fair” kubernetes api only supports strongly validated/typed YAML-ish input…, it won’t let you put non-string values in string locations. And in reality at the HTTP api layer—at least for kubectl—json is used. (Which also means you cant’ do the more weird occult YAML things that JSON wouldn’t let you)
You have to blame the deep-nestedness of k8s resources for unreadability…
this shit happens because FUCKING GO is a piece of shit (cf that post (from iirc fasterthanlime?) about how the go apis infect everything)
which should not be read as me supporting k8s, fwiw. fuck that noise too.
Wha… What?
I’m trying to imagine a news anchor hyping about XM-fucking-L and I’m drawing a complete blank, is this a zen riddle
It didn’t jump out of tech media containment, so it wasn’t a mainstream hype thing, more a techworker hype thing. It was the data serialization standard which would save the web! Second life otoh, did massively jump containment.
I’ve always seen XML as much more of a tech executive thing — here’s the language that’ll run your entire business but is also incredibly easy to create proprietary semantics with, ensuring you can’t be ousted without taking the company down with you! it looks like absolute shit and it’s painful to type! buy in now!
XML works fine for what it is, it’s just a bit verbose. Not sure it’d be my first choice for a new thing, but it’s not a toxic waste dump if you’re allowed to do it properly.
I know someone who was hired (around turn of the century) because they knew how to xml with a certain kind of then-important big systems api
the stories I’ve heard from there are hilarious
christ the shit I’ve seen with network vendors…. shibboleth NETCONF/YANG. advance warning; abyss grade 6+
And yet there are some tasks I wish I could do in NETCONF instead of the thing we’re actually using, but apparently the documentation for this interface is difficult and expensive for the company to get my hands on, for reasons.
ikwym, that’s part of the set of crimes I was pointing to