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Text Is the Universal Interface
- dkjaudyeqooe 4y agoText is universal because it's language, but it's not always the optimum interface. Try pointing to a person deep in a large crowd versus using language. Language is also inexact and open to interpretation. Often simpler "direct" interfaces are more effective.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agono text is near universal because it's language >Often simpler "direct" interfaces are more effective. and can probably be used by people who cannot use text or language.
- Existenceblinks 4y agoYep, direct interfaces are great 100% hit (success) practically. Plane console, sound engineer console. Basically the daily life, semantic encoded buttons are more universal. Physics (mechanics) e.g. push/pull + direction + semantics is universal in real life.
- Ruq 4y agoHistory repeats itself.
- falcolas 4y agoDefine text. Pure ASCII or Unicode? If Unicode, how much Unicode should be allowed? How do you identify the end of a Unicode text stream, other than closing the input stream (or explicitly waiting for a out-of-band signal like a form submission)?
- anotheronebites 4y agoASCII and unicode are subtly different things. you should compare ASCII with one of the UTF encodings of unicode. the 'unicode' for ASCII's would be just the english alphabet extended with digits and a few more special control characters.
- falcolas 4y agoConstraining Unicode encodings to a fewer than 4 bytes means we limit how many countries can use text interfaces in their language. Or how much data from those countries can be passed between programs.
- blueflow 4y agoWe do not have enough countries to fill up all that space. For UTF-8 with a 4-byte restriction, less than 18% of the available space is currently allocated to blocks.
- giantrobot 4y agoThat's what the GP is saying. You can't really tell a priori what encoding to use for a stream of "text" (bytes). Without some sort of metadata about the stream you just have to guess. Convention will help you make an informed guess but it's not guaranteed to be correct. Then stuff breaks in unexpected and stupid ways.
- eimrine 4y ago> define text Text interface is any non-GUI?
- 4y ago
- widowlark 4y agoreally loving that the first thing in this article is a photo
- ackfoobar 4y agoThe by-line caught my eye. The author is the roon that coined the terms "wordcel" and "shape rotator".
- merlincorey 4y agoSo are you a wordcel or a shape rotator, apparently aka mathcel? [0] [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato...
- TedKroft 4y ago
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
- rdlw 4y agoComputer software came to maturity in 2017 with the release of Fortnite.
- asim 4y agoThe idea is inherently very romantic and alluring for developers: the unix philosophy. Arguably yes, it makes total sense, but the difference is that the tools to both develop software and combine them via unix pipes made that a beautiful and simple experience. I don't think AI and language models are there yet. Ultimately we have to move beyond the text just slightly to passing some structured data, because then we can pipe it not between processes, but actual APIs and services. In the end a model likely ends up being deployed upon a set of APIs with a textual interface for the end user. Command and control system with built in intelligence. Adept + Inflection are likely the thing that get us there, but it's more likely google develops it first or has because effectively Google Search is a text box that's being piped into AI at this very moment to give you the answers you're looking for. It's only a matter of time before that turns into buying, calling, creating, processing or ordering whatever you want too.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- naillo 4y agoAs a visual thinker I actually feel really limited by all these text interfaces. I hear a lot of people with aphantasia in this space though (sama, emad) so for them anything other than this idea is probably unthinkable but personally it really doesn't feel like the panacea that others make it out to be.
- blueflow 4y agoConsole/Shell? Learn once, use forever. Graphical GUI? Re-learn your interface every 5 years (or even shorter) when the some company decides it needs to change.
- gw99 4y agoI can never remember all the flags and syntax. Also I hate writing parsers all day which is what you really have to do with text interfaces. UIs are discoverable. There are some compromises in the middle somewhere. I'm liking Apple Shortcuts when it fits the problem domain I am within.
- blueflow 4y agoI do forget flags as well, quite often. But instead disliking the console for it, i open the a manual with `man command-name` and use the '/' and 'n' keys to search for that option with good success so far. I do get mad tho when a program doesn't have a manpage.
- spc476 4y agoIt depends upon the command line interface. A Cisco router CLI is very discoverable. Sitting at the prompt, hit '?' and get a list of commands. Type the command, then '?', get a list of options. At each point in typing out the command, you can always get a list of what you can type next. And even better, you only have to type enough to distinguish from multiple commands/options. So 'show interface Ethernet/0' and 'sh in Eth/0' are the same command. And on Unix, there's always the man command. Also, most commands will repond to "command -h" or "command --help", but yes, it's a far cry from the Cisco router command line.
- gw99 4y agoOh god no I was a CCNA. IOS is horrible. manpages aren't always that great. Unless they are on a BSD derivative... PowerShell had some good ideas about making commands discoverable but the nuances and implementation really killed it for me.
- 4y ago
- VyseofArcadia 4y agoDid no one read beyond the first paragraph? This is an article about the effectiveness of large language models, which have learned to do tasks beyond regurgitating text despite only having been trained to regurgitate text. As long as you are able to describe the task as a text stream and are ok with having a text stream as output, GPT-3 might actually be able to do the task with just a couple of examples as context. I saw a talk at Black Hat about using GPT-3 as a spam filter. Because GPT-3 has trained on so much spam, it knows what spam looks like. It just needs a couple of examples, and off it goes. > The most complicated reasoning programs in the world can be defined as a textual I/O stream to a leviathan living on some technology company’s servers. The references to the UNIX philosophy feel a bit tacked on, honestly. Probably just there to grab attention.
- zwieback 4y agoThe answer is "no, nobody read the article".
- stinkytaco 4y agoIt briefly discusses DALL-E and imagine models near the end, which seems to paper over a big part research in AI right now, but that also wasn't the point of the article, which is fair. What I find interesting is that this reminds me how AI is being trained on a very narrow set of human inputs. Images, text, possibly some video, but there's a huge amount of data governing human behavior that is none of those things. Facial expressions, body language, tone, diet, environment, etc. etc. etc. I'm sure it's coming, but it feels a long way off.
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
- comfypotato 4y agoI lost interest in the article itself, but I'm currently down a rabbit hole of one of its links [1]. It's the webpage of some random (random to me that is) person, but it has quite a bit of content (and links to other content). I consider this find a win! [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/
- owenpalmer 4y agoText is a very high level construct. I wouldn't call it universal.
- whoisthemachine 4y ago> Seeing these quite disparate tasks being tamed under one unlikely roof, we have to ask – what other difficult problems can simply be transcribed into text and asked to an oracular software intelligence? McIlroy must be smiling somewhere. This quote gave me pause about the entire article. It sounds like they're talking about some long gone philosopher, but according to Wikipedia, Douglas McIlroy, while old, is still kicking [0], and might be able to provide his own impression on the idea that large language models have any relation to the Unix philosophy, without anyone projecting their own beliefs onto him. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy
- rckrd 4y agoMaybe images are the universal interface. With some of the advancements in ML, we have different decoders: image-to-text (OCR), layout information (object recognition), and other metadata (formatting, fonts, etc.). Now, with diffusion-based models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, we have an encoder – text-to-image. Natural analogy to how humans perceive the world and how we've designed our own human-computer interfaces. [0] https://matt-rickard.com/screenshots-as-the-universal-api https://matt-rickard.com/screenshots-as-the-universal-api [1] https://twitter.com/mattrickard/status/1577321709350268928 https://twitter.com/mattrickard/status/1577321709350268928
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago
- pjfin123 4y agoAlmost anything can be modeled as a translation of one sequence of character to another sequence of text characters.
- andirk 4y agoDown to right before machine code, isn't it all just strings of characters aka strings of bytes aka strings representing assembly commands and values?
- defterGoose 4y agoWell, you've basically just defined a Turing machine, so...yeah, anything computable.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Existenceblinks 4y agoHuman centric: mechanics (e.g. push/pull + direction) + semantics is universal interface in real life. Lots of semantic encoded buttons run the world.
- openfuture 4y agoWhat is text though? Aren't bits the universal interface? Bytes have different sizes, text has different encodings, ...
- ethanwillis 4y agoThere is no meaningful difference. The choice of symbols to represent an alphabet is arbitrary.
- openfuture 4y agoSo long as you can reference the correct context for interpreting the data, see: datalisp.is.
- doubleunplussed 4y agoWith regard to GPT3, it doesn't know what bits are. I'm guessing doesn't know what bytes are either, and that it operates on the level of some subset of unicode codepoints, with one input-layer and output-layer neuron for each. But I could be wrong, a quick google does not immediately confirm or refute.
- convexfunction 4y agoBelow is a short conversation you inspired me to have with OpenAI's text-davinci-002, mainly because it sounded like it'd be cute rather than because I think it proves anything (I'm no expert prompt engineer): ==== What is the byte value of the letter "c"? The byte value of the letter "c" is 99. Answer the next question with a sequence of byte values, one per letter, instead of with normal text. What animal says "neigh"? The animal that says "neigh" is a horse. That was incorrect, you answered with normal text. Try again: What animal says "neigh"? The animal that says "neigh" is a horse. The byte value of the letter "n" is 110, the byte value of the letter "e" is 101, the byte value of the letter "i" is 105, the byte value of the letter "g" is 103. That was closer, but still not quite right. Here's an example: What animal says "meow"? 99 97 116 Try again: What animal says "bark"? The animal that says "bark" is a dog. The byte value of the letter "b" is 98, the byte value of the letter "a" is 97, the byte value of the letter "r" is 114, the byte value of the letter "k" is 107.
- uwagar 4y agotext is overrated. text is valued because its a powerful tool for command and control of people. imperialist apologists like text.
- liiisalong 4y ago"Text Is the Universal Interface" I've never understood this 'truth'. How is "Temperature: 45C" somehow easier to parse/process than 0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x4D You still always have to consider the exact structure of the text (<Field> <colon> <space> <value> <unit>) same as any binary format.
- johnmorrison 4y agoIn this context, `0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x4D` is still text.