4 ms·

Anyone else worried how backward this sounds? I mean this is like totally giving up on the dismal state of website UXes these days and gladly accepting that web

Anyone else worried how backward this sounds? I mean this is like totally giving up on the dismal state of website UXes these days and gladly accepting that website navigation and experience should remain utterly confusing for humans but machines (yes, machines) should get preferential treatment! Good UX is now for machines, not for humans! Shouldn't something like this be first and foremost for humans ... which also benefits machines as an obvious side-effect?

spencerchubb 2y ago
It's recognizing that the needs of a human are different from the needs of an LLM.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Either you phrased that backwards, or we live in a world where humans are becoming a second-class demographic.
  - spencerchubb 2y ago
    I didn't say that humans are second-class to LLMs. Nor does the proposal suggest that. It's an additional mode in addition to the webpage that humans use
PaulHoule 2y ago
It seems not thought through at all, just an attempt to get on the LLM bandwagon, like Facebook's giving up on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas VR (would be so much fun and the gfx would probably work great) for a "pivot to AI" which just seems to be mindless flocking with an inevitable pivot to something else in another year and a half when they realize they spend $20B building a model and got $20M worth of revenue.
hobofan 2y ago
This isn't good UX for machines. This is a patch for bad UX to help LLMs out in those cases. Some websites have the same patch for humans in the form of a "Help" or "About" section that details how the page is to be used/interpreted. This essentially just places those same instructions into a well-known location, so that LLM-based agents don't first have to crawl the website for such an instructional page (which may or may not exist). If you have good UX these instructions should be largely moot for both machines and humans, and bring machines on the same page as humans that may have additional context (e.g. where the site was linked; previous visits to the website).
kmod 2y ago
This reminds me about the Semantic Web, which was a movement explicitly about making the web more understandable to machines. I don't agree with the ideas and I think a lot of other people were also skeptical, but I bring it up to say that some people take the other side of your argument rather seriously and that there's a lot of existing debate on the topic. Here's Tim Berners-Lee talking about this way back in 1999: > I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize. I quoted this from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web since the original reference was a book that is not openly accessible. Also I think it's funny that he's talking about agents in exactly the same way that people do now.
apwell23 2y ago
> Shouldn't something like this be first and foremost for humans ... which also benefits machines as an obvious side-effect? no because machines can put up with large walls of text but humans need exciting ux to keep their attention.
TZubiri 2y ago
To me it just sounds like: "html is too complicated for me to parse, please rewrite your website in html again like it was the 2000s without all the doodads and obfuscative frameworks that compile to htmljs, also we changed the syntax and pretend its an llm standard because that's what I'm using it for, and I think I'm solving a novel problem. That way you can make my dotcom boom job of web crawling easier while I get to pretend I'm contributing to the state of the art ai boom topic." It sounds like that exactly

spencerchubb 2y ago

It's recognizing that the needs of a human are different from the needs of an LLM.

dotancohen 2y ago
Either you phrased that backwards, or we live in a world where humans are becoming a second-class demographic.
- spencerchubb 2y ago
  I didn't say that humans are second-class to LLMs. Nor does the proposal suggest that. It's an additional mode in addition to the webpage that humans use

PaulHoule 2y ago

It seems not thought through at all, just an attempt to get on the LLM bandwagon, like Facebook's giving up on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas VR (would be so much fun and the gfx would probably work great) for a "pivot to AI" which just seems to be mindless flocking with an inevitable pivot to something else in another year and a half when they realize they spend $20B building a model and got $20M worth of revenue.

hobofan 2y ago

This isn't good UX for machines. This is a patch for bad UX to help LLMs out in those cases. Some websites have the same patch for humans in the form of a "Help" or "About" section that details how the page is to be used/interpreted. This essentially just places those same instructions into a well-known location, so that LLM-based agents don't first have to crawl the website for such an instructional page (which may or may not exist). If you have good UX these instructions should be largely moot for both machines and humans, and bring machines on the same page as humans that may have additional context (e.g. where the site was linked; previous visits to the website).

kmod 2y ago

This reminds me about the Semantic Web, which was a movement explicitly about making the web more understandable to machines. I don't agree with the ideas and I think a lot of other people were also skeptical, but I bring it up to say that some people take the other side of your argument rather seriously and that there's a lot of existing debate on the topic. Here's Tim Berners-Lee talking about this way back in 1999: > I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize. I quoted this from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web since the original reference was a book that is not openly accessible. Also I think it's funny that he's talking about agents in exactly the same way that people do now.

apwell23 2y ago

> Shouldn't something like this be first and foremost for humans ... which also benefits machines as an obvious side-effect? no because machines can put up with large walls of text but humans need exciting ux to keep their attention.

TZubiri 2y ago

To me it just sounds like: "html is too complicated for me to parse, please rewrite your website in html again like it was the 2000s without all the doodads and obfuscative frameworks that compile to htmljs, also we changed the syntax and pretend its an llm standard because that's what I'm using it for, and I think I'm solving a novel problem. That way you can make my dotcom boom job of web crawling easier while I get to pretend I'm contributing to the state of the art ai boom topic." It sounds like that exactly