3 ms·
The example seems like it would be easier if we’d gone in the direction of allowing more complex commands, like vim does. Imagine if real editors had been devel
by bee_rider 2y ago
The example seems like it would be easier if we’d gone in the direction of allowing more complex commands, like vim does. Imagine if real editors had been developed for the last 30 years or however long, instead of stagnating at vim (which is clearly a nice text editor, but it could be nice to have an editor designed around writing prose). Maybe neovim will save us. Some day.
Bob’s intent is to edit the word color, and inserting a u. But, he is limited to just expressing “put u here,” which is not at all what he wants to achieve it is just a mechanical description of what operations need to occur.
Alice’s intent is to delete the whole sentence, but she’s similarly limited to just saying “delete delete deleted delete delete…” to a bunch of letters.
Ending up with a u is the obvious dumb result of treating language as a pile of characters. The correct behavior is to say: because the world Bob has edited no longer exists, his edit is clearly nonsense, don’t apply it. Which editor does that?
- Rygian 2y agoConsidering that software can only guess the intent if it's not declared explicitly, I'm curious what such an "intent declaration" language would look like.
- satvikpendem 2y agoAt the limit, it would probably look like an LLM, because it's akin to rules-based AI in the '90s vs neural network AI today. Expert systems had programmers write many rules in order to process information, which is what this "intent declaration" language would also be like, users writing many rules that would be followed. But this approach didn't work because even humans didn't even know all of the rules needed, therefore we turned to the statistical approaches of current neural network AI.
- Rygian 2y agoWe are aligned. Software cannot identify intentions. Heck, even person A cannot identify intentions of person B in a systematic way. Hence it's a non-solvable problem.
- bee_rider 2y agos/color/colour/g