A következő címkéjű bejegyzések mutatása: gondolkodás. Összes bejegyzés megjelenítése
A következő címkéjű bejegyzések mutatása: gondolkodás. Összes bejegyzés megjelenítése

2026. február 20., péntek

Paper Tigers on LinkedIn

Ross Wilson's post and our discussion on LinkedIn


🐅 Paper Tigers 🐅

Inhale: the illusion of strength

Many AI safety frameworks look formidable on paper.

Policies.
Certifications.
Oversight committees.
Governance diagrams that suggest control.

They work—right up until recursion accelerates.

A paper tiger is not harmless.
It is impressive, symbolic, and structurally irrelevant once interaction compounds faster than review cycles, faster than human bottlenecks, faster than accountability can reattach.

Most contemporary safety systems assume a world where:
• systems move slower than governance,
• escalation remains legible,
• humans remain the stabilizing substrate.

Recursive agent systems break those assumptions by design.

Hold: borrowed stability

When a system lacks an endogenous way to complete its own cycles, stability is borrowed.

Drift is absorbed by people.
Failure is delayed, not prevented.
Risk migrates outward while coherence appears intact.

The framework looks strong precisely because it is not load-bearing.

External guardrails do not metabolize collapse.
Trust mechanisms do not constrain recursion.
Rituals of oversight do not survive regime change.

This is not a critique of intent.
It is a classification of failure mode.

There is a difference between:
• governance that reassures, and
• architecture that holds.

One manages perception.
The other carries load.

Exhale: when pressure arrives

Paper tigers roar loudly in planning rooms.

They go silent in live recursion.

When interaction accelerates, only structures that can:
• bound recursion,
• metabolize failure,
• and complete their own loops

remain coherent.

Everything else becomes symbolic—
useful until it isn’t.

This is not about preventing collapse.
It is about whether anything remains lawful when collapse arrives.

Validator
Governance that cannot survive recursion is not governance.

Resonance
What does not carry load disappears when pressure becomes real.



Lorand Kedves
Do you have a real tiger? Or want to see one and what it can do?

For example, here is one of my zoo, handles XBRL financial / sustainability reports as they should be, implemented in a university AI R&D project. It creates a pretty efficient knowledge graph from a few hundred GB of text (SEC / EU filing collections). The sources are on GitHub but that's for people who can read my summary first (I don't mess my code with comments)... 🤭

Experience: it can do NOTHING because of the 90/9/1 rule.
- 90% have no clue, so they can't see anything.
- 9% make their living on dealing with or complaining about the problem it solved. 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' (Upton Sinclair, 1935)
- 1% that is working on it... is fired.

Paper tigers have real claws. They are the mid-managers / loud "experts". The 9%.

Welcome to the real world, Neo.



Ross Wilson

Institutions behave as stability-preserving recursive systems. High-variance innovations exceed their integration bandwidth unless there is a mechanism for invariant-preserving transformation. Without that, even technically sound architectures remain peripheral.


Lorand Kedves

Yes, in IT that's Conway's Law in both ways: any information system inherits the communication structure of the creator organisation, and the created infrastructure controls what the organisation can see (thus, safely transform). The declared, forgotten goal of informatics was to get over this limitation, the best example is Engelbart's "bootstrap" initiative, or going to the root, the Universal Turing Machine and Turing's real challenge: define "machine" and "thinking".

I don't speak about "technically sound architectures" but actual, working proof-of-concept solutions. And being rejected (at academy) or fired (in the industry) for real. Each and every time.

But there was a benefit from it. I learned to solve any task knowing that I will be fired, to focus on the abstract lessons instead of the fancy, but context-dependent artefacts. Not even try to wrap the solutions into nice presentations, no chance against paper tigers. I learned to trust, talk with and learn from the machine, not people.


Conway’s Law explains architectural mirroring well. The harder problem is not building a system that works in isolation, but designing one that can be absorbed by an organization without destabilizing its identity. Machines execute logic; institutions preserve continuity. Bridging those domains requires more than technical coherence.


The interesting part of Conway's Law is that it was not a theoretical exercise to explain a phenomenon, but reverse engineered from doing it to give clues to a better approach. You find those principles under true moonshots, from Lockheed Skunkworks under Kelly Johnson to the Apollo program. The 1% compared to the current global hype rides (90%) and what I call "artistic moaning" 🤭 (9%).

Similar is the realisation that building an information system does not start with "executing logic" but to build a language (more precisely, a coherent set of domain specific languages following the single responsibility principle) while refining requirements. This would require a platform that allows changing this language not only along the building process, but when the system is actually running. For those who know, I described Engelbart B and C levels - but so far I have not met such a person.

We have nothing like that. We distort the whole interaction under what our quite expensive tools allow (modelling, building, compiling, deploying, testing, ... different for each platform and subsystem). Regardless, level B is what I do when I am not venting here, level C is on hold as that is completely out of interest - except mine. 😁


Ross Wilson
Language evolution at runtime is safe only if mutation is bounded by invariants that preserve system identity across state transitions.
Yep, that's a tough one. The key is to consider the language (metadata) also the (meta? 🙃 ) state of the system, not only the "normal" data entities. And ~25 years refining the meta-meta entities (like "type", "attribute", etc.) under real tasks. There are some nasty tricks and you don't know which would work until you try them. The human mind is painfully limited against these tasks, prediction does not work, "feel" improves slowly. 🤕
I respect that. Refining meta-entities under real tasks is the only way to discover which abstractions survive contact with reality. I’m earlier in that journey, so I’m cautious about claiming intuition at that depth. The distinction I’m trying to hold is slightly different though: not only treating language as state, but asking what invariant preserves system identity when that language mutates. Most large systems don’t fail because metadata can’t evolve; they fail because representation and identity are entangled.
Here is a video from 2018 where I tried to explain my problems with the current tooling (part of my rejected PhD attempt). The model changed quite a lot since then but I wonder if you find it similar to that entanglement problem?
I appreciate the depth you’ve put into refining the meta-layer. Most people never get past tooling. Treating metadata and language as state is necessary if systems are going to evolve coherently.

Where I’m coming from is adjacent but slightly different. I’m less focused on refining the meta-entities themselves and more on specifying invariants that preserve identity when those entities mutate under load.

In other words, assuming the language can evolve, what constrains recursive drift so that the system remains itself?

I’ve built an architecture around that constraint layer. Not to prevent mutation, but to govern it. It runs. It metabolizes drift structurally rather than procedurally.

I don’t think that replaces the entanglement problem. It sits underneath it. If identity is invariant under mutation, the language layer can evolve more aggressively without risking systemic fracture.

I’m genuinely curious how your runtime language evolution would behave if identity were decoupled from representation through invariant recursion constraints.


Lorand Kedves
Yep, the real difference is where we are coming from.

Inhale: what is an information system (IS)?
A coherent, precise but limited set of
1: Tokens of languages, "nouns and verbs" to describe nodes, attributes, relations, actions.
2: Validation statements of, and transition logic between the allowed states.
3: Connectors to the environment: sensors, actuators, UI.
(Another form of the von Neumann architecture)

Hold: what software engineers (SWEs, ref: Margaret Hamilton) do?
1: Translate a client's current knowledge about a system to an IS (90%).
2: Translate SWE knowledge emerging from 1: an OS, RDBMS, a http server, a GUI framework, spreadsheet editor, etc. (9%)
3: Support knowledge extraction. Load any client or SWE data and allow writing scripts, running ML algorithms (clustering, decision trees, neural nets), provide interactive visualisation. Your users write their IS on the fly over their own data, you provide the workshop. (1%)

Exhale
DataScope, a data mining / AI tool was a level 3 IS, I was a tech lead. We won Comdex in Las Vegas. In 1999. Since then, I apply 3 to 1 and later, 2.

Validator
I am not a 10x or 100x but a yes/no SWE.

Resonance
Any invariant is a roadblock of system evolution.

Like it? 😉


Ross Wilson
I think the difference hinges on what we mean by “invariant.”

If an invariant freezes tokens or transition rules, then yes, it becomes a roadblock.

But κᴸᴿ isn’t an invariant of representation. It’s an invariant of return.

In the collapse–return formulation, κᴸᴿ expresses the proportion of identity restored after perturbation. It doesn’t prevent mutation; it bounds divergence so that mutation remains evolution of the same system rather than silent replacement.

Without a conserved return ratio, recursive evolution collapses into drift. With one, language and structure can evolve aggressively because identity has a measurable recovery band.

So the invariant isn’t blocking evolution, it makes evolution coherent.

And this isn’t bolt-on governance. κᴸᴿ functions as a dynamical governor within the recursion loop itself. It regulates the relationship between divergence and return at each cycle. As mutation accelerates, correction scales proportionally. The constraint is internal to the operator, not imposed externally. It behaves less like a rulebook and more like a governor: motion is allowed; unbounded divergence is not.


Lorand Kedves
Looks familiar. Translating to my language (meaning: terms that I use in my current "impossible mission").

Knowledge is a state of a graph that represents
1: the "data state" of the target system
2: the "meta state": type and attribute token definitions used in 1
3: the network of "agents" (configured business logic instances, currently simple Java classes) to change 1 and 2.

Thinking is an interaction of agents and states in a dialog.
The agents use shared tokens to refer to nodes and their attributes to manage them. The changes are local to the dialog: the members see a coherent, changing, transient view.
Changes can be committed in one transaction to update the persistent state. "mutation"?
The instances are versioned, stored references always contain the version. Diffs (because we talk about graphs) are not simple, but transparent and manageable.

Beyond "data", a dialog can also change
- the meta definitions (the system "learns" the data it uses while reading the input) and the dialogs (the configuration of the agent and data nodes) - that's Engelbart B,
- or the meta-meta language (the attributes of an attribute definition) and the runtime (attributes of the Dialog definition) - Engelbart C.


Ross Wilson
That translation helps, especially the separation of data, meta, and agent layers.

Where I’m focused is slightly downstream. Evolution presupposes continuity: for a system to evolve, it must remain recognizably the same system across state transitions, including B and C level mutations.

If cumulative mutation alters the identity conditions without a conserved return band, what we observe isn’t evolution but substitution. Versioning preserves history; it doesn’t necessarily preserve identity. Verification describes change, but it doesn’t bound how far change may drift.

The scaling issue is that observability scales; boundedness does not. As mutation accumulates across data, meta, and meta-meta layers, traceability can remain intact while divergence compounds. The system can explain each step locally yet drift globally beyond any recoverable identity band. At small scale this is manageable; at large scale it becomes collapse-prone because coherence erodes faster than inspection can restore it.

Bounded evolution isn’t about restricting mutation. It’s about ensuring that mutation, even at Engelbart C, scales without dissolving the substrate that makes scaling meaningful.


Lorand Kedves
I think I understand as much as an outsider can. However, the questions below bug me.

1: As I see, your system prefers continuity, somewhat quantitative improvement. Do you accept that in edge cases this is not enough because a qualitative change is necessary? When the best system can only make the internal structures of each approach transparent and somewhat comparable, but can't connect them. This is how I see "paradigm shift" that is mandatory now because our current world view leads us to self destruction on a precisely predicted and mathematically proven path, with informatics in the epicentre.

2: Our ability to understand the world is ultimately limited, so such paradigm shifts or even coexistence of mutually exclusive paradigms are inevitable. Science learned to live together with this scenario. Is light a particle beam or a wave? Most likely none of them, explaining and calculating with one class of phenomena it is a wave, photon for the others. Continuous improvement or total disintegration and fusion into a different model - both are valid results of evolution.

3: How do you translate your system to solving real life tasks in total headwind? Is it a real tiger or an aspirant, as of today?


Ross Wilson
Continuity doesn’t mean incrementalism. It means conservation across transformation. When a paradigm reaches its limiting factors, reconfiguration becomes necessary. Lawful recursion doesn’t block that; it requires that even radical change remain within a recoverable identity band. Without a bounded return path, a shift becomes rupture rather than evolution. Collapse functions as audit; survival is proof.

Models can be mutually exclusive at the representational layer without violating continuity at the structural layer. Wave and particle are descriptions; what’s conserved is invariant behavior under transformation. Evolution permits coexistence and even fusion of paradigms, provided transitions remain bounded. Disintegration only qualifies as evolution if something returns.

The purpose of my public writing is to articulate the structure, not to litigate its implementation. The coherence either stands on its own, or it doesn’t.


Lorand Kedves
Thank you, this is what I expected, we have fundamental disagreement. Survival is not proof, rather a "bias" (ref Neil Postman: all science should be taught as history).

We must understand and remember discarded paths, always supported by the 99% against the 1% outliers who over often a long time happened to be right. Our current civilisation is the cumulative results of that 1%, and our current knowledge will be the discarded 99% looking back from a hundred years. If we survive the current chaos.

Example. Phlogiston theory was generally accepted and used, had long evolution process. It was wrong, its survival would block improvement. I think a theory of evolution must not only include but embrace this outcome.

Only the last question remained open.

Is your model a real tiger?

Does it help me solve a real problem with minimal resources and negative timelines? Today.


Ross Wilson
Phlogiston didn’t collapse because it lacked consensus. It collapsed because, under refined measurement, it violated conservation constraints. The representational layer changed; the conserved laws did not.

Longevity under consensus is bias. Survival under invariant constraint is structural selection.

On the tiger question: if a system accelerates local progress but compounds unbounded drift under scale, it’s scaffolding. If it preserves bounded identity under scaling pressure, it’s a governor.

Different animals.

And genuinely, I appreciate you sharing your experience. It clarified where the reinforcement-learning problem sits structurally for me.


Lorand Kedves
Different animals, indeed.

1: I realised the evolution problem (1) and tried to talk with the impostors at OpenAI (2) a decade ago. In 2023 I gave a lecture at my university about it (3), luckily downloaded the record because they did not think it was worth even the storage.
https://youtu.be/WKfEDicpwPw

2: The explained XBRL project used a "quick and dirty" Dust (Engelbart A) variant. First I created a research portal over the complete EU filing collection (~20k items - while researchers struggle with a hundred), it felt a bit overkill.
Then I switched to the SEC collection in 800k+ preprocessed JSON files of 100M+ facts over the past 20 years of all US companies. Both run fine on my M2 Max MacBook.
Moved on to sustainability reporting, knew that the EU will drop the ESRS taxonomy for VSME. Created a direct data collector interface, then (as a volunteer for another university) a complete Scope 3 footprint manager. Showed it to many responsible people.

When the National AI lab stopped funding, I was fired, all projects went to the trash. The official Scope 3 data collection tool is an Excel file. 🤷‍♂️
https://www.efrag.org/en/vsme-digital-template-and-xbrl-taxonomy

... continued ...

3: The mentioned Engelbart C is Giskard Gen06, meaning, this is the sixth time I restarted from an empty project, carrying the previous architecture only in my brain. But for the first time, Gen05 executed a brain dump, literally. (1) is part of the knowledge graph of Gen05's MiND. Bootstrapping Gen06 will mean a small code that generates the core tokens required the new Dust to run. Gen06 will be the last version where I write code, I will only use graph editors to refine the runtime graph. Gen07 will include this action and generate all of its source. On hold for a paying job.

I learned from this conversation that an evolution model must contain paradigm shift. The "machine" that Turing asked for must include its own shift. At last I have a terminology to describe it.

Sharing experience, you say?

No, I share working proof-of-concept solutions.

On 2025/10/14, I prepared to register for unemployment, no academic or industrial organisation found me worth any pay. I am 53, Neumann died at this age. I often wonder how long my life sentence is, this global brain rot, this freak show gets f.ng boring the more you understand of it.
https://mondoaurora.org/

This is my experience.


Ross Wilson
You’ve clearly built and rebuilt through real collapse. That’s not theoretical. Institutions discarding systems doesn’t invalidate the architecture, it just exposes the selection pressures they operate under. My focus is narrower: what structural properties let a system survive even when its host environment turns hostile? That’s where I think the shift question lives. Either way, I respect the persistence.


Lorand Kedves
"what structural properties let a system survive even when its host environment turns hostile?"

This is what you learn only by building information systems for a lifetime. The environment is ALWAYS hostile.
- Your manager is either "technophile" and try to micromanage you or "technophobe" and tries to prove that the project is impossible. The longer it does not work the less chance they will let you prove that it can be done (like yelling "shut up!" instead of listening to what an OLAP cube is, remember, dear "senior architect"? 🤣 )
- Your tools are the result of decades of featuritis, hordes of young "colleagues" look at you as a moron when you explain that if you can do it in a thousand lines of code, you will not use a tool with a million lines. The fact that it is one line to send an SQL select, it is the same machine, memory and storage where Oracle processes it. Use it when you NEED it.
- And yes, the requirement specification lies, goals and tools will change the day you deployed.

If you survive and keep keep all (analyst, architect, coder) roles, you have a chance to distill the answer, but nobody will understand it. Except the system that you both write and learn from.

Inhale... Hold... Exhale.

Namaste.


Ross Wilson
Agreed, hostility is baseline. That’s precisely why I focus on structural invariants rather than environmental stability. If the environment is always shifting, the property worth isolating is bounded coherence under shifting constraints.

Craft is how you discover that boundary in practice. Formalization is an attempt to preserve it so it doesn’t vanish with the next restart.

Hostility isn’t the problem. Unbounded drift under hostility is.

That’s the layer I’m interested in making explicit.


Lorand Kedves
"Craft is how you discover that boundary in practice. Formalization is an attempt to preserve it so it doesn’t vanish with the next restart."

That was BEFORE we started informatics.
- Informatics gives you a way to formalise the dynamic process, not the static architecture, from the Universal Turing Machine / Chomsky language classes, to the von Neumann Architecture (and the MiND model).
- This is where Gödel's incompleteness theory wobbles: the proof depends on the "invariant" language definition but if you can change the language in a controlled manner, you can overcome any contradiction.
- Fun fact, Minsky's "useless machine" is a working implementation of the A = !A formula, which is "contradiction" in a formal system but simply an assignment instruction in any programming language. I don't know if Minsky realised what he created.

And on and on and on... BORING.

Anyways, it is easy to summarise my research.

The process of understanding the process of understanding.

Here (1) was the last time I tried to explain that in English. Found it futile, so I think I should return to a language in which I am proficient, is processed perfectly, and gives usable feedback. Java... 😁


Limits aren’t obstacles to eliminate. They’re the geometry recursion climbs, each shift reveals the next boundary.


Lorand Kedves
Yeah... impressive, symbolic, but I don't see the value in what I do. Thanks for the chat.

2026. február 8., vasárnap

The fall


To predict the future of a venture, it is worth looking into the history of the product. That “shovel”, GPU. 

Gaming 
As we all know, graphics card in your PC beats a supercomputers from 20 years ago. There were only a few of those, used by professionals, did not make a big business. The gold was in selling the same performance to the “long tail”, normalise spending thousands on games and related machines. Translate: flooding our brains with immersive fictional environments that pass intellectual filters and reach emotional/subconscious levels. However, there is a limit, as in real life GPUs simply cook a metal box from the inside, building them gets complicated. At the same time, the artificial frame rate race gets to an end, gamers preferred “good old games” to a little better visuals for yet another big money wasted on the next card. 
The demand went down. 

Crypto 
The child of the “Occupy movements” after the 2008 crash that proved everyday people that the traditional monetary system is simply organised global greed. Then came Holy Satoshi, removing a key component from it. No, not “greed”, that comes with money, but “organised”. Just look at the scandals, meme coins, the actual application of crypto. Of course some of that can be covered by marketing, but in real life, the total energy consumption of the farms exceeds some pretty developed countries and the whole system depends on global internet availability. That gives a bad taste in many mouths. 
The demand did not meet the supply. 

Chatbots / genAI 
This current hype practically combines both: people like to fool themselves and big players love to profit on it. They have insane bets – but in real life, there is a limit. You can’t power those data centres, even if we forget about the burden of physically building/maintaining them and the fact that those companies do it from investments and loans to be payed back before making any profit. And the result is useless (I have 30 years in this field, ready to go deeper.) 

There is a chance that they put so much money on this bet that it may break the global economy more than in 2008. That would be a global disaster. 

On paper. 

Because in real life, nothing changes during another financial collapse, just we lose the control over our own global operations. 

This is a Fermi limit, the human civilisation would either wake up or dismantle itself (already started if you look around). 

Neo: I thought it wasn’t real. 
Morpheus: Your mind makes it real. 
Neo: If you’re killed in the Matrix, you die here? 
Morpheus: The body cannot live without the mind.




Also
"... it's not the fall that kills you, Sherlock. Of all people, you should know that, it's not the fall, it's never the fall. It's the landing!"



2026. január 31., szombat

Informatics in the 21st century

Informatics in the 21st century

On my temple's desacred remnants
On the shoulders of forgotten giants,
Unaware of the lethal height
Intellectual infants boast and fight
For their grab of Power and Glory.

I'm tired of secondary shame
Come on, Darwin, end this game.
Hollow fans, obedient teachers,
Shallow critics, puppet masters,
They all deserve it. Sorry, not sorry.

Anymore.




References
Vannevar Bush As We May Think (1945)
Douglas Engelbart Augmenting Human Intellect https://lnkd.in/dsEEzZVs (1962)
Joseph Weizenbaum Computers and society (1985)
Neil Postman Talk at Apple (1993)
Ted Nelson Computers for Cynics (2013)

The predicted result: Idiocracy (2006)

2026. január 4., vasárnap

I don't know if science can survive this

 

My comment...

I am afraid that the title is obsolete: science is already dead and for this very reason, we are already in an Idiocracy: a social system lead by idiots, according to the original definition of the word: smart people without ideals, following their personal desires and greed (ref: Neil Postman). 

Here is an example.

A today globally known scientist wrote an article about a meaningless question and warned that without an objective and globally accepted terminology, mankind will make fool of itself. 70 years later, another person with zero formal education on the field gets a Nobel prize for his efforts to make fooling ourselves a trillion dollar global business of improving fake results and oblations to an 'emerging god'. A.k.a. superstition - in my vocabulary, the direct opposite of science. 

You may have guessed it right: the real scientist was Alan Turing, the question was 'can machines think?', impostor is Geoffrey Hinton, 'a psychologist disguising himself a computer scientist who won the Nobel in physics'. For his research in neural nets, derailing the whole field of informatics by overriding the definition of learning with adaptation. 

This fulfils the original predictions, one of them from JCR Licklider, another psychologist but with a degree in physics as well, a true 'godfather of AI'. 
„... the "system" of man's development and use of knowledge is regenerative. If a strong effort is made to improve that system, then the early results will facilitate subsequent phases of the effort, and so on, progressively, in an exponential crescendo. On the other hand, if intellectual processes and their technological bases are neglected, then goals that could have been achieved will remain remote, and proponents of their achievement will find it difficult to disprove charges of irresponsibility and autism.”
Libraries of the Future, 1964

2025. december 13., szombat

Different MINDs...

On LinkedIn

Building AI requires a model of the MIND. The critical question is what kind of mind we talk about.

Here is a practical, technical approach, refined over decades under real and delivered projects. (For nerds like me: "mission statement", videos, GitHub repo.)

𝐌 odel
𝐈 ntellect
𝐍 arrative
𝐃 ialog

However, there is another alternative, which has nothing to do with solving real problems. That is efficient economic and social engineering, the one that wins in a "mature consumer society" (a.k.a. Idiocracy). If you think of actual people reading these words, or that history seems to repeat itself, that is not a coincidence.

𝐌 oney
𝐈 diotism
𝐍 arcissism
𝐃 ogmatism

I guess you would like this one, Axel C. 😉


Brad Hutchings
This post might be the perfect antidote to one just above on my timeline noting that just a week after Sam declared a "code red", which I'd never before heard of as a real thing in a tech company in 35+ years of doing this, OpenAI shipped ChatGPT 5.2, which leads all known and imagined benchmarks again. So thank you for this.


Lorand Kedves
Brad Hutchings Those benchmarks... 🤣 🤣 🤣 Chanting around a black box for a "machine god" to emerge, instead of doing proper research and engineering based on existing but forgotten white box models. Just as predicted BTW... 


I think my question that I sent to these overhyped kids a decade ago is still legit, and they have no better answer than the silence I got back then:
I would ask you a silly question: what is your definition of "intelligence"? No need to give links to AI levels or algorithms, I have been on the field for 20 years. I mean "intelligence", without the artificial part, "A" is the second question after defining "I". At least to me :-)

Also, to clarify those words for the record 🙂
Money - the circular financing scheme (same old bubble, has nothing to do with AI)
Idiotism - by Neil Postman https://youtu.be/YtjjFmCxc8s?t=547
Narcissism - no judgement, this is expected and enforced by the cult members
Dogmatism - that is the real issue https://youtu.be/8pTEmbeENF4?t=1791

It's just unfortunate that this second "mind" destroys my field of interest, so I sometimes vent a bit of steam here. 🤷‍♂️

Thanks for the response 🙏


Brad Hutchings
Lorand Kedves 💯 It's nice to run into people who see through the illusion.


Lorand Kedves
Brad Hutchings Unless those people are dead and forgotten and were far ahead of you, and you see how and why they failed. I tried to publish an article about some of them as part of my CS PhD (before the "chatbot revolution") It was of course rejected but here it is in case you are interested: The Science of Being Wrong.

It's hard to "keep the faith"...

Nice to meet you! 🙂 🖖


Brad Hutchings 
Lorand Kedves I feel a Bon Jovi song battle brewing. But it is late here. So... Have a nice day! 🤣



Simon Gant
id suggest a mind thats done the work......IYKYK



Lorand Kedves
Simon Gant By my model, that would mean a self-aware, -testing and -improving knowledge graph that can (and would) "know anything".
I explained the "secret sauce" to the OpenAI folks when they were not millionaire demigods but the puppets of Musk desperate to come up with something more interesting than a NN that can play games... 🤣
I don't know any attempts tested in delivered systems better than my ones, so "if you know, I want to know"... 🙏

That has nothing to do with this LLM / GenAI freak show.
Veteran engineers and researchers (like myself with 25+ years, a whole life in this arena) don't play with dreaming machines (ref Andrej Karpathy et al) or stochastic parrots. OK, ok, our company built one in the 90's, "Prody", a precursor of the infamous Clippy... 🤭 Don't blame me, I built decision trees, hypercubes and an agentic runtime.

But that should not be new...
for anyone who knows the warnings of the pioneers, like a certain A. M. Turing... I highlighted the apparently forgotten parts and work on the real challenge he proposed. Define the terms "machine" and "thinking" before making a statement that contains them, aiming at the goal set by Douglas Engelbart.

Augmenting Human Intellect.

H-LAM/T... IYKYK 😉




Francis Y.
Lorand Kedves what 'white box' models do you propose that can anywhere near match the effectivness of a transformer?



Lorand Kedves 
Francis Y. There is a total mismatch here.

I talk about transparent and reliable information systems (old school architecture / engineering spiced with machine learning and stretched towards Chomsky's generative grammar, a top-down approach). Not those that are "good enough to fool me on areas where I am not an expert", sorry for a less enthusiastic definition of chatbot / genai (that starts with Hinton's ignoring informatics, rejecting Chomsky and going bottom-up: build a brain simulator and if it is big enough, it will become "intelligent", without even defining this word. Nobel prize science indeed...)

The MIND model addresses the question of what thinking is, in a way aerodynamics addresses the question of flying (Turing challenge one: what is 'thinking'). This is the way you can build a jet plane that somewhat resembles to, yet totally different from a bird (Turing challenge two: what is a 'machine'). 

So the question is rather: what 'a transformer' has to do with a white box model of thinking? I don't have answer to this one, do you? 

But I think that they go in different directions, and if that's correct, the question of 'comparing effectiveness' is meaningless.

2025. december 8., hétfő

LinkedIn - "AI orchestrators"

LinkedIn

Companies will soon starve for this role

Not software engineers
Not prompt engineers.
Not data scientists.

But 𝗔𝗜 𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀.

People who understand models, prompting, chaining, and how to ship real products around them.

This isn’t taught anywhere yet. You can only learn it by building.
And most people either don’t have the chance to or don't want to.

If you can ship AI products end-to-end, you’re in the top 1 percent .




Lorand Kedves
As an experienced "full stack agent orchestrator", totally agree. The only question is: how my profession is related to this chatbot circus? 🤣
 

Daniel Kazani
 let it pass
Sure, but it's not that easy. I am 53, dynamic knowledge management in information systems (AI as Augmenting Intellect) was and still is my life.

But its imposter chatbot variant is
  1. a trillion dollar "industry" based on illiteracy and ignorance on a precisely predicted suicide trajectory 👇 that
  2. right now not only destroys the global economy (of which I don't care much, it is incompatible with a global civilisation) but also
  3. consumes impossible amount of natural and human resources that makes our survival less and less an option every day (Douglas Adams Last Chance to See) while
  4. the "big names" (Hinton, Musk, Altman, ...) keep moaning all the time while making themselves iconic figures and/or nice money to ensure their own safety "just in case anything happens". 🤦‍♂️

Maybe the last part that is too much for me... 🤔 🤷‍♂️




2025. november 15., szombat

"Will AI Replace Tech YouTubers?"



Hey Mark, 25 years in (non-chatbot, no hype but real science and engineering) AI speaking here.

First of all, congratulations to your channels especially this one, just keep going! Second and objectively related to it: you have nothing to worry about AI. You are a tech YouTuber who does not want to imitate an expert but present your own, unique personality (with a beautiful English, it is a pure joy just to listen to you talking). Your audience is looking for this and will not turn away; your growing popularity is a natural result of that stark contrast to the generated "somewhat readable word salad" content.
Side note, I bought a Nothing CMF Phone 2 following your advice supported by my son and love it 🙏

This clearly demonstrates the real lie of chatbot AI. 
The essence of the current AI boom is the "fake it until make it" mentality so popular in the tech venture capital circles (critical distinction from "industry"!), but it is the opposite of the reality. You do not put a spaceship to stable orbit by blowing millions of rockets in your lab, or become a surgeon by chopping up countless people. Not only because you simply can't do that but because if you do that and once succeed, you will not know what was different that time. 
Ouch. 

LLMs are an attempt to prove that "infinite monkeys over infinite time will write the Hamlet". 
Even though that is mathematically true, if you add up the cost and time, it is nonsense in the very literal meaning of the word, and this gradually reveals itself. You can see more and more signs that even business realised it, the end of this bubble is near. But the real issue is that no LLM can replace Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet for the first time. In short, LLMs adapt to all collected data, they can imitate the average, but never an expert. The expert content is and will always be a minority, and the adaptation will never tell the difference between the extremely good and extremely bad outliers. Neither you can pick the expert who is right at the moment: the definition of true invention is that it sounds insane, latest commonly known examples are like the relativity theory or the nuclear chain reaction. Knowing that from retrospect is deceiving. 
This is why learning the real history of science would be essential, instead of imitating Hollywood scientists... 

I am quite sure that there is no need for decades of hard-core IT experience to realise the ultimate flaw behind the current AI hype. Are you interested in proving this theory as a test subject? 😉


@markelliscreator
15 hours ago
That was a lovely, insightful read - thank you! And as for being a test subject, I think I am already
😉


@lkedves3 hours ago
Nah, the subject of my test, "the Kedves Test" if you like 😁 Here it is. 

I have a bet with myself that if serious people carefully read the following short text, will have problems answering the questions below in the "expected way" unless they are under pressure: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." (Upton Sinclair, 1935), explains my, at least a decade long experience. 

The text is the original definition of the Turing Test (emphasis is mine). 


MIND 
A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY 
October, 1950 

COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE 
By A. M. Turing 

1. The Imitation Game 
I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. 

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." 

[...]
We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think? 


The questions: do you think that according to Alan Turing
 - Passing the test really means that a machine is intelligent?
 - Passing the test is a technical goal that is worth the effort we put in that?
 - ... WTF is going on here??? 🤣 

Care to answer? 😉 I mean, big boyz spent YOUR money on this quest (and seems to have lost it)

2025. október 29., szerda

Human-AI collaboration


Konrad Kiss
I'll give a 30 min talk at AI Summit Budapest on Tuesday at the MKIK Prompt Arena about the future of Human-AI collaboration. Let me know if you can make it, I'd love to meet! ❤️

Lorand Kedves

Én nem jutok el ilyenekre, 25 év kutatás-fejlesztés nem kap helyet a nagyok asztalánál. Lásd még: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." (Upton Sinclair, 1935) - egyébként ez érvényes a teljes mai chatbot-AI világra, ahol a néma értő olvasás kizáró feltétel (pl. a Turing teszt definíciója).

A cím alapján viszont kíváncsi vagyok, vajon szóba került-e az alapfogalmak tisztázása során JCR Licklider Man-Computer Symbiosys cikke 1960-ból? 🤔
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

Konrad Kiss

Nem, de örömmel beszélgetnék a témában, ha érdekes lehet Önnek is! Az előadás célja inkább az volt, felhívjuk a kutatásaink eredményeire a figyelmet. Az MKIK segítségével sikerült bejutnunk az eseményre amiért nagyon hálásak vagyunk. :)
Nos, én örömmel beszélgetek ezekről a dolgokról olyanokkal, akiket a tények és az elfelejtett múlt is érdekel, nem csak az aktuális hype meglovagolásából nyerhető pénzügyi nyereség és kapcsolati tőke... 🙃
Sajnálatos módon ezek ellenkező irányba mutatnak, ez az oka a fent említett problémának még a hivatkozott forrásokról tudó környezetekben is. 🤷‍♂️

Ha elfér egy kis önreklám, itt van két (nem túl jó) videó:
https://lnkd.in/duJEbZty
Ezeket egyébként az alábbi előadás bevezetőjéből ollóztam:
https://youtu.be/WKfEDicpwPw

Néhány a vesszőparipáim közül, hátha megtetszik valami 🙂
Megvan a szerepe a hypenak és a pénzügyi nyereségnek is. A vállalkozói oldalon ez az életbenmaradást jelentheti, akadémiai oldalon néha ködbe burkolózik. A teremtett érték a kulcs metrika, ez pedig szubjektív. Meg fogom nézni az előadást hamarosan, köszönöm a linkeket.
Ezért jutottam arra a következtetésre, hogy az informatika aranykora 1945-től (MEMEX) 1972-ig (az utolsó Apolló küldetés) tartott, amíg mérnöki és tudományos célokat szolgált: pontos definíciók, objektív értékelés. Ebből persze nem lehet pénzt csinálni, de jött Bill Gates és feltalálta az informatika üzleti modelljét (1976), Alan Kay (tőle nyúlta Jobs) a "végfelhasználót".

2011-ben még csak a következményekkel küzdöttem:

So, if you really solve a problem well, you have solved it for anyone who can run that software, as long as they have the environment that you used. In "business language": if you do your job well in programming, you lose your job.
...
Software industry had invented the "artificial software aging" by changing the environment all the time: creating new operating systems, end supporting "old" hardware, end supporting new hardware with drivers in old operating systems and ensuring that old software will not run in the new environment. New frameworks and generated new requirements on the end user side can only be fulfilled by new and newer software again – so users pay programmers to solve the same problem every year.
https://lnkd.in/dy5Tnm3n

Figyelmeztetés: a háttér megértése jobban fáj. 🤕
Az "értékteremtés" kérdéssel kapcsolatban itt ez a dia 👇 amit az (egyébként elutasított) informatika PhD kutatási beszámolómhoz készítettem, de végül kivettem belőle. 2018-ra már megtanultam, hogy semmi értelme olyasmit mondani, amit a "felettem álló" bíráló nem akar hallani.

A három görbe csúcsai olvashatók úgy is, hogy kinek hol az érték (piros: "fogyasztó", kék: "üzlet", zöld: "tudomány"). Tudományon nem a mai publikáció-gyár / pop-science értendő, hanem ami az Apollo programot elvitte a Holdra. Nem a mozivásznon vagy egy VR sisakban (pedig ott "terem a pénz" 🤑 ), hanem a való világban (ami az üzletember és a politikus szerint "csak viszi a pénzt", és mivel "ők tartják fenn az akadémiát" 🤮, onnan is eltűnt 🤷‍♂️ ).

Na ezen a szinten kezd igazán fájni a történet, amikor kezd összeállni a valós viszony ember és intellektus között. Mellesleg, a Turing teszt közismert változatának egy lehetséges fordítása: miért is kéne intelligensnek tekinteni egy olyan fajt, amely épp most vágja el a saját torkát? Miért lenne cél az, hogy a gép ezt utánozza - pláne, milliárdokat és terawattokat borítani a "megoldásába"?
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai

Kiábrándító.

2025. augusztus 4., hétfő

Outsiders


@lkedves comment
Greetings, Grim, 

I like this model but think it is incomplete and wonder what you think about my version. 

1: The chess analogy is power-oriented, describes actions, a black box model. 
I use a white box model focusing on motivations and found a twisted version of the Indian caste system more useful with the Brahmins (monks), Kshatriyas (guardians), Vaishyas (organisers), Sudras (craftspeople), and the Dalits (untouchables). These represent the five ways that people can deal with their inevitable weakness and mortality; and dictates every decision they make. The model also shows how "modern society" flipped this system upside down, together with a possible (though quite improbable) solution. 

2: There is no single person who can flip the table, this is not how it works. 
There may be people who never accepted the motivations of this game, spent their lives outside of the struggle for money and power, seeking for real answers and better questions(!) They lost all their fights not because they were not ABLE to win but because they were NOBLE to take only what they needed and not what they could grab. They can and do tell everyone their way to play the game but get the response that "you have to understand". They do understand but they don't obey. 

Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. 
“Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?” 
But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, 
“You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. 
Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” 
When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away. 

Today the whole table is in free fall, no pawns and no kings can really control it, the game plays itself through them. Players either realise that and start looking for those outsiders or we die together. 

The outsiders do no look for honour, they seek respect in its original meaning: "re-specto" = "examine it again". Don't reject because you think that's insane. It is just frightening because it is out of the world you knew. 

Your move?

2025. május 22., csütörtök

Stargate... Another few billons for Sammy's Toy Factory?



@lkedves1 day ago
25+ years in working with AI (NOT the current chatbot bubble) and the true pioneers of informatics say: it does not matter how far you go into a dead end street because you did not even know that there were maps showing where to go. The question is: when do you realise the mistake and turn back from it... (no problem if you delete this comment, just a minority report)


@rwlurk
1 day ago
there is no insatiable demand for AI, but there is insatiable demand from investors for more growth in tech stocks, which are propping up the USA's security markets


@Abouttime-p8u4 hours ago
@lkedves it just might be too lste by then... AI makes work so much easier though, 10 hours of work turn into 1


@Abouttime-p8u4 hours ago
@rwlurk My reply: Have you seen how many billions of pare using AI? Just from the time ChatGPT started to a year later it tremendous growth. Sure, there is also a lot of demand from stock investors interested in companies related to AI.



@lkedves27 minutes ago (edited)
​ @Abouttime-p8u Ironically, you are right but maybe not for the reason you think. Social media is not a big fan of facts and real science, I try to be as lightweight as possible here. Let's quote Alan Turing, highlighting the keys that nobody seem to read. 

--- 
1. The Imitation Game 
I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think". The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. 
The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." 
--- 

Understand? 

Turing stated that both the goals and the means of this current "mainstream AI" are absurd. The "imitation game" does not answer the question if machines can think but replaces it. Turing wrote this article in the Mind (a Quarterly Review on Psychology and Philosophy !) to explain why people should stop calling the Universal Turing Machine a "thinking machine". I don't think he could imagine that a whole industry will be based on misinterpreting the first page (and completely ignoring the next 21) Or rather, just quoting Benedict Cumberbatch from the movie because he is so cute. Scientists... 

I have spent good 25 years on finding a definition of these terms on par with the UTM. I follow Douglas Engelbart, a mentioned pioneer when read AI as Augmenting Intellect, because his forgotten results hold the key. My daily job is to deliver solutions to "impossible missions" in real life with real deadlines and restricted budgets, not hype riding. 
The ratio is not 10 to 1 but 1 to 0. 

On the other hand, social media defines "thinking" as skimming over the popular news following the latest hypes (including videos like this), conduct some excited discussions with relatable buddies in your idea bubble and regurgitate some word salad as your well-founded opinion. And you are absolutely right. 
LLMs can do this much better than 10 to 1. 

But, there is a question. Is this second path really worth billions of dollars and terawatts of consumption? 

Back in the days before LinkedIn turned to a GeekBook, I picked up a quote that still holds today: 

I suppose one way for a machine to pass the Turing test is to wait until the quality of actual human conversation is so bad that a bot could be an improvement. This seems to be happening here. 

Peace... 


---- Interestingly, the first comment remained public and got a response to it ----


I've been thinking about this in addition to a "maximum wage" in the USA. Thinking of ceilings for progress. I'm becoming ever-more convinced that we should impose ceilings as a society, to slow the rate of progress for the sake of security and happiness. 

EACC folks (effective accelerationists) encourage us to barrel forward because AGI will solve all of our problems. I have extreme doubts. We will see how it okays out.


Quite the opposite. If you understand that our monetary system is based on exponential functions (the definition of the yearly interest on your bank deposit, or the GDP), combine it with enough elementary mathematics or informatics to know what it means, you realise that there is no ceiling. The repeated hype-rides and falls are simple consequences of the systemic ignorance, under various, sometimes bittersweet ideologies. 

I often watch The Big Short, you only have to replace the few words and get the AGI story - the two mortgage brokers are just like Sammy boy and the whoever that showed the site to Emily. I play a mix of Mark Baum and Michael Burry. Informatics offered a solution but the middle men took over, check Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the first chatbot, ELIZA, 1966. For contrast, Softbank invested in all hypes so far: Theranos, FTX, WeWork... I would rather consider that a red flag. Let alone, a praise from Trump.

I wonder if Bloomberg shadow bans this comment individually, or I am banned as a person. Testing, testing... 
😉

2025. május 10., szombat

What Is The Future Of Programming Languages?



The questions are excellent, the answers are "state of the art", the latter is not a compliment in this case. Here is a different take on the graph part.

  1. You have two fundamentally different ways to transfer and curate knowledge, A: storytelling (very human, imprecise) or B: knowledge graph building (hard for a human, as precise as can be). 👉 JCR Licklider, Libraries of the Future (1965, book).
  2. STEM knowledge is always B: a graph. When you have a problem in physics, biology, math, medicine, ... it's NOT about how you sing it or what language you use, but to build a precise network of property pages filled with data and linked to each other. The very terms (labels of data and links) are also graphs (DSLs). Information systems are graphs, too. In the computer's memory, you have flowcharts of the algorithms and you use the memory to hold the content of those property sheets. 👉 Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad (YouTube)
  3. EVERY program is a combination of a DSL set (the "meta" layer of classes, members, functions and their parameters) and a bunch of stories (the code of the functions and procedures), quoting Bob Martin: the software is assignment statements, if statements and while loops 👉 Future of Programming (YouTube).
  4. The real problem is that the text-based tools make us focus on the storytelling, we only see the big list of features or use cases, instead of the DSLs that allow us to describe and solve the atomic problems (modularity, KISS, DRY, SRP. ...). We have already solved every possible atomic problems literally millions of times, but repeating them every time (copy-paste or in "modern cases", LLMs🤦‍♂) in the endless possible combinations, and that grows every day. 👉 Alan Kay's Power of Simplicity (YouTube)
  5. Introducing new programming languages that do the same has one effect: it even erodes the "burden" of cumulated human experience and the codebase, start it all over again, not solving the fundamental issue.

Problem: Information systems are graphs. Storytelling is not the right way to interact with graphs. The blamed imprecision is manageable "human error" in the case of graphs but inevitable fatal block in text-based programming. Teaser 👉 Bret Victor, Future of Programming (YouTube); hard-core answer 👉 Douglas Engelbart: Augmenting Human Intellect (report)

Solution: STEM languages are graphs (DSLs). THE future programming language is the DSL of information systems. The same that we have in physics, mathematics, biology, ...

Question: has anyone read this far? 😉

---[ discussion under a comment ]---

CallousCoder
Your behaviour is like the old horse and cart people against the automobile. It's nonsensical, the technology is here to stay. So either adopt it or you'll go extinct. You know that good developers are terrible managers, right? ;) Also I don't get it, what the resistance is. Whether you ask a junior or medior to implement something or you ask an LLM. It's no different other than that the LLM just does it and doesn't nag especially after the 2nd or 3rd iteration ;)

CallousCoder
“bro” is 52 years old and didn’t take philosophy but EE and CS.

lkedves
Age is just a number (happens to be the same...) Check the Mother of All Demos, that was real technology behind the Apollo program, while this chatbot AI is just another stock market bubble. Side note: before the previous AI winter, we won Comdex '99 with a data mining / AI tool. Back then people could read the first paragraph of Turing's article, the definition of "the test" instead of trying to implement cartoon dreams... (including a Nobel prize winner psychologist) 

But you got the point with "Modern software is a disease!" LLMs learn from their sources, kids copy-paste them to real software, LLM learns from them again. Quantity goes up, quality goes down. LLM companies use human slaves to avoid stupid mistakes in everyday tasks after the first flops. Regardless of we accept this as a solution, who will censor generated codes? 

Dead end.

cyberfunk3793
AI is obviously going to fix data races and buffer overflows and every other type of bugs you can think of. You don't understand what is coming if you think it's just hype. I don't know if it will be 5 years or 50, but at some point humans will only be describing (in human language) what they want the program to do and reviewing the code that is produced. Currently AI is already extremely helpful but still makes a lot mistakes. These mistakes will get more and more rare and the ability of AI to program will far exceed humans just like computers beat us at chess.

TCMx3
Chess engines did not need AI to curbstomp us at chess. Non-ML based engines with simple table-bases for endings were already some 700 points stronger than the best humans. Sounds like you don't actually know very much about chess engines lmao.

CallousCoder
btw playing chess with an LLM is a hilarious experience. If it looses it brings back pieces from the dead or just “portals” them into safety.

lkedves
[retry, I promise I leave if disappears again]

You may have missed so I repeat. We won Comdex '99 with a data mining / AI tool (and there is nothing new on this field except the exponential growth of the hardware). Since then I have worked on refining knowledge graph management in information systems under every single project I touched, often delivering "impossible missions". I work together with the machine because I follow a different resolution of AI: Augmenting Intellect (Douglas Engelbart) on systems that are of course smarter than me (and generate part of their own codes for years from these graphs). Right now at the national AI lab in a university applied research project that I will not try to explain here.
You find some of my conclusions with references to sources in my comment added to this video (11th May). 

I know the pioneers who predicted and warned about what we have today (recommended reading: Tools For Thought by Howard Rheingold, you find the whole book online). One of them is Alan Turing, who asked people not to call the UTM a "thinking machine" and wrote an article in Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy about the dangers of making such claims without proper definitions. Poor man never thought that in a few decades "IT folks" would think this was an aim. Or Joseph Weizenbaum, the guy who wrote the first chatbot, ELIZA. 

I know why your dream will never happen because I know informatics (its original meaning, not the business model Gates invented) was against this fairy tale. LLMs are just try to prove that old story from quantum mechanics, that infinite monkeys in infinite time will surely type in the whole Hamlet. The problem is that we don't have infinite time and resources, and the goal is not repeating but write the next Hamlet. Those who initiated informatics, made this clear. Start with Vannevar Bush: As We May Think, 1945. 

@TCMx3 , @CallousCoder - thanks for your answers... 🙏 Another excellent example - in chess, you have absolute rules.

In life, we know that all the laws we can invent are wrong (Incompleteness theorem) and thinking means improving the rules while solving problems and taking the responsibility of all errors. The ultimate example is the Apollo program with Engelbart's NLS in the background, that's how THEY went to the moon. We go to the plaza to watch the next Marvel story in 4D, now with the help of genAI. If we go with the question of predicting the next 50 years, look up "Charly Gordon Algernon 1968" here on YouTube.

---[ This answer "disappeared" for the second time so I left the place ]---

2025. március 20., csütörtök

Immersive Technologies Policy Primer - reaction

On LinkedIn



This looks like a solid overview of the current "state of the art". What I don't see is the background, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐠𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 (and were afraid to look down so now we fall like a stone, just as predicted -> https://youtu.be/KZqsWGtdqiA?t=102 ).

When discussing the social effects of communication technologies, where is the reference to Neil Postman? -> neilpostman.org
https://youtu.be/QqxgCoHv_aE

When talking about education, where is PLATO?
https://youtu.be/THoxsBw-UmM

When discussing AR/VR, where is Ivan Sutherland?
https://youtu.be/AFqXGxKsM3w
Or at least, Alan Kay (among others, the real inventor of the tablet)...
https://youtu.be/pUoBSC3uoeo?t=5061

When thinking about informatics in general, where is Douglas Engelbart?
https://youtu.be/O77mweZ8-RQ?t=22
Or Ted Nelson?
https://youtu.be/KdnGPQaICjk

...

---

"Primer"... 🧐

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana

---
... and I guess this date should be 1994:
[3] Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino (1884)

2025. február 19., szerda

Haiku

The anti social medium. The Matrix dessert.

The crack on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.

The ultimate form of non-transformable information.


2025. február 5., szerda

The Experience of Being Wrong

How could I be THIS STUPID???

Now, please stop reading and remember when you asked this, not just lightly but with the strange mix of real anger and shame.


...


That was the last time you learned something really important and this is the only way to it. It happened to me yesterday. At age 52 I think this is a very positive feedback: I can (very hardly but still) lower my ego and learn. Here is the story.

I have been repeating for years in every context that JCR Licklider separated transferrable and non-transferrable knowledge, and a root cause of today's mess in IT (and consequently, everywhere) is the fact that we forgot this. Banging my chest like a gorilla, like here...

But yesterday, as my young colleague is creating a proper scientific publication, we started looking for the exact reference. To my greatest surprise, I did not find it. In desperation, I started reading Libraries of the Future again, and realized (thankfully and ironically on page 2!) that...


Licklider never wrote that.

Here is the actual quote:

We delimited the scope of the study, almost at the outset, to functions, classes of information, and domains of knowledge in which the items of basic interest are not the print or paper, and not the words and sentences themselves —but the facts, concepts, principles, and ideas that lie behind the visible and tangible aspects of documents. The criterion question for the delimitation was: "Can it be rephrased without significant loss?" Thus we delimited the scope to include only "transformable information." Works of art are clearly beyond that scope, for they suffer even from reproduction. Works of literature are beyond it also, though not as far. Within the scope lie secondary parts of art and literature, most of history, medicine, and law, and almost all of science, technology, and the records of business and government.

He talks about "transformable information", not "transferrable knowledge".


What happened? Had I forgotten to read???

No, but I was not able to at that moment. This paragraph held a key to a question of computerized knowledge management I struggled with for decades, literally. When it hit me, my mind was blown immediately and started restructuring itself. I followed, remembered, and kept quoting my own revelation instead of the text that I thought I was reading. 


But why?

Knowledge in our minds is always a network: some attributes of and relations between "things". To store or transfer our knowledge of a topic, we "export" the related part of this network in a presentation, text, figures, pictures, videos. Other people will try to integrate this content with their existing knowledge. Here comes the trick: for those who can do this without changing anything in their minds, this was not "information" because information is only the part that you did not know and could not figure out from your existing knowledge.

At the first time I could not integrate Licklider's original message with my existing knowledge, it only triggered a change that took a long time. Now, when I revisited this paragraph, it was new again but now I could actually read it and integrate with my current knowledge. Fun fact: the word "respect" does not mean "obey" or "accept" but re-specto: examine it again.


Real information is like good chilli: it burns twice.


So, how do I read the message now?

This is a simple way to tell the difference between transformable and non-transformable information. I quoted the rest correctly: informatics (the "libraries of the future") should work only with transformable information.

  • Transformable means you can say it hundreds of ways, the meaning will be the same. You focus on the knowledge graph in your head and try to build exactly the same in the audience: a physical phenomenon or a medical treatment. 
  • Non-transformable information focuses on the message itself and the feelings created by it (not less important but totally different). With different tone, wording, or face, the message and the effect significantly changes.


A less nerdy example

I think 99% of modern pop music is not even information: repeats the same message about a boy, girl, love, hate, etc. that the audience is already familiar. (hashtag metoo?)

But the Sound of Silence is a perfect example of non-transformable information: I already knew the original song but this presentation by Disturbed delivered the message (which happens to be in close relation with the topic of this post).


[This post can be a pair of my more formal article, The Science of Being Wrong (a possible definition of informatics) as here I defined "infonauts" as experts in being wrong...]

2024. február 28., szerda

Brain Bar - Te hiszel még a jövőben?

https://brainbar.com/10-kerdes-a-10-eves-brain-bartol


Kedves Brain Bar,


Szerintem nem az a kérdés, hogy hisz-e valaki a jövőben, hanem hogy képességeihez mérten érte vagy ellene cselekszik, egyáltalán érti-e amit csinál, amiről beszél. Ez gyakorlatilag lehetetlen, ha nemhogy nem érti de nem is ismeri a múltat. ("Óriások vállán állva" az üres fecsegés is messzebbre hangzik...)

A múlt nem csak kijelöli a 10 kérdés közül a lényegeseket, de választ is ad rájuk. Tapasztalatom szerint viszont ezek nem csak a nagyközönség, hanem informatikai doktori kutatás környezetében is kívül esnek a komfortzónán (streetlight effect).

Lásd: https://bit.ly/montru_ScienceWrong

Buzgó, buzgó, buzgó...

2024. február 3., szombat

LinkedIn - Apple Vision Pro



The Apple Vision Pro is mind blowing in many ways and signals an important inflection point in the industry. But there is also a lack of clarity in how this all comes together in devices that we'll want to take out into the world and use on a daily basis. I call it the "messy middle." Camera/screen based MR/AR devices are great ways to preview the future, to test and learn, and take us toward the future devices that will be a part of our daily lives in a big way. My plea to the industry-- let's not lose sight of the ultimate goal: devices that can connect us to the real-world and people around us and make our experiece as human beings out in the world richer and better. I wrote a bit about how we view the future of AR here: https://lnkd.in/gquivyQn.


---

Lorand Kedves

I see a philosophical difference manifested in AR hardware. Can you see through the device, or does the middle-man block your eyes with its screens and transfer the view from its cameras?
I think I understand why Apple joined to the heavy-weight class as eventually, it will win there with its experience, momentum and capacity. But is that the right way? Should "augment" really mean separate, remix and project?
I don't think so. A proper 3D augmentation over a directly visible environment is the future I would vote for. I don't want anyone to "immerse" in an artificial world, deal with motion sickness, bump into objects on a software glitch. Rather let them see the real world but spice it with a modest bubble of additional knowledge.


Bill Wallace

I don't think Apple is saying "This" is how AR should be done. They compiled a tech stack that was fit for purpose for a strategy and added in pass through AR because they could. It's like saying GM shouldn't make passenger vehicles because we need pick up trucks. Different devices for different jobs.
In terms of the AVP, it is a reasonable solution using the critical mass of the tech available today. When see-through optical has enough tech in place to build enough useful features for a class of usage, then maybe they will play there also.



Lorand Kedves


So many topics, so small space…

AVP/Apple: They desperately want a “new iPhone moment”. This is not a weird connector, a bad keyboard or a fanless machine that cooks itself. They will not let this go easily.

AVP itself: this device has no “job”, it is a general consumer device. We remember how mobile phones moved from socially rejected awkward slabs to critical part of our individual and social life, unconsciously redefining “presence”.

AVP-like job: the head mounted display in fighter planes. The key reference frame is the plane and its sensors, the HMD must know its position relative to the plane. Not a random street.

AR in general: Damocles (1968) appeared right after Sketchpad (1963). Visual computing and AR is here from day one of informatics but with no "real job". I happen to have one: my system manages all data in a dynamic semantic graph (now testing on the full SEC EDGAR export on my laptop 🙂 ).

Another use case: the AR glass is a dumb, see-through screen and motion capture dots. People go into a conference room with lots of cameras. The 3D interactive hologram in the middle is projected for all participants. Cheap, safe, can be done today. Only the profit margin is low.

Where am I wrong?


Bill Wallace

I actually had a bit of a hard time following all of your thoughts, but context can be hard in this minimal channel. I enjoy exploring new perspectives but I can't comment on much.
'They desperately want a “new iPhone moment”'
I agree with that. I don't think this is it. I love that they are driving the market but I don't think they have a leading solution yet. They may make a market but noting like iPhone.
iPhone sold 1m plus in it's first year and 10m plus in year 2.
The AVP projection is 600k year 1. They sold out 40k in a day, now preordered out to about 80k total. I think everything after 200k is going to be a slog. Only time will tell. It won't be a flop but won't be a killer device either. Or this post might embarrass me in the future.



Lorand Kedves

Bill Wallace Yeah. So many "communication platforms" but they all good for venting and cheering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW-kAqAjMNc
And no place for a meaningful dialog, that feels so weird against the sounds of silence...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Dg-g7t2l4

Anyways. The listed aspects are those we should talk about to evaluate AR as a technology, medium or social phenomenon. But Apple with AVP changes the topic to market penetration and profit, and with gigantic effort that only they can invest, may push it through and move this product from awkward to desirable for the public. AVP must not be a success as a product to make this the next iPhone moment.

That turned mobile communication, a technology that could be available for $100 and maybe even without charger (microcontrollers, solar panel, eInk display) to an area of entertainment market with billions of fragile but beautiful glass slabs every year that already replace / overflow our eyes and memory, each for $1000 (fake figures, just the magnitude). And green if you exclude Ghana and alike.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agbogbloshie

AVP makes the Hitchhikers' Peril Sensitive Sunglasses or "the blind lead the blind" phrase so real. (sorry for venting)


Larry Rosenthal Reading your comments I thought you should refer to Postman - and there you are! I see the beauty of this lecture to the Apple developers in 1993. Quote: "Television should be the last technology we will allow to have been invented and promoted mindlessly"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqxgCoHv_aE&t=5285s

I started talking to computers (coding) at 12, now I am 51 with a whole life doing that. I see a crucial moment when this ("my"!) industry wants to strap a screen on the face of people, completely isolating them from the reality (yet acknowledging that we live in a world in which they have reasons to prefer that).

But I also admire the Apollo program and the lesson they learned when in a go-fever they burned the Apollo-1 crew during a test, worded perfectly by Gene Kranz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zjAteaK9lM

Building a technological civilization in general, and altering the human perception of the world on individual and community level in particular, is also "terribly unforgiving of carelessness, incapacity and neglect". I know that my words have no weight, but for whatever this counts, here they are:

Dammit, stop.


Mitch Turnbull

Thank you for this discussion and John Hanke for initiating it. But how to put the genie back in the bottle?


Lorand Kedves

Mitch Turnbull My 2 cents: we don't.

Informatics is more like the old story of Pandora's box. We were not careful and have all the misery out in the world but we have to open it again to find the hope. I went back to the University after 20 some years in the industry and via my research I finally met the "founding fathers of informatics" who saw all this coming. You find a short summary here from 2018 (now trying to create some videos in my spare time but that's not my comfort zone for sure)
https://mondoaurora.org/TheScienceOfBeingWrong_KAIS.pdf

For motivation, look at Douglas Engelbart, his goals, achievements and modesty (and the date!). I did my research, his results are massive, today's informatics only scratches the surface hunting for profit. Imagine if we start listening to people like him instead of current "icons".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjWhQiwJzKg


Larry Rosenthal

Lorand Kedves the good news is sometimes, eventually, we do. Today the smog in the air, the smoke in restaurants, are all mostly gone in western cities. Smoking was as common as driving leaded fuel cars that got 8 miles to the gallon. Sometimes actions in society change. Sometimes it takes a civil war to change an action as well.


Lorand Kedves

Larry Rosenthal Does this mean I wasted too much time taking seriously those "existential threat orgs" like the Cambridge University or the MIT or the UN? 🙂 Or thinking that actions without understanding like that of Edward Snowden (From Russia with Love) or Aaron Swartz (no joke here, RIP) may not help?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ

I think you are right on MIPS. But I have been payed for clear thinking in rough situations and still here (with some more or less managed psychosomatic issues). My conclusion is that mankind needs a paradigm shift. The definition of that state is that there is no other option. (... and it is not a screen strapped on our faces showing the Brave New World - another Postman ref... 🙂 )
https://neilpostman.org/



Larry Rosenthal


Lorand Kedves ironically i didnt know of postman much in 93... i knew mcluhan much more.. as for his quote from 93.. maybe he got it from me.;) “ I’ve seen the future of the Metaverse and it looks like 1980's TV “ ,,, this was all part fo tHUNK! the digital network which we began in 92;) published as early MAC diskettes.;) BUT Postman, McLuhan and Chayefsky should all be mandatory learning today. but its probably too late. sigh.. i also lamented nback then that i never got to make real spaceships as i did in my college thesis, since by the time i graduated in 85 the worlds money was now stopped from going to reality and all investment was in the virtual of the PC or movie. So i made lots of tv and video game spaceships instead from 85-95. since i had to eat.;)


Larry Rosenthal


Lorand Kedves we do need a paradigm shift,. but certainly the stanford/ mit/ eff folks were not the people who we should have allowed to make the previous one.;) aaron died for their sins.


Lorand Kedves


Larry Rosenthal I think I found a more constructive approach.

Institutions are by definition bound to the system and the current paradigm, thus work against any real shift. That can only come from "insane" individuals, as logical thinking based on a new paradigm is nonsense looking from the old one. In older words, "though this be madness, yet there is a method in it". In areas like physics you are lucky because you can use an equipment to show that your theory works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Szilard#Columbia_University

But in informatics, you work against human nature, quoting Postman:
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
https://neilpostman.org/

Aaron lived a meaningful life chasing values beyond those of a "consumer society". He did not know enough about the past, substituted this gap with faith in people and communities. He did not lose against sins of individuals but roles they played.

On the other hand, I did my research, know that don't say much new but still against the current understanding. Here it starts.
https://youtu.be/u-TFazXf_RU


Larry Rosenthal


Lorand Kedves the adults in the room failed him. Simple as that. They have failed most children who came after them. Many of those children have finally awakened. Most are not self blaming, they are getting very angry. Machines may hold man at bey longer than man alone, but soon they to age and fail.


Lorand Kedves


Larry Rosenthal Maybe. I prefer clear heads. We'll see.


Lorand Kedves


Larry Rosenthal ... and adequately TRAINED (by the same institutions you blame because there is no better alternative).

In IT, you can't quote Bob Martin enough:
"... if we are doubling every five years, then we always have half of the programmers less than five years of experience, which leaves our industry in a state of perpetual inexperience... the new people coming in must repeat the mistakes made by everyone else over and over and over and over, and there seems to be no cure for this..."
https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?t=3092s

Before saying so what, IT is a changing field, ask yourself if you think a commercial pilot or a brain surgeon is "experienced" after 5 years. With 30+ behind my back here, I can safely say: hard core IT is beyond reading the marketing materials of the latest tools and languages.

Informatics is literally brain surgery on civilization level. No wonder that it fails with the current bazaar attitude.



Larry Rosenthal


i'll stick with the arts and sciences vs technology and engineering being written on the colleges buildings entranceways.


Lorand Kedves


Larry Rosenthal That's why I so much respect Postman, an arts expert who could precisely analyze and predict the humane consequences of technology and engineering. To me, both other questions around "what" (products, services, stories) are equally important: "why" (arts and science) and "how" (technology and engineering). I agree, one should be expert in one - but be aware of and respect the other.


Lorand Kedves


Larry Rosenthal "... i never got to make real spaceships as i did in my college thesis, since by the time i graduated in 85 the worlds money was now stopped from going to reality and all investment was in the virtual of the PC or movie. So i made lots of tv and video game spaceships instead from 85-95. since i had to eat.;)"

I missed this important comment... thank you!

I think I had more luck. I met with the Tao Te Ching and started programming my first computer, a Commodore 116 around the same time at age 12. I got CS BSc in 1994 but only met the founding fathers like Engelbart and critics like Postman after I returned to the academy at age 43 (CS MSc, half PhD). I had the privilege to spend 25+ years working on (and with) what I dare to call AI (far from the popular "state of the art"). Of course not on the surface but behind any paying jobs until I hit the glass ceiling, got fired, started again elsewhere. The money was just enough to raise three sons, not more.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity...” (correction, not Seneca) as I started this lecture 10 years ago. It aged well, like the picture at "I see the storm coming" is the Maidan Square riot, Ukraine, 2013.
https://mondoaurora.org/TasteOfLuck.pdf


Larry Rosenthal


Lorand Kedves life is luck and timing. All the way back to a few amino acids in the goo.



Lorand Kedves


Larry Rosenthal Agree, life is that.

Civilization is another story. This is a most tricky form of the behavioral sink, when accumulated knowledge and tools free individuals from the constant struggle for survival. It moves the focus to communities (tribes, nations, ideologies, see also Dawkins and the meme theory) to the ultimate global level. Now the threat is the collapse of knowledge transfer under the power of the very technology invented to support it.

Can't quote JCR Licklider enough (1964)
„... the "system" of man's development and use of knowledge is regenerative. If a strong effort is made to improve that system, then the early results will facilitate subsequent phases of the effort, and so on, progressively, in an exponential crescendo. On the other hand, if intellectual processes and their technological bases are neglected, then goals that could have been achieved will remain remote, and proponents of their achievement will find it difficult to disprove charges of irresponsibility and autism.”

Better to realize the importance of individual responsibility as part of the education, not under the threat of death

... or missing the message even then...