Hacker News

We are at the breathless-but-low-information-posts-about-plain-text-formats point in the cycle.

AI generated article.

Sdks/libs, especially open source sdks, were never about gated knowledge. They were about the providing company making it as easy as possible for you to integrate. You would not need to know the idiosyncrasies behind api retries, paging, rate limits, auth flow, and on and on. The third party developers needed a resource, they call a method and get it. Open source libraries especially are about pooling knowledge, not gating it. This is propaganda for pooling that knowledge inside a service you have to pay to use, and instead of developers all using and improving the same codebase together, they have to spend money to rewrite the same code repeatedly. This is AI companies further trying to undercut open source because it’s free.

It seems beyond naive, rather malicious, to upload any useful private data to SaaS LLMs.

Like, you are letting them data mine your business. Why are corporations not panicing over this?

I've been using org[0] for the past 10 years to store knowledge, project write-ups, notes, etc and love it. As I get deeper into AI I'm keeping that, like recently I created an org-edit tool to manage especially issues in the project write-ups. 1 file with all my several hundred projects accumulated over the years, and the value has only grown although it's becoming harder for me to personally consume; I'll likely just create a couple commands that improve the browsing experience. But I continue to love and prefer that single large file (actually several: personal knowledge, projects, business and an inbox) to many individual files. And it's synced across my devices, where esp on mobile I can access it all via Orgzly[1].

[0] https://orgmode.org/ [1] https://orgzlyrevived.com/

Yep, knowledge should not be gated:

Imagine Google search without any links or sources named

This is the “modern” AI chatbot:

It never mentions the training data it used, in fact has no idea what it used (often FB, Reddit and partisan websites)

Update: I added the reply about after the fact Googling chatbots do - it’s different

>Personal wikis always died for the same reason.

Mine (WikidPad) died when I switched to Linux, and learned that breaking changes to WxPython rendered it worthless, as none of the dialog boxes functioned after that point. Sure, the source from 2012 was available, but my Wiki really wasn't.

Eventually this forced me back to Windows... but it was too late, now I'm back on Windows, and still don't trust WikidPad.

>Keeping them current was tedious, and humans hate tedium. But the tedium is the one thing language models are immune to. They will happily re-link, re-summarize, and reconcile contradictions across a hundred files without complaining.

Yeah, and you're going to trust the LLM to reliably maintain this? Not a wise choice.

I really wish we had a reliable way to annotate and interlink documents using hypertext. Unfortunately, HTML doesn't actually let you mark up (annotate) hypertext.

We still, 81 years later, don't have a Memex! 8(

If you're maintaining Markdown with a coding agent then you need linting tools to do things like checking for broken links. Without consistency checks, it will often make mistakes. The more internal consistency checks you can do, the better.

This is good practice anyway, and a coding agent can help write the tools.

Now that we have coding assistance, we can even be more ambitious. A common, language-independent test suite would be more useful than Markdown for generating an SDK and then verifying that it matches the spec. So I don't think plain Markdown is the best way.

The title suggested a far more interesting piece than the actual post. Alas.

Information wants to be free! I remember when that was the rallying cry of hackers. I miss those days.

Has anyone figured out why anyone would bother adopting the google 'open knowledge format'?

Normally I expect a set of tooling to be build on top of any open format. Value-adds and interoperability. Instead I just see a way to organize markdown files.

I don't understand why Open Knowledge Format improves interoperability, which is the main claim for its value. These LLMs are obviously advanced enough to navigate other MD file organization schemas like Obisidan, or other text files like Emacs Org.

now that any software/knowledge is copyable given sufficient cash and AIs, gating knowledge migth be the only thing that protects your business. otherwise you do not have business.

Personally, I think the ability to distinguish between all the knowledge that's overflowing is becoming a characteristic of the current establishment. In reality, the number of sites where you can get good information is extremely limited. It feels like we're in an era where discernment matters more.

Most of it is just misinformation, after all. People say knowledge shouldn't be restricted, but now we have the opposite problem. There's so much information that just skimming through it takes too much time. On top of that, as we shift from text to video, getting information has become even harder. Compared to text, YouTube videos feel like they have much lower information density. I've heard that the TikTok generation's text literacy is declining, but maybe that's actually a social adaptation to process as much data as possible from low-density sources

In that sense, the efficiency of RAG ultimately comes down to what kind of good knowledge you're feeding into the AI.

Sadly it has been during most of human history. I think the establishment resents the masses becoming over educated. The 1990s internet had a wealth of views and information on it. Now you can only access approved sources via search engines thanks to scaremongering, and have CloudFlare monitoring everything you do.