One thing I realised today about LLMs: they have *exactly* the same problem as the Semantic Web did and Cory Doctorow pointed out in 2001 (https://web.archive.org/web/20070508200721/http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm). LLMs facility with producing language have just blinded us to this fact.

#llm #chatGPT #SemanticWeb #metacrap

The whole point of that post is to show that og hasn’t solved it. There are too many flavors of metacrap and no standards. And worse og is not only not “open” it’s a DRY violation.

If you want to spelunk a bit, Cory Doctorow approached the idea back in 2001: Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

#francis-urquhart #metacrap #microformats #twitter

https://boffosocko.com/2021/08/15/55794681/

Hooray for one less plugin in the stack!

#administrative-note #metacrap #twitter #wordpress-plugins

https://boffosocko.com/2020/12/25/55784118/

If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip. A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. ❧

Apparently this also now applies to politics and democracy too. Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:12AM

When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order. ❧

If we look at Twitter as a worldwide annotation tool which is generating metadata on a much tinier subset of primary documents (some of which are not truthful themselves), this seems to bear out in that setting as well.

ref: Kalir & Garcia in Annotation Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:17AM

Schemas aren’t neutral ❧

This section highlights why relying on algorithmic feeds in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be toxic. Your feed is full of what they think you’ll like and click on instead of giving you the choice. Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:23AM

It’s wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. ❧

The fate of true democracies. Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:33AM

↬ Jeremy Keith Replying to a tweet from @hdv (2020-08-06)

https://boffosocko.com/2020/08/06/metacrap-putting-the-torch-to-seven-straw-men-of-the-meta-utopia-cory-doctorow/