[HN Gopher] LLM abstraction levels inspired by fish eye lens
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LLM abstraction levels inspired by fish eye lens
Author : swyx
Score : 241 points
Date : 2024-12-03 16:55 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (wattenberger.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wattenberger.com)
| Terretta wrote:
| My cursor got schooled.
|
| Intriguing example with the shoemaker story, but initially
| confusing. After playing with it, okay, but still perhaps more
| confusing than the concept which is clear.
|
| The trick with the cursor suggests: what if the context was
| ambient, like a graph of concept bubbles around whatever
| paragraph has focus? Or, a step further, as if the paragraph was
| a card in an array of cards swiped across a desk in "is this your
| card?" style, with fisheye focus on paragraph text, past and
| future paragraphs as cards to left and right of this one, with
| summarized concepts bracketing those from above and below?
|
| In any case, this is onto something, and worth experimenting with
| various UIs.
| toisanji wrote:
| Another article with a similar concept, around AI, but not LLMs:
| https://blog.jtoy.net/choosing-the-appropriate-abstraction-l...
| BitterCritter wrote:
| I think the process of learning is in fact making larger pictures
| into smaller quotes and this does not help learning in the way
| that it's trying to. The process of diluting context is something
| that fundamentally must happen inside a person and trying to
| replace that with Ai is contrary to the point.
|
| I do find significant use for this in something like review and
| considering the legibility of my own note taking, that is one
| handsome solution.
| baxtr wrote:
| This sounds uncannily similar to Barbara Minto's "Pyramid
| Principle"...
| imranq wrote:
| I think this is a great way to explain the idea of a knowledge
| graph. There's probably a whole field of ux research opening up
| to interact with knowledge graphs and using llms to create them,
| parse them and display them to users
| richardw wrote:
| A term I've heard since the ...2000's?...is "focus+context" [1],
| often used in visualisation. I'm looking for a very similar UI
| construct right now, for balancing simple high-level terms for
| non-technical people but digging in for people who want more
| detail, or who want a definition. My thinking is to have a
| sidebar with more info, but a closable popup might work better
| for mobile. Don't like popups but it's e.g. how iOS does "look
| up" when focusing on a word.
|
| [1] And article hints at it with the lines "A fish eye lens
| doesn't ask us to choose between focus and context" and "This
| concept isn't new--it's foundational to fields like data
| visualization."
| ionwake wrote:
| I have no idea who the author is but that was the most beautiful
| blog Post I've ever come across. I would be perturbed if didn't
| know ai was used to help make the fish but I'm not trying to
| detract from my praise. Good post op
| ruzig wrote:
| The blog post itself is at product production level.
| aanet wrote:
| What is this voodoo?? This is the among the loveliest sites I've
| read in a long time! <3
|
| Beautifully designed, executed and presented. With just enough
| tension to pull the reader in...
|
| I had to look up the author (who I was not familiar with, tbh)
| and her other work. Good job!
|
| Beautifully done. 12/10, would read again!
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I love the way the fish move around! It's a very pretty webpage
| in my opinion.
| tianshuo wrote:
| Great explanation! It's actually a kind of version of "TL;DR,"
| which stands for "Too long, don't read." One of AI's benefits is
| personalization, which means that you can jump between
| abstraction levels, or in other words, information density
| levels.
| brainless wrote:
| This is such a lovely article and I relate to the idea as I have
| thought of something similar when I was building a passion
| project (https://github.com/pixlie/gitplay).
|
| The idea was to use the Git commit log to show how a software
| evolved into what it is today. I needed to think of zooming in
| and out of context, where there are thousands of commits
| involved. I am not a good UI person so I will definitely take
| inspiration from this.
| djmips wrote:
| Very nice! On Perforce I always loved the time-lapse view.
| Basically another view that could let you see your code evolve
| over time with branches and changes. There are some git tools
| like this but never captured my imagination like the Perforce
| time-lapse. I am eagerly looking forward to trying your tool!
| brainless wrote:
| Thanks, I just searched for Perforce time-lapse. I will find
| out more about it, more food for thought.
| newusertoday wrote:
| nice project.
| p1necone wrote:
| Oh dear, someone has invented an even more compelling way for me
| to get stuck in a wikipedia article reading hole.
| dylan604 wrote:
| we've had other expressions that covered this concept as well:
| 30,000' view, boots on the ground, deep in the trenches. Forest
| through the trees.
|
| It's great that someone has a new saying, but it's still the same
| concept. It's not like we've just been shown a new wheel. It's
| just been cleaned up and given fresh coat of armor all, and maybe
| chrome rims instead of the ones from the factory
| sedatk wrote:
| Isn't this the original design of hypertext as intended by Ted
| Nelson? Like, instead of clicking links and navigating to
| somewhere else, the relevant information would actually accompany
| the text?
| ruzig wrote:
| I feel the same. The hypertext in this article is AI-generated.
| casey2 wrote:
| Unless someone starts paying people to read a system like this
| will probably be inevitable in our information saturated age were
| nobody has the time to read anymore. Pulling in decades or
| centuries worth of context and motivation for the passage you are
| reading is definitely a worthwhile goal.
|
| I really like the layout of the reimagined wikipedia it has the
| feeling that there is an entire group of people and subjects the
| care about and rely on the central topic. It's the exact same
| feeling as studying at a good school. The narrative that this
| circle creates can be a powerful motivator for learning. With
| wikipedia and other wikis, most articles feel like your reading
| an expense report and 99% of links are equivalent to the "general
| topics" and seem to serve more as distractions from your topic
| rather than a circle around it.
| kubb wrote:
| Ever heard of executive summaries?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Part of me wants to say, this is waste of space. The
| "Reimagined Wikipedia" is basically just taking all the links
| and rendering them as tiny thumbnails orbiting the article.
| This adds no new information, no new connections, to what was
| already present in the article.
|
| _And yet_ , it somehow _feels_ different. It 's really as you
| say, "it has the feeling that there is an entire group of
| people and subjects the care about and rely on the central
| topic"; those thumbnails beckon, invite you to explore in a way
| that regular hyperlinks don't.
|
| (That, or maybe after years of getting stuck on Wikipedia,
| recursively reading linked pages for hours on end, I eventually
| grew desensitized to regular links.)
| th0ma5 wrote:
| The biggest problem with complexity is that you have it. I
| applaud wanting to manage complexity, but there's a difference
| between managing complexity and simply hiding it.
|
| You want the right information, summarized correctly, from the
| right source, to the right person, and just in time. We can
| barely, sometimes, do that if we're lucky with deterministic
| systems... We loose most of the control of any of these pieces in
| probabilistic systems. Maybe that works for you, but it feels
| like hubris to use it anywhere I might actually think I could use
| it.
| brightmood wrote:
| How do I disable the fish following my mouse? I skipped the
| content because of that. Too, damn, distracting.
| danieldk wrote:
| They don't follow the mouse pointer when using arrow keys
| scrolling the page (Vivaldi, macOS).
| thirdacc wrote:
| Bottom right corner, click the "Please, no fish" button.
| acenturyandabit wrote:
| An outliner would be a good way to represent this info: something
| like Workflowy, Org mode, Ravel or Dynalist. You get nested
| bullet points that you can collapse.
|
| Workflowy: https://workflowy.com/ Ravel:
| https://ravel.acenturyandabit.xyz/
| georgestrakhov wrote:
| https://www.telescopictext.org/
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yes, like that, but less interactive. Clicking to expand every
| part individually is tedious, especially with no up-front idea
| of how many levels of detail are there. TFA's example operates
| on lager blocks of text, too, which seems to work out better.
| hopfog wrote:
| Beautiful blog post!
|
| I've built something similar and have yet to find a compelling
| use case for it. In my mind it seemed like such an obvious idea
| that I thought I'd start using it instead of Wikipedia. However,
| in practice I seldom care about the broader or more specific
| topics for the thing I'm looking into. It's strange though
| because I'm a compulsive rabbit holer but it just doesn't trigger
| the same urge to explore related nodes as Wikipedia does.
|
| With that said, this UI is much slicker so maybe that is the
| missing piece.
| internet_points wrote:
| As long as I can turn it off, I get distracted so easily. I can
| barely code full-screen with one function visible at a time.
|
| That wikipedia view sounds terrifying.
| stavros wrote:
| I created something related long ago, when there weren't any
| LLMs. I do think it works better when human authors can choose
| when to add information and how:
|
| https://skorokithakis.github.io/expounder/
| bux93 wrote:
| Those who don't know the pyramid principle are doomed to reinvent
| it.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Haystack Editor uses a UI of inter-function control flow graphs,
| but lacks the ability to "summarize" surrounding code. (In my
| usage I found it was buggy, and useful for tracing a specific
| level of knotty code, but had issues relative to traditional IDE
| tabs/panes for both small files and flipping between multiple
| "aspects" of a system.)
| tubs wrote:
| The example is incorrect. On the paragraph where the elves
| (dwarves??) get the clothes, it is specified no cut pieces are
| left out for work, but the subsequent summary is the elves settle
| to work?
|
| I don't think this is a particularly good showcase.
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(page generated 2024-12-10 23:01 UTC)