I knew he cited a NYCT paper on the page itself, but I've never seen the paper so I didn't know how similar they were. Regardless, making this available to the public is laudable in-of-itself. Thanks for the sources, will check out later!
Are there any tools that employ LLMs to fill out the Semantic Web data? I can see that being a high-impact use case: people don’t generally like manually filling out all the fields in a schema (it is indeed “a bother”), but an LLM could fill it out for you – and then you could tweak for correctness / editorializing. Voila, bother reduced!
This would also address the two reasons why the author thinks AI is not suited to this task:
1. human stays in the loop by (ideally) checking the JSON-LD before publishing; so fewer hallucination errors
2. LLM compute is limited to one time per published content and it’s done by the publisher. The bots can continue to be low-GPU crawlers just as they are now, since they can traverse the neat and tidy JSON-LD.
——————
The author makes a good case for The Semantic Web and I’ll be keeping it in mind for the next time I publish something, and in general this will add some nice color to how I think about the web.
Bringing an LLM into the picture is just silly. There's zero need.
The author (and much of HN?) seems to be unaware that it's not just thousands of websites using JSON-LD, it's millions.
For example: install WordPress, install an SEO plugin like Yoast, and boom you're done. Basic JSON-LD will be generated expressing semantic information about all your blog posts, videos etc. It only takes a few lines of code to extend what shows up by default, and other CMSes support this took.
SEOs know all about this topic because Google looks for JSON-LD in your document and it makes a significant difference to how your site is presented in search results as well as all those other fancy UI modules that show up on Google.
Anyone who wants to understand how this is working massively, at scale, across millions of websites today, implemented consciously by thousands of businesses, should start here:
Is this the "Semantic Web" that was dreamed of in yesteryear? Well it hasn't gone as far and as fast as the academics hoped, but does anything?
The rudimentary semantic expression is already out there on the Web, deployed at scale today. Someone creative with market pull could easily expand on this e.g. maybe someday a competitor to Google or another Big Tech expands the set of semantic information a bit if it's relevant to their business scenarios.
It's all happening, it's just happening in the way that commercial markets make things happen.
I guess where do you go from basic info that can be machine generated, to rich information that's worth consuming for things other than link previews and specific Google Search integrations?
It depends, are we pontificating as technologists, or addressing real market needs? Given that the framework is already there and widely adopted, I think the moment there is a viable commercial scenario where a company sees a profit opportunity, additional JSON-LD schemas will take off. I don't think Great Thinker technologists are likely to alter the behavior of the market at scale by themselves
Semantic Web is now revived into its new marketing incarnation, called Knowledge Graphs. There's actually a lot of work on building KGs with LLMs, specially in the RAG space e.g., Microsoft's GraphRag and llama_index's KnowledgeGraphIndex
This article reasons that it is not a coincidence because of the “seconds pendulum” definition of the meter, which would necessitate the values being equal because of the pendulum time period equation.
That all makes sense to me, and I agree.
But here’s what’s odd to me:
We ended up not choosing the seconds pendulum approach (for reasons mentioned in the article). Instead they chose to use “1 ten-millionth of the Earth’s quadrant”. Now, how is it that that value is so close to the length of the seconds pendulum? Were they intentionally trying to get it close to seconds pendulum length, and it just happened to be a nice round power of ten? Is that a coincidence?
I seriously need an explanation for that too. Never understood how these genius folks just came up with the most outlandish definitions that somehow make perfect sense
The 1-minute (or less) headways on London Underground are precisely because of signal modernization over the past couple decades that has moved certain lines beyond purely fixed-block signaling.
Much of what you’re describing (besides the live hitching and unhitching) is made possible by Communication-Based Train Control (CBTC) [see link below]. This has been implemented in many rail systems globally, mostly urban rail. It helps reduce headways a lot. However:
1. It’s not just a software problem - installing the hardware is time-consuming and expensive. The engineering requirements are much stricter when human lives are at stake so you can’t just strap on a radio to each train. You still need additional infrastructure along the tracks to manage communications.
2. There are other limiting factors in reducing headway - having enough trains and having enough train operators. Somewhat easier to solve perhaps but still costly and non-trivial.
Urban systems are generally single-user networks, which makes life a lot easier. For main line railways that assumption doesn't hold, which is where things kinda fall apart.
It's a bit like the old copypasta from the slashdot days of "This is why your solution to spam won't work", where one of the options was "It requires the entire internet to change at once.
Just look at what a big deal in the US it was to get positive train control (PTC) installed nationally.. and that's a much simpler system that is basically local (Picks up info from relays in the track, but all the logic is in the locomotive).
Assuming you mean TrainTime (which does both LIRR and Metro-North). That app is one of the best transit apps I’ve used (public or private).
TrainTime has different requirements though - it’s focused on schedules and ticket-buying (and does both of those things really well). The relaunched MTA app seems more about way-finding, trip planning, service status. For those functions, I’m not sure it does much of a better job than Transit app or Citymapper app (although certainly an improvement over Apple or Google Maps).
Hmm, I've been using Google Maps for this purpose for years, just helping me decide how to get to a particular spot in NYC, walking, subway, bus, citibike, or uber if its worth it.
It also takes into account the official schedules, so I generally trust its routing.
What am I missing out on that the MTA app does better with?
I too discovered sizecoding through dwitter way past the original demoscene era, but I think codegolfing with javascript scratches a similar CS/math/language tricks itch. Had a lot of fun with dwitter, and it definitely helped me feel more fluent in coding for work, just from all the practice even though optimizing 140bytes and SWE-ing multiple thousand line files are two different niches at first glance.
I first learned about this piece in a college art class. Reading about it again, I’m intrigued by how much of the surrounding discourse (including the artist’s own comments) talks about “audience” and “public” and “humanity” in the abstract.
It seems to me that the outcome would have been heavily dependent on _who specifically_ was in the room. In that way, the piece speaks more to the psyche of _an_ audience and _a_ public, rather than _the_.
I'm afraid this is very much an "a man in a pub told me" anecdote, but a while ago I chatted with somebody who apparently interviewed people who attended the original Rhythm 0. She said that initially people were reluctant to behave in the violent ways expected, and Abromović's assistants were telling people they were spoiling the art by being too timid. None of the online write-ups mention this so idk, but it would make a lot of sense. The piece would've been a damp squib if (a few of) the audience hadn't behaved as they did.
Either way, perhaps it makes sense to think of the audience reaction as artistic collaboration, rather than innate human visciousness.
This is really an important piece of information to understand the original art! The interpretation is vastly different because of this!
It reminds me of a story I heard about John Cage's Music of Changes, which was famously composed randomly. John Cage purportedly threw coins and consulted the I Ching to determine each subsequent note. However, during a memorial at John Cage's death, David Tudor told a story about how he saw John Cage just writing down the notes and not throwing coins. When he asked for an explanation, John Cage said the he did not have to throw coins "because my mind is random."
I can't find the source, but I think it's Scott Aaronson who told a story of a device with two buttons, which students were invited to press as rendomly as possible, but training a simple Markov model allowed them to predict what button an individual would press next most of the time. Student after student tried to trick the predictor, and failed. Then this one guy comes along and mashes the buttons and the prediction accuracy never goes above 50%. When they asked how he was doing it, he said he "just used my free will".
> When he asked for an explanation, John Cage said the he did not have to throw coins "because my mind is random."
Was Cage claiming some kind of spiritual musical connection from choosing pitches based on the I Ching? If not, then it was just a practical compositional consideration. He didn't need cryptographically secure sequences, and-- at least in terms of music cognition-- at worst he ended up repeating consecutive pitches fewer times than he should have. (And if he started with I Ching-derived patterns he may have noticed the repetitions and successfully emulated them with his mind!)
After all, his general need for random processes was to avoid accidentally falling back into patterns from the common practice period of tonal music (esp. patterns from the Romantic era). In other words, his mind was basically good enough for the avant garde. :)
For me, the interpretation of the art changes significantly. That it was composed randomly was the entire point of the music. If the anecdote was true, that was just normal composing that every composer has done since there was such a profession.
Ugh, that's disappointing to read. Certainly, I don't assume the stories told in standup are precisely true. But it's poor form to make up a story about being a victim of bigotry.
I do question if it's unfair that a non-minority comic can make up stories about whatever and I don't necessarily feel that's a problem. But I think it's the fact that people will assume you've been victimized as a thing to know about you outside of your performance that feels wrong.
Similar story, I used to know an artist who knew her casually. He said that she was intensely aware of the commercial aspect of her work and is basically the art equivalent of a shock jock. She gets a lot of attention and makes a lot of money from doing the most outrageous things she can think of.
I wouldn't feel bad about anecdote in this case. All the online descriptions of the performance, including this Wikipedia article, rely solely on the artist's narrative of the events.
Given the date, I suspect it was influenced by the Stanford Prison Experiment, which was just three years prior. We now know that Stanford Prison was not an experiment at all [0], but at the time I imagine it was fresh on everyone's minds and believed uncritically.
The proximity to Stanford Prison, coupled with the time (8pm-2am) and her wording ("There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. Performance. I am the object.") go a long way towards explaining what happened here. Not that the behavior is acceptable or justified, but that it certainly should not be used to come to any bleak conclusions about humans in general.
EDIT: Also, it's important to note that she had in the prior year performed four different pieces that left her wounded or unconscious. We don't know what they were told in advance, but the audience was almost certainly aware of her MO when they showed up and expecting something intense. That would both have an impact on the kind of person who chose to be there and on their behavior once present.
There was a vogue for stuff about man's innate inhumanity around this time. Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram Experiement, Cut Piece, Rhythm 0, Sex Raft Experiment etc.
Milgram's experiments were ten years prior. And the interpretation of the experiments' results, that Milgram himself favored, was not about man's innate inhumanity, but about man's ability to perform inhumane acts if ordered by an authority. He emphasized that none of the subjects would willingly shock "the learner" unless ordered to.
More importantly, this is echoed in the other works/experiments. Cut Piece explicitly instructs the audience to cut away pieces of her clothing. The "Sex Raft" was intended to initiate conflict in order to find a resolution but ended out just showing that everyone got along until the "experimenter" deliberately intervened. The Stanford experiment, as said before, explicitly set the "wardens" and "prisoners" up as enemies and instructed them to act hostile to each other.
It seems that the only cases of violence in these "experiments" turn out to be violence performed under explicit instruction. Also note that Milgram's experiment not only has the instructor explicitly insist on an order being carried out but it also removes the subject of the harm by only providing a voice channel whereas the instructor is present in the room with the participant. And a number of participants eventually refused to comply nevertheless.
I go into more detail downthread, but my take is just like the Prison experiment, the takeaway isn't "humans are terrible", rather "humans will do what is expected of them".
Even if the audience didn't know about her and her whole schtick being risky performance art, the table, the items, and the directions set up an expectation of "risky shit is gonna go down". The real question is how far the audience is willing to go in terms of inflicting risk.
Attempting to extract a conclusion about human nature from this event is as ridiculous as trying to determine if hypnosis is real based on the outcomes at a hypnosis performance.
The people were not randomly selected. We are not told what their instructions were. We do not know what their relationships were with the creator/subject of the piece. None of that is a "problem" with the piece, of course, because it doesn't even purport to be science. It's not "performance art" in the sarcastic sense that you might apply to a very poorly designed social science experiment. It's actually performance art. It tells us as much about humanity as an indie film depicting the same occurrences would.
I think art does capture a perspective of humanity in a way that science does not. In a sense, you can argue science is a kind of art, also, with its own perspective of humanity-- notions of conclusions drawn only from observable phenomena isolated from interference/the world can somehow apply to a world full of interference and knock-off unforseen consequences.
I don't know how you can scientifically glean any conclusion that the artist was trying to discover or perspect, here, as effectively as she is trying to do so.
I wasn't trying to say art has no value, just that its value isn't in it being a source of conclusions. Art can raise questions that we wouldn't have had otherwise, and questions are the starting point of science (and that of further art).
> I don't know how you can scientifically glean any conclusion that the artist was trying to discover or perspect, here, as effectively as she is trying to do so.
This is what I disagree with. If there is a conclusion that you think you have drawn from this work, then you should re-frame it as a hypothesis and test it properly. Or just be content with the new questions, perspectives, and the experience of it. Just don't go saying that you learned something reliably predictive about how humans behave.
How do I test it properly in science, except through what she did here? Genuinely asking. Am I paying people 10$ amazon gift cards for the opportunity to sexually assault a woman? VR-cut-and-drink-woman-blood?
Even if you can't ethically test it scientifically, that doesn't mean the alternative is to take conclusions from it instead. You have to recognize it's limitations for what they are.
I find it interesting as well that many here seem to miss one of the main aspects of the piece: the violence of men against women. It's not just "an audience" but a very divided audience.
When you watch it back it's predominantly men who grope her body, harass her and laugh despite her visible tears.
I've seen this piece discussed in various places. Sometimes the gendered and sexual element of the violence against the artist is the main thing that is touched upon. In other contexts the women of the audience are actually backgrounded so completely that the reaction of the men is spoken about as if it's the entire audience.
Why bring gender into this? Why assume without any other indication that this would have been different had the artist been a man? Or if the audience would have been only women?
I'd say there's a few reasons. First: the very visible recorded gender disparity in the audience reaction within the performance itself. Further: the statistical facts of gender based violence. The reaction in the case of this performance mirrors the reality outside the performance hall, where women almost inevitably face various level of gender based violence throughout their lives.
Lastly I'd also say because I believe (although I could be wrong) the gender divide of HN is unbalanced towards men like myself, so it can be helpful to raise these issues at times where our blindspots might lead us to miss interesting or important elements of the stories shared. In cases where that blindness helps real world violence to thrive I feel it's doubly important that we can discuss it without getting defensive.
> Why assume without any other indication that this would have been different had the artist been a man?
Without any other indicator? Like I say, we have huge indicators in the statistical makeup of violence outside of the performance hall. Women are far more likely to experience sexual violence. Indeed, the likelihood of Marina experiencing sexual assault at work would have already been non-negligible even if she wasn't inviting interaction.
> Or if the audience would have been only women?
Please note: the audience in reality wasn't "only men." it was a basically even mix, but the violence of the reactions was far from balanced.
> This art piece held a mirror to all of societey though, not just the men.
The irony here is that you're continuing to focus only on the men despite what I read. I say that there's a huge gender disparity in the sexual violence that was committed against the artist. Somehow you've read that as me saying the work is a mirror of the violence men commit against women? But it's equally a mirror of the women who chose not to commit violence against her. Shadow or light, a mirror reflects it all.
> Was that act sexualized violence?
What is this argument? You're taking one example that you can question the sexual nature of while ignoring the multiple cases of literal sexual assault.
Can I ask you a hypothetical question?
Let's say it was a male artist and the audience was 50/50. Now say that almost 100% of the violence against that man was committed by women and that much of it had a degrading sexual nature, and that these women all laughed amongst their friends while the man they groped and stripped was reduced to tears, before one of these women eventually held a gun to his head.
Would that gender disparity stand out as worth mentioning to you?
I think you're missing the point of an art, especially art where the audience participates. Art is meant to invoke societal concepts, like gender. It makes sense to bring gender into a context such as an art piece where the audience are active participants.
Who said anything about a war between genders? Can't we talk about real issues raised by art without it being framed as a culture war? I'm a man and I don't feel in any way attacked by this discussion existing.
If the artist was a black man and the audience was 50/50 black and white but all of the violence committed against him was by white people, often was explicitly race based overtones, would you not find that notable?
Prefacing with that I love this piece and have always found it fascinating.
This has always been my main criticism. As art, it's lovely - horrifying, but fascinating.
As a critique of humanity, it doesn't sit well with me to assert anything in a general way based on the behavior of the audience. I don't see humanity so bleakly as to assume this would happen in every case with any group of people.
I feel like this type of language is standard for artists (and startup founders oddly enough). By that I mean they tend to over inflate their scope/impact. This product is going to change the WORLD!! My art is having a huge impact on SOCIETY!!
I think your assessment is correct, but that type of broad/overblown language is not uncommon at all.
I don't think the public puts a lot of stock into artist statements one way or the other. "Good" art can have eye-rollingly self-important artist statements on the placard just like "bad" art. We all know it's just a part of the game the industry plays.
I was coming to write a similar comment. It's a pity that the article doesn't talk more about the audience.
To answer your question the name is suitably cryptic and can be interpreted as referring to the artist not moving. It kind of pales compared to the my thoughts about the actual 6 hour performance which truthfully leaves me feeling a bit nauseous and disturbed
I think that's because usually, once people are in a group setting, we all kind of blend in together, acting as a group more than as individuals. Sure, there are always individuals that never conform to any groups, and they'll stick out, but most of the common human will start acting as a "person" rather than "John" when joining a group in a public setting.
It's still valid to argue that this was an audience, rather than something generalizable to humankind. Conformity looks very different depending on context: if this piece were being performed in an Amish community it would look very different than it did, not because of less group conformity (there would likely be stronger conformity) but because of conformity to different norms.
It's a piece though. It hasn't been performed multiple times because of the safety issue, but at its core the idea is that you could repeat it for arbitrary audiences.
Yes, in practice the performance history can only shed a little light on the nature of audience, but the piece is conceptually capable of broader insight.
> but at its core the idea is that you could repeat it for arbitrary audiences.
That's the idea, but I don't see any strong reason to believe it. There are too many unknowns for me right now.
We do not know how the event was marketed. Who was invited? What were they told in advance? Presumably this wasn't a random sample, it was a self-selected group of people, and how the event was presented would determine the type of people who showed up.
Here's what I do know: It was scheduled for 6 hours from 8pm-2am on a Wednesday, and she had previously engaged in some very violent performance art [0][1][2][3]. That suggests that the audience is self-selected away from people who have jobs or families, and that the audience was primed to expect that she wanted a violent performance. Another commenter indicated that the audience egged each other on in the name of the performance.
This does not suggest to me an event that could be recreated with an arbitrary audience by an arbitrary performer.
> This does not suggest to me an event that could be recreated with an arbitrary audience by an arbitrary performer.
Could you explain why not? What's stopping me from putting on a preformance if this in my project space next week? (other than intellectual property concerns)
I’m not sure different people would produce a different outcome. Maybe?
But if you think of it as a statistical mixture problem, there is some sample size where the same aggregate personality emerges in the crowd, much like we expect any given sample of air to have the same characteristics.
So many it’s a question of whether the sample size was large enough to represent the overall population? (“Population” might just be “those who go to this kind of thing” and not all humanity)
At any scale, especially at the scale where the aggregate personality is going to become visible, the collective behavior will dominate the individual behavior. You won't be able to separate the two unless you modify the experiment to include another part with meaningfully isolated individuals.
Studies have demonstrated that money & power (same thing at a certain point really) reduce a person's capabilities for empathy. If you consider "EQ" a thing, you could say power makes people "dumber" in this sense.
So no, common folk with money & power are different from common folk without, especially when confronted with the other.
Given that this performance has taken place in a large, western city with a random audience, what makes anyone think that the outcome would be significantly different if you would perform it multiple times, in similar contexts, assuming the audience has no knowledge of the other instances?
The pattern seems clear to me: you have a situation in which you are "allowed", even encouraged, to do harm to a person. You are "hidden" in a crowd. The crowd starts off with harmless actions but the get more intense over time, the boundary is pushed continuously. As long as you can hide in the crowd, you cheer. But as soon as you have to answer as an individual, you turn into a coward.
Of course you might think of specific contexts, in which the outcome would be different. But in a general setting? Why should this be the case?
The performance took place in 1974, barely 30 years after the fall of the Nazi regime. Under this regime, a whole people was put in a similar situation, where the treatment and dehumanization (i.e. objectification) of specific groups (in particular, Jews) got worse over time, publicly and continuously. I think in this historical context, the performance clearly referred to that time. I don't remember the 1970's, but in the 80's and still in the 90's, WW2 and the Third Reich were very much present in the public mind and often referred to in conversation. One example is Todd Strasser's novel The Wave from 1981, which shows how an "innocent" audience is transformed into an aggressive mob. I remember that this novel, and the movies based upon it, led to discussions where some people claimed "this certainly wouldn't happen here/to us/to me/now".
I think it needs a good explanation why today, or a different crowd, would be any different.
Two notes: 1. These “stringlines” are also known as Time-Space Diagrams in the transit industry, and they’ve been around for a while. e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Time-space-diagrams-of-t...
In fact Vibien cites as inspiration the official NYCT stringline paper: https://www.worldtransitresearch.info/research/5936/
2. I’ve noticed that at least on the A, the viz is inaccurate? It’s missing a lot of trains.
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