alt Hacker NewsI wouldn't bother; the time for this is past. It is not worth curating tags/ontologies. Let the computer do it for you, or don't: just search. Google was right.
The problem is acute in organizations, where the question of ontology ownership crops up. The last place I worked at had a dedicated engineer on the job. And marvel at the elaborate systems Wikipedia and StackOverflow have to manage their ontologies. It is best to avoid that stuff and improve search instead, which is likely why an ontology was sought in the first place.
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> Let the computer do it for you, or don't: just search.
Only for information that has no real value.
Search misses things. Hierarchy or tag ensures that all you have marked can be found.
The problem with the "just search" approach is that it creates "dark corners", that is clusters of documents/images ignored by the search engine for whatever reason. I guess it could be addressed with some kind of "what I've been missing" query executed once in a while.
> I wouldn't bother; the time for this is past. It is not worth curating tags/ontologies. Let the computer do it for you, or don't: just search.
The only mechanism that will ever be properly able to contextualize the relevance of my ingested information when it counts (as in while I am alive) is me; the only way to do this is by curation. A someone else who understood this once said: "The tool shapes the master; the master shapes the tool".
Manually assigning tags are an excellent way of doing this, as long as one doesn't overthink it to such an extent where the curation process meets the harsh realities of diminishing returns. Sadly, many people, constantly jumping from one fad to the next, already fail here.
> the time for this is past
A few nights ago I was looking through photos with my daughter, and she asked to see photos of her. I looked for them using the AI way and found some, but not a whole lot. That's because it missed the vast majority of them, which I then found when looking through files with the same date stamp as some of the AI discovered photos of her.
I understand we're on our way to automatically labeled content, but we are a long way off, and the time for manually organizing important information has not yet passed.
It’s a good observation. Counterpoint - the organization labor is drudge work, maybe with cheap AI labor you can have your KB kept in great shape, and likely this makes it easier for RAG to locate the correct document.
Maybe there is room for both, though I am in agreement that it seems dubious a human should be curating.
Labels in Gmail is what makes it better (for me) than other email systems.
One major difference is that tags/folders better enable discovery. Search can get you to “similar to thing I found”, but it can’t really do “related to thing I found” ala Wikipedia.
AI might be intelligent enough to fix that, but in the end it’d just be automating the curation of tags/ontologies (ideally in manner that’s user-visible and editable)