Wiki/Report of Meeting 2024-06-06

Report of Meeting 2024-06-06

Present: Ed Gottsman and Bob Therriault

Full transcripts of this meeting are now available below on this wiki page.

1) A quick update on the templates for the category maps. Bob has realized that if the templates are inserted in the footer of each page then they will also be inserted on Category pages and this means that the category maps will be at the bottom of every page and that they should not be inserted into the content of the page. While this puts the category map at the bottom of the page which is what we wanted, the category map will not be highlighted because the footer insertion is not sent the page variables.

2) Ed has the J Viewer working now with J9.6 beta 9. Ed has also done a crawl to update the information. The category maps that are in the footer will not pollute the J Viewer as the footer is not scanned. Ed confirmed that the structure of the categories is foundational to the J Viewer.

3) Ed has recently asked some J questions of Chat-GPT-4-o and received correct answers. We have not yet been able to introduce the LLM to the J wiki, but the updates on the LLM's may have pulled in more information on J from the internet. The wiki remains important for content, but it is possible that users may eventually access through some sort of intelligent searches. As an example, GitHub Copilot is rapidly making inroads as a coding assistant to developers.

For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the J forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC).

Transcript

Starting off with the templates,

I was doing more templates and then I realized that

where I was talking,

having Raul put the templates in the footer,

those same footers exist on the category pages.

- Oh, oh.

- So it doesn't make sense to put them on category pages

when underneath them there's gonna be another,

plus now that would do is what you'll see the pages

below the content and then the categories,

which is what we wanted initially.

- Right, right.

- So I'm gonna talk to him about that.

The downside of that is I don't believe there's a way then

for the categories to be highlighted

because you're not coming through a page to get there.

You're inserting them.

So you don't know what page you're going to,

but I don't know, I'll have to talk to him about that.

- Yeah, there may be a way around it.

- Maybe, but anyway, before I went and did too many more,

I thought I'm gonna figure out whether these,

if they're indeed showing up in the footer,

all the pages have a footer.

- Yeah.

- And they'll all be at the bottom,

which is where we want it, so.

- Yeah, perfect, perfect, perfect.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Excellent.

- Yeah, so that was kind of what I came to this week,

aside from, well, doing lots of editing

'cause I was doing that.

- Yeah.

- Well, I think I fixed everything.

Henry said, "Wait for beta eight."

I said, "Okay, I can do that."

And it's okay.

I did make some changes.

I sent out a note.

You may have seen it.

Okay.

- Yeah.

- And I ran the crawler again.

Thank you for not breaking anything in that regard,

by the way, as you're mucking with the category pages.

I really appreciate that very much.

- No worries.

(laughing)

- Yeah.

I don't want to dig into that again.

- No, no, no.

I'd be doing a lot of thinking before I'm,

well, the next opportunity to do any alignment

of the categories will be when Jan starts

to come back with some.

- Oh, no, no, I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about changing the way

the categories are expressed in the pages.

Like, well, we're not gonna show them anymore,

for example.

We're now gonna show this template that we're using instead.

- Yeah.

- That would really mess me up.

So thank you for not doing that, at least so far.

- Okay.

So when we do end up showing the template.

- That's a different story.

- And that'll show up in the footer.

- Yeah, I don't know how to think about that.

We'll have to see how it turns out.

- If we put it in the footer,

it may not show up in the content.

Are you scanning footers?

- No, why would I scan footers?

- Well, I don't think it'll make any difference to you then.

- Okay.

- If, and I'm just supposing that the same way

Raoul was able to insert that other text

up above the content.

- Yeah.

- I assume he could do the same thing below the content.

- So you're not planning on changing the current expression

of the category pages, the list of subcategories

and the list of pages that are associated

with that category?

- No, as I said, the next time I would think about doing

that will be based on what Jan comes back to us with.

- I see, okay.

And that doesn't matter to me as long as it's there.

- Right.

- I don't care what's there as long as it's there.

- Yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah, no, I'm sure there'll be some kind of a structure.

- Yeah.

- But all I'm saying is the weights

and how we organize things.

If he comes back to me and says,

"This really is a fundamental error."

I'm willing to move stuff around.

That's the idea behind working through the process.

- I feel like, I don't know if it's worth looking at,

but I had a J question and I asked chat GPT 4.0 about it.

And it gave me the right answer.

Wasn't a hard question, but I was still kind of surprised.

So I think it actually has wrapped its arms around J.

I think that's possible.

I haven't tested it in detail yet.

- Yeah, that's possible.

- But I sort of want, I found myself wondering,

I haven't tried it yet,

whether it could maybe infer a category hierarchy

on the code.jsoftware.com wiki pages,

having already encompassed them.

- If you asked it and it gave you something,

I'd be willing to look at it.

- I just haven't done it yet.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, that's interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

- I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago,

I tried to feed it the wiki

and it couldn't process the zip file

or anything else I gave it.

But that may not be necessary is what I'm now thinking.

It may already have done it,

have done the processing of those pages.

- The other thing that I was reading this week

was they were talking about the issue

with LLMs ingesting the internet

and self polluting themselves.

And the person I was reading was saying

that they didn't think that was going to be an issue

if the companies were responsible for two reasons.

One is there's a considerable backlash now

on sites being scraped and information being taken off.

So what you used to be able to do, you can't do anymore.

And the other thing was, he says,

the responsible people are now looking out for sources

and pulling in libraries to use because it's true.

It's strong, good content.

So they're being more active in what they bring in

and then they'll run it through that.

And that's making their engines more powerful

and their models better.

And it's not subject to,

they've already got the language stuff.

They already know how people speak English.

They did that.

Now they're just trying to get the good information in.

And that's a bit of a slower process,

but that may be what they have done.

Like they may just,

I wouldn't surprise me if they went to wikis and said,

you know what, these are maintained wikis.

The information is probably pretty good on them.

- Pretty good, yeah.

- Let's go there.

'Cause you're not getting all the craziness.

- Right. - It's a wiki.

That's one of the, you know,

that's Ward Cunningham will be very happy

if it turns out that wikis are part of the salvation

of feeding Chad GPT.

- Of course, there's still the Conservapedia,

which is full of tangential, shall we say?

You don't know about this?

- I don't.

(laughs)

I don't need to go there.

- Yeah, you probably don't.

Not all wikis are full of, you know,

hobbits and unicorns.

Let's just move on. - No, no, no, no.

I can imagine there are political ones

that you would take a hard look at on both sides.

- Yeah.

- But I'm just thinking a lot of the technical stuff

that I could see LLMs could really be used for.

Like you don't want an LLM, you know,

talking to you about politics or who you should vote for.

I don't think you want that.

You know, maybe point you good sources,

but aside from that, you know,

you wanna make up your own mind.

But there are technical stuff,

as I think a lot of developers and programmers

are finding out that this is a very powerful thing.

- Oh yeah.

My brother-in-law runs a company

and I was talking to him a few weeks ago about LLMs.

And he said, "Yeah, we've mandated GitHub Copilot

"for all of our programmers

"in all the projects that we're doing."

And its effect is interesting.

For his top-notch programmers,

the ones who are working on impossible problems,

it doesn't help them at all.

But all of his other programmers are elevated.

Nobody's lost their job yet,

but they're all more productive than they used to be.

- I'd heard people using them for generating test beds.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- Oh, how interesting.

That's what I think is.

Sorry, go ahead.

- Well, I thought it was a really brilliant use of them

because there's a lot of test bed generation

that's repetitive and just takes up people's time.

- Yeah, but you really, excuse me,

you really got to think about your tests.

I mean, some of them anyway.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I mean, it strikes me that, I mean, there are now,

you can tell chat GPT 4.0 to build you an e-commerce website.

It's not just a matter of filling out,

you know, one little method in a class definition.

But it strikes me that the real problem now

is not generating code, but generating tests.

And I don't know, maybe you could leave it up to the AI

to generate the tests too.

That strikes me as a little odd, but it's funny,

the people who did integration tests

and UI tests where I used to work,

it seems to me that their jobs

are the most secure of any of us.

- And they probably still are,

because this guy was saying it really is test generation.

And then you have somebody evaluate the tests

and see which ones you put in.

So in other words, they don't have to do the,

they'll get a bucket load of tests and go,

yeah, that one needs to be done, that one needs to be done.

Hmm, get scrub these.

I mean, this is, you know,

there is an evaluation level that a human has to do.

It was familiar with the situation at this point.

Now, whether that goes forward, that that's required.

That'll be hard to say, but that's true

of just about any profession I can think of right now.

- Indeed, indeed, yeah.

- Anyway, that's about all I got.

- Okay, excellent.

All right, take care.

- Bye-bye. - Bye.