The audience for this piece is already very familiar with RAG. I don't want articles discussing e.g. OLED screens telling me what the acronym is - that would be a sign that the article is far below the level that I need.
There's a middle-ground where you write out ambiguous acronyms ("rag" is an English word) and not unambiguous ones ("oled" only has one commonly-used meaning).
I found the piece interesting, once I worked out what it was about. I strongly disagree that taking time to spell out acronyms should be taken as a signal that an article is low level.
For people familiar with the field, it would be like if you had every article about hardware read “Intel Central Processing Units (CPUs) with modern Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) Random Access Memory (RAM) can be coupled with Nvidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to run Large Language Models (LLMs) that are stored on Solid State Disks (SSDs)”. Just rapidly becomes unreadable.
The acronym constraint was valid in a pre-LLM world but now you are perhaps 3 clicks in a modern browser from learning.
If I read an article that spelled out Random Access Memory I would definitely treat that as a lay article.
When I hear stuff like this I always imagine going to a restaurant and asking the waitress for a menu and them replying “lol just google it”.
It’s not that I can’t or don’t know how, it’s rather that the expectation should be that a website should… link you to the information it believes to be relevant background. It’s why it’s called a “web”, linking is a core concept.
> When I hear stuff like this I always imagine going to a restaurant and asking the waitress for a menu and them replying “lol just google it”.
in this case there was a menu in the next empty table and you saw it but in place of getting it you want the waitress to get it for you. Which is a normal behavior but you could save your time by just getting the menu yourself.
No. It isn't. With acronyms, there's often plenty of potential things it can stand for, and if the person doesn't know enough to know which one is the correct acronym, Googling it isn't going to help them.
As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK."
The NWS knows this and automatically links to their glossary for both acronyms as well as jargon in their discussions. <-- See what I did there? What does NWS mean in this context? If only I had provided a link that would help you know. I very easily could have. I just didn't.
>As OP said, simply providing a link to a Wikipedia article, or a glossary, helps widen the audience beyond "IFYKYK."
it also serves as a minimum barrier to entry for the masses, which isn't always a bad thing.
if you're reading this stuff, and you can't figure out what kind of RAG that the search engine mentioned is being talked about through context clues, or you aren't clever enough to feed context into the search like 'hackers , computers, rag' as a query -- there is a very high probability that the person will have absolutely nothing constructive to add to the conversation that is about the topics they haven't even yet conceptualized or are aware of.
in that case that slight barrier to entry for the conversation will serve as a tool to produce less work for the moderators and derail less threads into uselessness.
> it also serves as a minimum barrier to entry for the masses, which isn't always a bad thing.
No. Lowering the barrier of entry to those who are trying, in earnest, to learn about a new topic, to broaden their base of knowledge is NEVER a bad thing. None of us were born with the knowledge to read this (or similar) article. Trying to kick the ladder down after you have climbed it is terrible behavior and absolutely must be discouraged and stopped at all costs.
> much like this stupid divergence
The only thing stupid in this conversation is the insistence that folks who might know less than the author of the linked article or the poster do not deserve to have access to the information.
Given the title of the article is “RAG is simpler than you think”, and how I expected it to literally be an article explaining what RAG is and how it works, it’s more like going to the menu holder at the front of the restaurant, finding out it doesn’t have any menus in it, and then the waitress saying “we don’t have menus, dummy, just google it.”
I mean the article is entitled “RAG is simpler than you think”. I clicked the link thinking “I don’t know what RAG is, so ok I’m willing to learn something”, and the article… completely fails to explain it.
Given that the stated purpose of the article is to literally explain how simple something is, not explaining that thing seems a bit misleading, no?
I’m gonna get rich when I make a website explaining all the technical concepts in AI. Every article will just say “lol google it”, it’s gonna be great.
I thought this would be a useless search that brought up pictures of rags, but indeed, DDG delivers a full page of results about retrieval-augmented generation for the query "rag"
We can confirm, RAG has been a very big thing in the past few years. It's actually bewildering that it be new to some now - but we are also getting the vibe that some are living an ""AI"-nausea" that may be shielding them from some trends.
