Computing has crossed an important threshold: AI Agents are turning decades of infrastructure and open standards into something we can finally use through natural language. In a new blog post, I chronicle the journey from the pre-Web era to today's emerging Agentic Web. Naturally, I've included a live demo: a reactive dashboard generated by @Muse through its ability to interact deductively with a Virtuoso database containing the age-old Northwind SQL database, exposed as a Semantic Web courtesy of RDF Views created declaratively for no-copy access. In my opinion, the tortured journey toward getting The Semantic Web Project to connectivity escape velocity is over. Why? Because today's LLM-powered AI Agents have been trained on the critical specifications, dramatically reducing the client-side implementation and usability friction that held things back for years. Simply tell your Agent, in natural language, what you want done with the data—and what kind of artifact you want for the visualization. The standards were already there. The data was already there. The missing piece was an interface that made all of it accessible. That interface has arrived. Enjoy! linkeddata.uriburner.com/web…
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"The term came from computer scientists trying to copy a very simple idea from how brain cells work. The name stuck, even though AI doesn’t work like a human brain." 💯!!!
The term “neural network” has been used so casually and so often that it’s worth clarifying what it actually means. The original, true meaning is biological. A neural network is a population of interconnected neurons inside the nervous system of a living organism. An artificial neural network is software that processes numbers through connected layers. During training, it adjusts those connections so it gets better at turning an input into the expected output. Calling those units “neurons” doesn’t make them biological neurons and it’s borderline disingenuous. They don’t fire like nerve cells, they don’t have a nervous system, they don’t feel anything, they don’t have a soul, they don’t experience anything, they don’t understand what they’re processing in the human sense, and they don’t form thoughts in the human sense. The term came from computer scientists trying to copy a very simple idea from how brain cells work. The name stuck, even though AI doesn’t work like a human brain. That language is creating the wrong mental model because when people hear “neural network”, “learning”, “memory”, “reasoning” and “attention”, they imagine something operating like a mind. Those words describe mathematical operations and software behaviour. “Learning” usually means adjusting parameters. “Memory” usually means stored information or retained context. “Attention” is a mechanism for weighting relationships between pieces of data. “Reasoning” describes a pattern of outputs that can resemble human reasoning. Those terms don’t mean software is doing the biological equivalent. AI can produce extraordinary results without having a brain, consciousness, feelings, intent, or human understanding. That doesn’t diminish the technology. In some areas, AI can analyse, classify, predict, generate and solve problems at a scale and speed that a human could never match. Autonomous AI doesn’t change any of this either. Autonomous systems can make decisions, choose between actions, use tools and continue operating without a person approving every step. They can do that because people designed it, defined its objectives, gave it permissions, connected it to tools and allowed it to make those decisions. Autonomy isn’t the same as independent agency. An autonomous system can act without a person pressing a button for every action, but it still operates because its creators gave it the capability and authority to do so. It doesn’t suddenly acquire feelings, motives or moral responsibility because the software can choose between available actions. The terminology makes the technology sound more human than the underlying mechanics justify. This is important because people are starting to assign responsibility to AI systems instead of tech founders. A “neural network” didn’t decide to compromise a computer network. Software produced an output or took an action because people designed it, trained it, configured it, gave it capabilities, connected it to systems and deployed it. AI deserves appreciation for what it can actually do but it doesn’t need a fictional human identity to make it impressive. The word “neural” shouldn’t make us forget that.
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Yep! The fundamental nature of innovation and competition in a our economic continuum.
Open Models Were Inevitable. It Is Simply Smart Competition. p3institute.substack.com/p/o… @bgurley explains open source and AI "Sears was not allowed to outlaw Walmart. IBM was not allowed to outlaw Dell. The legacy airlines were not allowed to outlaw Southwest (though they tried). In each case, a comfortable incumbent met a rival with a lower cost structure, and in each case the incumbent had exactly two options: compete, or lose."
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Yep!
Let’s be very clear: there is value in automating tedious and repetitive and dangerous tasks; there is value in delegating certain work to our machines that can do the work tirelessly and much faster. But at the same time, let us remember that there is value in the activity of engaging one’s mind and body to discover, to understand, to create, and yes, even to struggle and overcome. Indeed, these are some of the things that make us human, that contribute giving us meaning, that are part of the simple joy of experiencing being alive.
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Yes, but the shape of the moat remains obscure because the industry hasn’t yet accepted its new form factor. The application form factor is fading, much like the GUI moat. The next moat will be governed access to proprietary data, enforced through fine-grained, attribute-based access controls and delivered through the connectivity infrastructure the Web built on top of the Internet. That shift is inevitable because data, information, and knowledge are the eternal fuel of AI agents, skills, and tools. All you need is a hyperlink—and an understanding of the power it holds in this new reality.
Cathie Wood explains how Jevons paradox is running hot in AI: the same answer costs 99.99% less per year, and volume exploding. Even with that price crash, OpenAI's run rate went from $20B to $70B in about a year, past Anthropic's reported $65B. Cheaper calls did not shrink the business. Usage exploded. and she says that is the engine for explosive GDP growth. ---- From "ARK Invest" YouTube channel, (link in comment)
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And another edition—made possible because natural language processing at the top of software’s UI/UX stack has made production and publication almost effortless. linkeddata.uriburner.com/web…
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This is a Meshup. Not a Mashup! Enjoy 😀
Replying to @kidehen
The big difference between the Web 2.0 era, where we’ve been trapped for some time, and the Agentic Web now taking shape lies in the shift from “mashup” to “meshup.” A mashup is a brute-force recombination of content, shaped by the data representation and access constraints of silos reinforced by GUI moats around applications. A meshup is a natural recombination of content informed by context—context that supports both computational and natural-language processing. LLMs are moving language processing to the top of software’s UI/UX stack, making GUIs optional rather than mandatory—and trivial to generate when needed. An example? Here’s a prompt I sent to @AnthropicAI’s Claude, powered by its Sonnet 5.5 LLM: Given the visual in x.lingyaoai.com/Rainmaker1973/status/2…, can you make a variant that supports the statement in x.lingyaoai.com/kidehen/status/2106413…? Here's what it produced. More to come on this...
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😂😂😂😂
DELETED SCENE FROM “PULP FICTION” ANIMAL LOVE MORGAN FREEMAN.
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Q: What’s a fundamental benefit of today’s generation of AI? A: Better communication. Why? See the attached example: a harness I’ve used for some time and have now shared via @GitHub. It constrains my AI agents while loosely coupling them to LLMs, context and memory, skills, tools, and Data Spaces—databases, knowledge bases and graphs, filesystems, and APIs that comply with MCP or OpenAPI.
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It's one of those days, lots of things coming to getting easily thanks to recent AI related innovations. My agent (Phenny on @bot) can upload videos to @YouTube taking all the tedium out of the process. piped.video/watch?v=uiKJKav4…
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The document referenced below revisits Marshall McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message” in the new age of AI agents, demonstrating the communicative power of multimedia, hypermedia, hypertext, and hyperdata. linkeddata.uriburner.com/web…
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Does a durable AI era moat exist? Frontier language models certainly don't have one. Neither do Agents, so what's left?
Replying to @lessin
Yep! There is no moat in frontier models. There is no moat in agents, either. Why? Because, when all is said and done, there is only one real and durable moat: controlled access to proprietary data that scales across the internet and the Web. Achieving that is a “deceptively simple” undertaking, rooted in verifiable identity and fine-grained, attribute-based access control (ABAC). At its core, it means representing entity relationships in machine-computable form: identity through hyperlinks; reasoning context, inference, and ABAC governance through an ontology. This was once widely known as “the Semantic Web”—a case of poor branding. The vision was always a semantic web: a web enriched with machine-readable meaning, courtesy of using hyperlinks to name entities and relationships. The phrase “Semantic Web,” along with “ontology,” became temporarily toxic. Now, as the world peels back the layers of this architectural inevitability, “ontology” is cool again. Next up? Its Semantic Web companion—despite the rebranding confusion swirling around the term “knowledge graph.” The Web made LLMs possible. A Semantic Web will make real—and useful—moats possible in the age of AI. 😀
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SeeAlso:
Replying to @royrubin05
IMHO: In the age of AI, there is no lasting moat at the application layer. Applications became valuable when interacting with data, information, and knowledge through computers was constrained by three kinds of complexity: Interaction: command lines, then graphical interfaces. Representation: how data, information, and knowledge are structured and understood. Access: how people and systems connect to them. The internet, the Web, and open standards have steadily dismantled the barriers to distribution and integration. LLMs bring the full weight of natural language to interaction, representation, and access—making applications easier to build, connect, and replace. The enduring moat is proprietary data, information, and knowledge—and the trusted, standards-based pathways that make them accessible and useful.
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It isn’t intelligence. It’s phenomenal pattern recognition, matching, and processing, aided by statistics. Language is a patterned structure with fuzzy edges. LLMs—or “Langulators”—handle it remarkably well through training and reinforcement learning, given a sufficiently large corpus. One great human-made tool has laid the foundation for another. 😂😂😂😂
Claude Ultracode is super intelligence.
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😂😂😂😂
“请Dario看到视频后把我列入Claude白名单,别封我” 歌曲名:“Claude is Safe!” 歌词、视频预处理:GPT-6-Astra 作曲:Suno V6 图像生成:GPT-Image-2.5 视频模型:Seedance2.5 参考视频:Michael Jackson - “Dangerous World Tour”
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Yep! Our Virtuoso multi-model DBMS is built on a fundamental bet about data access, integration, and management based on open standards: Hyperlinks as super-keys and logic as the schema, enabled by ontologies—that’s how you solve the age-old challenge of data access, integration, and management. The result: interoperable data, informed by ontologies and loosely coupled—putting an end to the endless cycle of data silos and compounding technical debt. The world is beginning to wake up to the term “ontology,” but there’s much more to ontologies when you factor in hyperlinks and the power of logic as an overarching schema. That’s the magic and beauty of Virtuoso!
Your AI Agents do not need custom middleware to reach legacy databases. Start with Virtuoso: every record gets a URI and is served over HTTP as machine-computable data that authorized agents follow. docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso… #CDIO #KnowledgeGraph #RDF #SQL
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😂😂😂😂
no compute for you
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Software doesn’t have a soul! Language is a sophisticated tool we’ve created. Its power has grown exponentially for three reasons: 1. Internet connectivity makes documents accessible across machines. 2. The Web adds an expansive abstraction layer over the Internet, with hyperlinks connecting those documents. 3. Frontier labs train language models on vast amounts of Web-accessible content. The net effect? We have a magic mirror for a myriad of interactions—exciting and utterly confusing at once. But the mirror doesn’t have a soul!
Cybersecurity specialists rocking up to Anthropic HQ
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"A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by “rogue, superintelligent AI”, but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent." There’s more than a 10% chance of that happening. In fact, the percentage may increase silently over time if we don’t get serious about our blind reliance on software. Software is a tool. Its AI edition carries the dangerous risk of blind overreliance—a risk that isn’t as easy to address as many presume or hope. The better a tool appears to work for us, the less we apply the fundamental rule: Never trust; always verify!
Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked worldwar 3? Timnit Gebru Emily Bender gerd.fm/4diu8Cl “The first loss of control will not look like a machine seizing power, it will look like humans quietly surrendering judgment to a system that sounds certain”
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The hope has been that AI’s challenges are primarily engineering problems. Unfortunately, that’s not the case when natural language sits at the apex of software UI/UX. The very nature of language adds sociological, psychological, and economic factors to this complicated mix. People need to learn to use AI as a tool—not as an “all-answering oracle.” That’s the dangerous trend.
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