People say “agents not RAG”, but one framing is that this describes RAG where the database is a file system and bash is the query language (with other cli tools installed it can use, including curl, jq, grep). With writing its own notes on the filesystem structure and maintaining them as a way to “index the database”
It is still using code to selectively grab the chunks of data it needs rather than than putting everything in context. It’s just better RAG?
Remember that for the vent majority of human history, most people have not felt like they were truly in control of their lives. If it was not God, it was the king. Remember that nearly every animal except humans dies by being eaten. We and our pets are nearly the only creatures that die in their sleep. To suggest that the world is supposed to “work” in a way that leaves us feeling un-anxious is a modern sense of entitlement. For most animals, and most humans the only thing you were entitled to was to scrape by desperately until you finally, eventually, failed and died.
Our institutions were more stable before because people were more dedicated to maintaining them. They were created because overt pain or death was the alternative. But then they began to protect us from discomfort. Then from fear of discomfort. And for discomfort that exists in the mind. This was bound to come apart around the time some people asked to be afraid simply said “meh”
Will this go badly? Certainly from the perspective of whether people feel safe and content. But we have had 10,000 years of self generated strive from humans. It is our fuel.
The article suggests a possible model where the schizophrenia is an extreme linear progression. But the inability to find a culprit genes suggests something more complex. It is possible that there are is a group of genes that all have variations that confers benefit, but when those variations are all together negative effects occur. That makes the positive variants overall beneficial, and keeps them in the gene pool. This is why it is dangerous to presume that when we correlate genetic variants with disease and then presume they should go away. In fact, nearly any inherited disease that has survived may be conferring value to other individual when in proper partnership with other genetic profiles.
The odd thing is that among identical twins when one has it the other has it roughly 50% of the time. Which suggests that having the generic basis still requires something external, and it is common but not too common.
If Slack wants me to use their AI to mine my company’s conversations, they need to provide a higher quality product at a better price. Not forcibly take ownership of my conversations.
I’ve loved Slack for a decade, but today I have to plan to exit.
I would argue. They don’t have the right to change these terms on prior conversations. Only new ones.. Because I have a lad slack to hold my companies, important conversations under the belief that I would have access to them later.
I’m sure there is fine print somewhere that says this is not really legally true.
Currently most websites have a snip of code that posts to Google when a visitor arrives. The cookie there is linked to an identity and later used to push ads, and metrics for the site user. It seems like this is the thing to make broadly available. Anyone with $ can index the web. But nobody can get every websites to update to post to 2+ destinations. Multiple companies should be able to listen to that feed, and then be responsible for tracking and indexing on their own.
Reads like a Disney lens on nature. Whether or not wolves have a single alpha in a pack, nature is built around selfishness and violence with certainty, cooperation selectively. Animals watch each other suffer and die without a flinch all the time. And nearly everything dies from being eaten. Any lens on nature that sugar-coats this is projecting human values.
Repeating a note by others, having advice on navigating a large transaction is comforting. Even though I ultimately found the house I bought myself the guidance of my buyer’s agent through the process was invaluable. No regrets on him making good money for his efforts. Also, surprisingly, it didn’t feel odd for him to help me negotiate a lower price while his pay is based on the sale price. His business is based on referrals to my next friend who needs such help.
A similar topic explored in the 2009 small movie Moon w/ Sam Rockwell (and Kevin Spacey as the robot voice). The main character doing labor on the moon figures out he is one of dozens of clones, and the original guy living his happy life back on earth. If you could clone yourself and have the clone take your burdens so your life was easier, is that a fair use of your own body and mind to do so? Clearly the jump to our children says “no”.
I ask questions and get wrong but “convincing” answers …that is way worse than wrong answers that are obviously wrong.
The functionality looks so smart because it skips reasoning and goes straight to “plausible imitation”. But the latter isn’t actually a path to the former.
If it were reasoning, and merely had errors the problem might-course correct. Even if the errors were huge, and reasoning was poor, it could eventually learn its way out.
It’s not intelligence. It’s a very good simulation of the superficial trapping of intelligence.
It makes $20M a year. That sounds like great code.
I would:
1. Get it in source control without “fixing anything”.
2. Get a clone of the prod server up and running, vs a clown of the db.
3. Put in something to log all
of the request/response pairs.
4. Take snapshots of the database at several time points and note where they occur on the log history from number 3.
You now have the raw material to make test cases that verify the system works as it did before, but for bug, when you refactor. If the same set of requests creates the same overall db changes and response messages, you “pass tests”.
First thing to refactor is stochastic code. Make it consistent even if it’s a little slower so you can test.
Once you can refactor, you can do anything. Including a full rewrite but in steps that don’t break it.
If you try to rewrite it from scratch it will probably just never be deployable. But you’d an rewrite it safely in chunks with the above.
The gorgeous thing about these was that, the thing that sold a game was clever playability. Even the games that tried to create an immersive world had to span 4-6 floppy disks, and mostly had to lean on imagination, and your ability to see a fantastic world in colored pixels. I learned to code on a vic-20, then a C128, though the C64 had basically all of the fun software. When the Amiga came out, you had to pay $500 to get a C compiler to build software on it, but it was a dream. When Commodore finally tanked, I looked at the 80286 and Win 3.11, and nearly gave up on computing. Then: Linux. But for all of them, the beauty came because you could "touch the bottom" of the virtual world they offered.
There are a lot of projects that want to serve an under-served space, but lack a novel idea about how to do it. In many ways, even companies like Theranos fell into this trap. They knew it would be great to have the device they promised, but the company wasn't founded around any sort of novel idea about how to accomplish it, just a wish.
It's not impossible to say "Positions vary from $20k to $600k, DOE." for these cases, if you really are hiring your new CTO and also a janitor. The nice thing about having to put _some_ kind of range is that there is some the poster will have to choose whether or not to reveal they _might_ pay well. And there are balanced incentives to go either direction. If you post low, you miss out on talent, and if you post high you have to convince every noob that might be useful they aren't worth $1M/yr. But having to decide that balance is useful.
Regarding interest rates, they are already up. I got a house 4 months ago at 2.85%, and now they are 4.2%. I can't speak to whether investment in tech will drop. Lately, there is so much spare money floating around investors can't find homes for it. Inflation suggests to me _more_ desperation to have the money invested, not less. And the net cause seems to be a steady stream of wealth consolidation allows a smaller subset of the economy to hold more and more wealth.
Fred Brooks' classic "No Silver Bullet" outlines this fundamental principle of software engineering physics. Written in 1986, the paper has its own wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
"Wouldn't it just be grand if we could write a spec for some piece of code, then let the machines do the rest?"
This is quite possible, if you write the "spec" in a programming language: i.e. write a test case. The problem is that people imagine a formal proof in, for example, English, being simpler or easier to think about than in, say, Python or C. In general this is not true. In general, moment you expect your "spec" (code) to be sufficiently precise for a machine to act upon it, the simplest way to describe it is a programming language.
And if you can invent a better way to describe it, and it is unambiguous enough for a machine to act on it, you've invented a new programming language.