cruffle_duffle

"we can start getting these answers back faster, they end up being more useful."

Dude, 10x token speed is going to be absolutely nuts. Half the "parallel subagent workflow" business seems to be driven simply as a means to avoid tapping your thumbs waiting for the infernal robot to finish something. If things come back speedy quick all the time, it should keep up with the "speed of the human" and let me stay focused on one thread instead of half a dozen. Plus the cost of screwing up gets significantly lower because you just re-fire with an adjusted prompt and iterate.

Someday these things will be 100x as fast as they are today and that is when things will get insane.

To be fair, versioning has always been vibes based.

Bumping the speed of these things would be more than meaningful. It would be a massive game changer.

I assert like 80% of this “multi agent parallel workflow” business is simply a workaround to models being soooooo slow. Like as the dude driving these things… you kick it off and twiddle your thumbs waiting minutes to hours sometimes for all the inference and token generator to finish. So you dispatch multiple workstreams in parallel to be more efficient.

I assert that if the model was even 10x faster we’d be using these things radically different. You’d be doing things that are currently time prohibitive. At 100x, holy shit will software dev get crazy. You’d be kicking off hundreds of parallel workers attacking a problem from every angle and stuff. Who even knows!!!

And the thing is, 10x will absolutely come and probably even 100x. And it will be sold like a video game cartridge or something depending on how the actual model gets “baked” into the hardware. No remote inference at all.

I mean it just depends on the price of the chip. You might just replace the chip like you would any other component. Like a video game cartridge or something.

“ Wafer level faults probably won't matter though - neural nets are resistant to a few missing or wrong weights.”

Brain science people “love” traumatic brain injury cases because it can help explore what happens when bits of the “brain wafer” get damaged. We’ve learned a lot from such things.

I wonder if people are intentionally “destroying” parts of the model weights to learn more about what happens? Like could you strategically wipe a gig of the model so it’s “all zeros” and see what happens?

I have to wonder

To be fair Claude is plenty capable of climbing out of its sandbox. If it has shell access, it will find a way. And honestly, it’s whitelist/blacklist permission model is broken and inappropriate for it to begin with.

It’s really wild watching LLMs construct those calls. They batch so many different checks and stuff into a single tool call, delimit them with markers, etc.

The crazy thing to me is that this kind of “composition of small tools to create something bigger” is the biggest vindication of the Unix philosophy I can think of.

I have to wonder how much of that behavior was trained into the model and how much it is the secret herbs and spices they toss into the harnesses own system prompts.

100-200 like scripts are tiny especially for something easy to scope like a vendor api. Give opus a much, much larger challenge and see what you get back. You really don’t need to see the code much at all anymore except for some steering now and then.

The docs that ship with it are a great source for the LLM who will be running the command and monitoring its output, fixing or adjusting whatever in order to complete my goal. Why on earth would I be calling it by hand?

Paste the job description into your friendly LLM and let it attempt to find the company for you and then contact the company itself.

Those recruiter spams generally just copy and paste the companies own JD so the LLM can usually figure out the source company.

I mean $40 if you are lucky or goodwill. You could get more selling it “proper” but the transaction cost of it is super not worth it (for me). When I want something out of my house, I want it out of my fucking house. Listing it on Craigslist means I have to babysit it, handle questions, but worse… the fucking thing is still in my house!. And I was over that, whatever the fuck it was, like… a week ago. Now it’s just sitting there in my life cluttering it up. Better take to the garbage or goodwill. Then it’s gone!

At least with a consignment shop I will hopefully get something out of the deal.

Remote work is absolutely brutal to a cohesive functioning society. I know people are going to slam me for saying it but is honestly true. People forgot how to interact with each other because the forcing function that gets everybody mixed together into the same pot got taken away. And if you don’t take some fairly extreme steps to counter it, you’ll be completely alone and isolated, subject to algorithmically chosen feeds that are completely unique to you and detached from the community around you.

It’s really quite dystopian and anti-human if you ask me. We’ve already lost so much shared mediums—nobody watches the same shows, reads the same media, etc. which in isolation is completely fine. But something has to be shared with other real physical humans and it has to be more than just occasional grocery store visits, run-ins at the park, etc.

I dunno quite how to articulate it very well though. It’s just remote work has a nasty side effect of making humans even more isolated from people not like themselves. It makes us all increasingly divided and “othered”. And that isn’t good for anybody.

I think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure. This deal is proof. If Microsoft didn’t believe in OpenAI they wouldn’t have restructured it this way. They’d have tightened their reins and brought in “adult supervision”

Pretty much. Lots of people who really were violently supportive of those measures will never admit to themselves what a horrible, entirely predictable mistake it all was.

It absolutely destroyed a ton of very good things, perhaps forever.

I feel like this is basically the answer. Things are constantly changing and it’s hard to predict what things have staying power and what is just a blip on the evolutionary railroad.

All this fuzzyness from Anthropic reads more like an incredibly fast growing company working in a brand new space full of uncharted waters. In other words, they are making shit up not because they suck but because that is literally all one can do.

“ I just have no faith in humanity, and do not understand why we think this is a good idea to give a browser this much access to local system resources”

As opposed to dodgy windows-only installable software from some weird site to flash devices instead? I’ll take my chances with webusb, thanks.

How is it any different with downloadable firmware?

I wish debates about “ai scraping my site” had more nuance.

There are multiple ways these tools access your site and only one of them is “using it for training”. Others are webfetch from chat sessions, “deep research” agents, etc. And those will have different traffic patterns. They aren’t crawlers, they are clumsy, ham handed AI agents doing their humans bidding.

Both can give a site the hug of death. Both can be badly coded. But there is much different intent behind the two and I feel it is important to acknowledge the difference.

“ If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt”

I mean isn’t that an okay exemption? If the intent is to drive devices to be less disposable and more sustainable… if it incentivizes all mobile phone manufacturers to improve battery longevity, I’d say that’s a win.

I wouldn’t even call it a loophole. The entire purpose of the legislation could be that clause

I mean you aren’t wrong. It’s just I don’t think it requires any kind of vote manipulation to see why ai company releases hit the front page. Back in browser war days it was the same thing.

You can let the LLM create slop for you, sure. But only amateurs are using it for that. You’ll be much happier if you treat it as a tool and use it like any other, a force multiplier to take your ideas and creations and pushes them further along faster.

If you treat it like a black box used to outsource your own thinking, you are holding it wrong.

It could also be that this is an exciting new, fast changing technology that happens to directly overlap and significantly impact the core audience of the site. I don’t think any form of maliciousness or secret astroturfing is required at all.

This stuff has changed a ton of what it means to exist in this whole “tech space”. The entire software development lifecycle got put into a stick blender and is in the process of getting mixed up in new and unusual ways.

It’s super cool. I haven’t been this excited about our industry since way back when the universe was just starting to get onto dialup and I grabbed my very first mp3 or wrote my first shitty program in VB or when AJAX was just entering the universe.

I think a lot of people forgot how fast shit changes in this industry and how learning new things is one of the most important skills to being successful. Everything changes all the time.

This is a tech site called hacker news. Where else would something like this be constantly discussed?

Shadcn and friends are the modern equivalent of old vb custom controls.

Oh my god have Anthropic products been absolutely saying everything is load bearing for the last week or so. Literally ever other paragraph has “such and such is load-bearing”.

Funny enough, today it seems to have stopped…

You're proving my point. The thumb was put on the scale, he public was bombarded 24/7 with self-serving false dichotomies and viola, you've just manufactured mass public support for insane bullshit.

See also Covid-19. Same shit only waaaaaaay more batshit insane and waaaaaaaay more crazy 24-7 fear mongering.

Tool discovery is only one very small part of the “context problem”. The bigger problem is the outputs. You can’t compost them. Ever watch Claude code run some crazy shit through python and jq to take some input, transform it in some crazy way and output exactly what it needs back into its context? You simply can’t do that with mcp. It’s basically forced to accept the exact shape of the mcp output into its context and then take that intermediate output and dump it right back into another tool. That is incredibly wasteful!

If your lucky the mcp might expose a way to ship its output into a text file so at least the agent can have a go at it with CLI tools.

Why does it matter if that output is stored in the LLM's context

Context window is expensive and precious. Much better to offload to some medium where it isn’t.

At that point might as well just use CLI

I totally agree that mcp not being compostable is a very big issue.

Coming soon to the moon near you: starlink!

Piles and piles of sci-fi novels.