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loehnsberg

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Getting from using Yandex to funding Putin‘s war requires quite a few turns. Since most of Russia’s war chest is filled by money from oil exports and China indirectly also supports Russia materially, I would first cut myself off of all oil-based products, and then from the Chinese supply chain of goods, and only then cut products indluding Yandex search results. In that order, because that matters for the war chest.

And after you then stopped typing the response, otherwise having to use a device that was made in China built from oil-based components using oil—based transport throughout its supply chain, send a postcard with your apology to the Kagi team and anyone else who does not fund wars and still uses traded goods, because this is how the world is.

If you want to throw a however tiny wrench into Putin‘s war efforts, complain load to your government to join sanctions and to have them support Ukraine and make your choice at the ballot box accordingly.

I am using Orion on Mac and iOS for a few years now and I cannot disagree more.

If a site works on Safari but not on Orion it is mostly due to ad blockers etc. Just flick the compatibility mode and it works. I have not encountered a single case where this did not fix it.

Also for a while now Apple Pay works, Apple password manager works, autofill works.

Unless we do our own benchmarks, we have to take all the marketing fluff from the frontier labs at face value, and all public benchmarks degrade eventually as labs optimize towards them. OP’s approach is wasteful because it is brute force, but post says that an ELO is kept, so this is also an experiment, and I don‘t see what‘s wrong with that. You learn which model performs well in which settings which may save resources later. It‘s also wasteful to keep working with the wrong model/harness/tools for too long.

Among the inexpensive models (and I include Grok 4.3 in this list), GLM 5.1 really sticks out!

On my personal test bench, when compared to other inexpensive models, GLM 5.1 provides the answers that I would consider most complete or satisfying (these are subjects that I consider myself an expert in). The answers tend to be more comprehensive, nuanced, and include references that I would consider the correct ones (if given access to web search).

I also find it a joy to code with, somewhere between Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 (have not tested Opus 4.7 yet).

Finally, just gauging by pelicans, it kind of stick out: https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/

Claude Brain 3 months ago

How does this work under the hood? What is so different from the OpenClaw approach of being able go do a semantic search over past sessions?

I think if we want to build on what we have, instead of compaction at the end of the context window, the LLM would have to 'sleep', i.e. adjust its weights, then wake up with the last bits of the old context window in the new one, and have a 'feel' for what it did before through the change in weights. I just sense it's not that simple to get there, because simply updating the weights based on a single context sample risks degrading the weights of the whole network.

I like the idea of using small local model (or several) for tackling this problem, like low rank adaptation, but with current tech, I still have to piece this together or the small local models will forget old memories.

As long as there's no solution to the long-term memory problem, we will have a "country of geniuses in a data center" that are all suffering from anterograde amnesia (movie: Memento), which requires human hand-holding.

I have experimented with a lot of hacks, like hierarchies of indexed md files, semantic DBs, embeddings, dynamic context retrieval, but none of this is really a comprehensive solution to get something that feels as intelligent as what these systems are able to do within their context windows.

I am als a touch skeptical that adjusting weights to learn context will do the trick without a transformer-like innovation in reinforcement learning.

Anyway, I‘ll keep tinkering…

I guess you can make that same argument about USA and America. Canada is clearly America but a Canadian would not refer to himself as American whereas a US national would. Europeans hardly refer to themselves as such but when European countries are lumped together, it has become common to ignore geography and refer to those affiliated with EU membership or bilateral EU affiliation (Norway, Switzerland, Iceland) as European.

Isn't it sad that we now have Russian, Chinese, American, European, etc alternatives? I mean I get it, Sept 11 paved the way for FISA orders and NSA overreach, Russia and China reverted back into dictatorship, but Europe is also at the edge. Shouldn't we rather fight that nationalistic power grab that just makes us all poorer and less free? And instead propagate global alternatives that are not subjected by some power-hungry state-/capital-sponsored overlord?

This is a perfect example of how to lie with statistics. All of these countries are either tax havens or oil-rich economies, apart from half of them having the population of a small city. The economic policy implemented by any of these countries cannot be implemented by a large economy with little or no natural resources, or would you recommend to Germany or Japan to just "HAVE" oil or open their banks as offshore foreign accounts?

Indeed what I do as well; gives me apps for Youtube, Netflix, etc. The only downside is that you have to login if you do not use the "app" for a while. Would Electron get around this?

Suppose you have a liberal mindset and work there, you must bend the knee and practice anticipatory obedience, or why else would you tell the world that the rocket will be ”dropping into the Gulf of America?“

It‘s still a stark abuse of power and borderline extortion by Google to use a private sentencing mechanism rather than dragging the purpetrator to public court over advertising and/or encouraging criminal activity, which may or may not have happened if Google Ads and Youtube were not part of the same monopolistic entity.

I made that same experience. You can get individual people to install it, sure, you may even get a group to do this if you start it, but good luck convincing the other parents of your kid‘s sports team group, which btw you must be part of.

Unfortunately, we living beings tend to go with what costs the least amount of energy - this being thinking and going through extra efforts to achieve a goal. Hence, we‘re stuck with WhatsApp by a law of nature.

I would argue that not spending money on it and showing to upper mgmt that the folks they hired can actually get the job done often contributes to an external contractor not getting hired.

You might want to question, why didn‘t you ask the guys for money before starting to work for them. True, but I guess they were of the kind, show me results and then maybe we move on. On the other side, a 30-40k pilot project in this area is not difficult to negotiate if you‘re patient.

It takes so much more to running a business than lower cost with clever math that this step often comes at a later stage when larger companies look for ways to stay competitive, which is when they start to take a look at their accounts and figure that certain cost really stack up. Then you come in. The only real power you would have gotten over that company would have been for those guys getting fired and replaced by a vendor - ideally that‘s you!