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I'm not sure why but Prolog seems to have more misinformation circulated about it than any other programming language I've ever seen. I'd take a lot of the information in these comments with a grain of salt. If anyone is interested in authoritative and accurate modern information about the language, please see Power of Prolog[1][2].
theprimagen called this[1] like three days ago. That was fast.
If this wasn't CERN tech I would think I was being taken for a ride. Conventional wisdom is that distributed consensus is not possible at this kind of performance, does anyone have a sense for how this is different and how my mental model is wrong?
Thanks. I thought it was interesting choosing arithmetic instead of some other relation because multimodal arithmetic (via CLP) is more of a PhD thesis than a blog post. Other relations might've been easier to demonstrate a general query.
What I couldn't tell from the article was if the author somehow achieved a multimodal arithmetic relation without needing CLP using a stack machine. That would be a neat technique.
Man that is such a bummer. The Naval Support Activity (NSA) "base" is not a hardened military facility. I've never been to the one in Bahrain, but it's usually where you go to play ultimate frisbee, maybe some paintball if you are lucky, and other types of R&R. Usually have a Naval Exchange (NEX) which is like a really discounted 7-11 / gift shop / walmart (depending on where you are).
Great writeup. Only thing I din't see in here was an analysis of the impact of players like Talaas[1] and their stupid faster hardware LLMs.
I feel like it could be majorly disruptive, but idk if it's going to prolong the apocalypse or bring it about sooner -- or if it's a big nothing burger.
But the demo[2] is super cool.
familiarity vs simplicity
Love this, I've never heard it put that way before.
Yeah, this checks out. I wonder what they are doing to prevent semantic collapse. Also, I wonder if the base model would already be instruct and RLHF tuned or only pre-trained. Trying to do additional training without semantic collapse in a way that is meaningful would be interesting to understand. Presumably they are using adapters but I've never had much luck in stacking adapters.
i.e.:
1. Do I start with an RLHF tuned model, "pretrain" on top of that (with adapter or by freezing weights?), then SFT on top of that (stack another adapter, or add layer(s) and freeze weights?) (and where did I get the dataset? synthetic extraction from corpus?), then RL (adapter, add layer(s) and freeze?)
2. or do I start at SF tuned model, ...
3. or do I start at raw pre-trained model, ...
Would love to know what the matrix used was.
Pre-training allows organizations to build domain-aware models by learning from large internal datasets.
Post-training methods allow teams to refine model behavior for specific tasks and environments.
How do you suppose this works? They say "pretraining" but I'm certain that the amount of clean data available in proper dataset format is not nearly enough to make a "foundation model". Do you suppose what they are calling "pretraining" is actually SFT and then "post-training" is ... more SFT?
There's no way they mean "start from scratch". Maybe they do something like generate a heckin bunch of synthetic data seeded from company data using one of their SOA models -- which is basically equivalent to low resolution distillation, I would imagine. Hmm.
We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales while strengthening our financial profile.
Some quotes from the video:
...at the same time, we're a people company.
Your work will live on in our products.
Doing the right thing for Atlassian while acting with humanity and doing the right thing for all those on all sides of this set of decisions.
Wow. There's a lot to unpack here.
In Prolog the syntax is incredibly important. It is designed to be metainterpreted with the same ease in which a for-loop might be written in another language.
https://www.metalevel.at/acomip/
mi1(true).
mi1((A,B)) :-
mi1(A),
mi1(B).
mi1(Goal) :-
Goal \= true,
Goal \= (_,_),
clause(Goal, Body),
mi1(Body).
As a challenge, see how easy it is to write a metainterpreter in another language of your choice. Alternately, see if you can think of any way the metainterpretation system in Prolog could be improved.
Finally, think of what would happen to this if we changed the syntax and introduced something like object.field notation.
So while logical programming can be achieved with other syntaxes, the metaintrepretive aspect will be lost. I have yet to see a language that does this better.
Very interesting stuff. Apparently this is the implementation: https://github.com/dicpeynado/prolog-in-forth
Thinking about the amount of thought and energy that went into this, back in 1987 -- mostly preinternet, pre-AI. Damn.
I feel really lucky that we get to build on things like this.
I'm surprised how hard I had to dig for an actual example of syntax[1], so here you go.
[1] https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~dale/lProlog/proghol/extra...
So I have been doing formal specification with TLA+ using AI assistance and it has been very helpful AFTER I REALIZED that quite often it was proving things that were either trivial or irrelevant to the problem at hand (and not the problem itself), but difficult to detect at a high level.
I realize formal verification with lean is a slightly different game but if anyone here has any insight, I tend to be extremely nervous about a confidently presented AI "proof" because I am sure that the proof is proving whatever it is proving, but it's still very hard for me to be confident that it is proving what I need it to prove.
Before the dog piling starts, I'm talking specifically about distributed systems scenarios where it is just not possible for a human to think through all the combinatorics of the liveness and safety properties without proof assistance.
I'm open to being wrong on this, but I think the skill of writing a proof and understanding the proof is different than being sure it actually proves for all the guarantees you have in mind.
I feel like closing this gap is make it or break it for using AI augmented proof assistance.
Anakin: I'm going to save the world with my AI vulnerability scanner, Padme.
Padme: You're scanning for vulnerabilities so you can fix them, Anakin?
Anakin: ...
Padme: You're scanning for vulnerabilities so you can FIX THEM, right, Annie?
tl;dr - All this AI stuff is just Universal Paperclips[1]
I see a lot of comments about folks being worried about going soft, getting brain rot, or losing the fun part of coding.
As far as I'm concerned this is a bigger (albeit kinda flakey) self-driving tractor. Yeah I'd be bored if I just stuck to my one little cabbage patch I'd been tilling by hand. But my new cabbage patch is now a megafarm. Subjectively, same level of effort.
Author: "Not my favorite language"
Prolog: "Mistakes were made"
As an avid Prolog fan, I would have to agree with a lot of Mr. Wayne's comments! There are some things about the language that are now part of the ISO standard that are a bit unergonomic.
On the other hand, you don't have to write Prolog like that! The only shame is that there are 10x more examples (at least) of bad Prolog on the internet than good Prolog.
If you want to see some really beautiful stuff, check out Power of Prolog[1] (which Mr. Wayne courteously links to in his article!)
If you are really wondering why Prolog, the thing about it that makes it special among all languages is metainterpretation. No, seriously, would strongly recommend you check it out[2]
This is all that it takes to write a metainterpreter in Prolog:
mi1(true).
mi1((A,B)) :-
mi1(A),
mi1(B).
mi1(Goal) :-
Goal \= true,
Goal \= (_,_),
clause(Goal, Body),
mi1(Body).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@ThePowerOfProlog
https://www.metalevel.at/prolog
Ok what I would really love is something like this but for the damn terminal. No, I don't store credentials in plaintext, but when they get pulled into memory after being decrypted you really gotta watch $TERMINAL_AGENT or it WILL read your creds eventually and it's ever so much fun explaining why you need to rotate a key.
Sure go ahead and roast me but please include full proof method you use to make sure that never happens that still allows you to use credentials for developing applications in the normal way.
A really simple one is traversing a linked list (or any naturally recursive data structure, such as a dictionary or tree). It is very natural to traverse a recursive data structure recursively.
Really impressive! For anyone who's not a pythonista, trying to implement TCO is something akin to solving the Collatz conjecture but for Python. It's often just an exercise in madness. So seeing an elegant solution to this is really cool, I myself was a victim of this madness and was unable to do it so very cool to see someone nail it! This will be a goto tool for sure.
Ok hear me out. It's not particularly obvious to me why plants being easy to replicate suddenly destroyed the rare plant market. Surely they can't be easier to replicate than software. That hasn't seemed to put much of a dent in the software market.
No, and its ok to be dismissive of it. I'm just giving an experience report.
Actually my primary value is emacs integration with claude.
I have an mcp with one function ( as_user_eval ) which allows it to execute arbitrary s-expressions against the portal package for emacs.
I use this often with custom slash commands, i.e., `/read-emacs`, which instructs claude to use that mcp to pull the context from multiple pseudoregions in to the context window (along with filenames and line numbers). This saves me from having to copy paste all of that.
I understand what the others are saying but the using the portal to talk to a running emacs client I don't find to be particularly "discoverable" on the cli.
I can say things like, "show me in emacs the test that failed", or, "highlight the lines you are talking about", or, "interactively remap my keybindings to do X", or, "take me to the info page that covers this topic".
This, paired with chrome devtools and playwright, had been a real productivity booster for me, and is quite fun.
I use voice dictation for this so it feels like I'm in Star Trek :)
I'm sure in 10 minutes we will be onto the next version of MCP... skills, ACP, Tools, whatever.
But this extensibility/discoverability for me has been nice. I make no stronger claims than that about "what it is for" or "what is should be", as I am a simple hacker with simple needs.
Chrome Devtools is similarly an extremely high value MCP for me.
I would agree that if you don't find they add discoverability then MCPs would have no value for you and be worse than cli tools. It sounds like we have had very opposite experiences here.
So I don't disagree with any of the criticisms of MCPs but no one here has mentioned why they are useful, and I'm not sure that everyone is aware that MCP is actually just a wrapper over existing cli/API:
1. Claude Code is aware of what MCPs it has access to at all times.
2. Adding an MCP is like adding to the agent's actuators/vocabulary/tools because unlike cli tools or APIs you don't have to constantly remind it what MCPs it has available and "hey you have access to X" and "hey make an MCP for X" take the same level of effort on the part of the user.
3. This effect is _significantly_ stronger than putting info about available API/cli into CLAUDE.md.
4. You can almost trivially create an MCP that does X by asking the agent to create an MCP that does X. This saves you from having to constantly remind an agent it can do X.
NOTE: I cannot stress enough that this property of MCPs is COMPLETELY ORTHOGONAL to the nutty way they are implemented, and I am IN NO WAY defending the implementation. But currently we are talking past the primary value prop.
I would personally prefer some other method but having a way to make agents extensible is extremely useful.
EXAMPLE:
"Make a bash script that does X."
<test manually to make sure it works>
"Now make an MCP called Xtool that uses X."
<restart claude>
<claude is now aware it can do Xtool>
Taking the article's analogy of the "collaboration while driving", the F1 sport is quite insanely collaborative. For example, the drivers literally do have someone in their ear by radio being their coach and spotter for the entire trip. I've never heard of the equivalent in software. Does anyone know of anything like this?
Not the type theory we wanted, but the type theory we needed.
Comments here are a bit rough. Marcin does plenty of work for OSE and the community is still active but most of it is in-person/offline -- hard for a lot of us to believe, I know, but there is human activity that takes place outside the internet.
Or so I'm told.
Ok to be fair the eagle looks just as confused and distressed to be there as the rest of us
I... what? Guys I think .gov got hacked. Cause the alternative is we are on the weird timeline. Can someone confirm we are not on the weird timeline?
I am actually surprised how well it runs, given how solid it is