IanCal

Feedback for the doc writers on this then, the phrase in my head of "the name of the named argument is greeting, name is not named" is a little awkward.

> Well, in principle yes one system can compensate for another, in practice, errors tend to compound and combine in interesting ways, not go away, particularly in systems like this which are unpredictable and generate slightly different responses each time without human intervention.

Ah but the point here IIUC is moving from "let an LLM figure out the right way of querying the data and what you mean with your terms from a wide span of different documents and sources, which it has to perform multiple searches on" to "let an LLM figure out the right way of querying your data with a coherent and machine readable ontology".

While the conversion from "load of data" to "defined structure" is error prone, you now have the second step operating on the same converted thing, and you have ways of fixing that over time (the corrections).

By splitting the task into two distinct phases, you can both interpret and fix the middle step, and remove a large class of mistakes and/or differences caused by different interpretations of the same documents.

There are really two answers to it IMO that this boils down to:

1. This process may be less error prone for that first step than the LLM you're using. That could reduce errors. 2. This process means the first step is run once rather than every time which means you cut out one area where there can be differences each time.

> Yes your second point is an interesting one - the divisions between these things are arbitrarily imposed on the world, but we do have these distinctions for a reason, even if they are not completely objective.

You're right, I think there are useful groupings, but I think any effort to fully isolate them is doomed to fail because they inherently blend. Your instructions contain things that can only be understood in context of world knowledge and the data. The data only makes sense with certain bits of world knowledge.

We also know that these things happen with humans (again just to pre-empt how others may read this and not saying you are accusing me of this, I'm not gotcha-ing here) and so we often have to be careful about how we ask questions, how different cultural backgrounds impact understanding and so forth. We have to take care about how we structure things.

> I'm not sure that this particular effort is going to help because it doesn't change or constrain the behaviour of the actual machines and the behaviour is the problem, not the data they are fed.

I think this effort does address that. A really key thing is that this is about turning human readable questions into SQL that then only query the actual data and you see the result of that query - it allows you to constrain things more (at both points).

I've not tried running it but while it defaults to NVIDIA hosted endpoints but the readme suggests you can host those yourself if you want.

One issue in a business is what does all the data actually mean? What are the various definitions and how do they relate to each other. What's a customer? Should that include people that have bought things, or anyone who is potentially buying? Do different systems use the same definitions, what are the columns, etc.

An ontology in this kind of context means a more precise machine readable spec of this and how it all relates to each other. You can totally build one by hand. The idea here is I think that it tries to figure it out itself and can take corrections over time, so you can ask natural language questions and get more reliable results rather than hoping an llm works out what "customers this month" means the same way each time over a wide span of data rather than having a much clearer API to work against.

> Fixing unreliable agents by adding more unreliable agents.

Depending on how you combine imperfect systems, you can lower or increase error rates.

> data they have learned about the world, instructions and data under analysis.

I don't think there really is a clear distinction between these things though.

And I don't mean this in a gotcha way - these things apply to people too. Not that that means they're like people, but we have successfully built enormous systems out of fallible people, and other imperfect things.

The goal is rarely "eliminate all errors" but "have a thing that's useful, given a possibility of things going wrong".

The cost of running the apps to you is much less of a concern compared the cost for them running their own training.

You average 100kWh of use per day?

What’s 5 ton in new money, 5kW power draw max? Are you planning to run that full power for a week?

Yes, that much in batteries would cost a lot but uk prices right now would be ~87.5k for the batteries themselves (so a shade over $100k I guess). £7k for 64kWh

FWIW - Clicking this link flashes a site then immediately gives me an about:blank page in mobile safari.

> Else’ is not commonly used in English today

I feel like I’m going crazy reading this thread today. Else is not a rare or archaic word.

Blackmail is something the models have been seen to do during evaluations as well.

If you were trying to connect with a clone of yourself and you thought of messaging via some channel, would you try listening there for what you would send?

Not as tricky but they discovered each other during the hf incident.

The other thing would be using it in any other automated whatever that accepts tokens with the same interface. Loans, escrow, trades, whatever it is that someone has built.

There's a lot of technical and other issues with blockchains, but framed as "a single shared database that allows stored procedures and shared data types, with no central owner" I'd hope devs here could see something interesting to mess about with there. If it wasn't for the fact that "a currency" is absurdly easy to make and then there was a lot of quick money to be made or lost, I think it'd be liked more as an odd shared network.

If nothing else, there's some interesting programming challenges involved given the compute limits.

Certainly in the UK, but probably in many places, conversion of any kind triggers capital gains tax.

I think the disagreement here is not whether that’s how you should use hyphens but whether that’s what was intended at all. The term audio-like music makes no sense.

Counterpoint - lots of old systems have atrocious architectures.

Those downsides existed, but then that’s just how lots of stuff is or was.

Larger systems are not imo any worse to manage now, but the scale of what is possible and expected dramatically changes what we consider a large system these days.

I think this is like looking back at a few hits and being nostalgic for some decade of music forgetting all the terrible songs of the time. Or perhaps if the volume has increased seeing on YouTube all the school bands that you’d never have seen before because recording was expensive and distribution reserved for the very few.

It explains what the thing does, and then there’s also a web demo, where you can run the code and see the reconstruction (which is what would happen when it’s checked out) and run that. You can alter the key cli args it tells you to.

I don’t see any instruction here that it’s telling you to do that you can’t in the demo.

I think you might understand it better if you took a moment to.

> How am I suppose to "run the JS code", manually writing it in my local JS console? Or is this just "Click the green button in the UI" but expressed in the way only a LLM would write it?

Probably by clicking the button that says run. It is not a weird way to say what they did.

I feel like this is one of the blunders that would feel worse if it wasn't so stupid and broad, it's at a point that feels comical.

(pre-caveat thing to not be massively annoyingly pedantic throughout, I'm not a security buff and I know who it is I'm talking to, I'm not trying to correct them)

I'm not sure I get the difference - the issue I would have thought was having the system code have access to the secrets themselves? Env file vs env vars injected at runtime seems the same there - either can be exfiltrated. The difference would be having it injected when used.

Is the problem with files about what happens outside that, being committed, etc?

But they didn’t go wildly off target - they stayed extremely focussed on the task at hand. Context collapse would have been if they were doing entirely unrelated things. Running a large research project to uncover the method of evaluation and modify logs to hide what was done is the exact opposite.

> Hey, I mean this in as kind a way as possible, but I actually don’t think the government should pay for the fence line!

Which is a fine option, but it should be something agreed to by both parties. You can't just hand over a cost like that, and if you buy property with some kind of agreement this choice is baked into the original price. It makes perfect sense for the government to uphold agreements it has made.

Secondly - if they did own the fence line, it'd be on the government to come and fix it when one of their trees breaks it, surely?

This is a bit black and white. We do things all the time that have some level of risk, and draw vague lines about where this crosses into negligence. My cars brakes might fail, right? But it wouldn’t be typically called my fault - unless the chance was heightened because I’d not maintained it, or had been warned the brake fluid seemed to be leaking.

You cannot guarantee a robot could get items without paying. You can’t really guarantee anything in basically any scenario.

You can’t guarantee your card will work at the end of a meal or that your wallet won’t have been stolen, or while you were out someone stole all your money at the bank. There’s a chance those things happen, so do you never go for a meal?

Again there’s clearly levels where it is your fault, because you were negligent. If the robot goes mad and smashes up the place one in 3 times, obviously you can’t do it.

This is where we do things like trials, have approvals, etc so that we can make reasonable adjustments to lower downsides, plan things like insurance and then move on with our lives rather than never doing anything because it’s possible there’s a problem.

I would assume that it’s a reference to the huggingface attack where the agents found an exploit in artifactory that was deployed internally.

> The UK typically doesn't need air conditioning, so why would people spend money on it? Yes, I know this recent summer was exceptionally hot but people don't react that quickly to changes.

We are? It’s becoming more common and we had a few bad summers and earlier this year too. The heat wave a few years back killed my dad.

Given there’s a push to swap heating systems for more efficient ones, air con units are being looked at a lot more.

Air conditioners are heat pumps. Not all heat pumps are air conditioners.

Common installations reuse the wet systems we have and are air to water, which was until recently the only thing the grants covered (and now it’s still lower for a2a).

Same - it doesn’t swap the model.

Classic Google.

> built to solve your hardest problems

Like a working scroll on a webpage.

God damn this is impossible to use of safari mobile.

I feel like there's got to be something more core around how many things we could make revertable. You can't "un-leak" a document, but you could reverse financial transactions / structure as escrow, and we know that having version control removes certain permanent loss scenarios.

Sometimes this may be just law. In the UK we have "direct debit" from accounts which fundamentally lets companies I approve take money from my account - as much as they choose. But the way of managing that risk is that banks will immediately and in full refund any money taken if I say so. Frankly lots of payment is the same online, we hand over enough information for the other party to take money from us, rather than explicitly sending it - with guarantees that we can get it back if it shouldn't have been allowed.

There is a skill, but you don't have to use it, though you'd have to explain how to use the app.

> burning tens of thousands of tokens in context.

~1400?

> Literally just ask Claude to “call out actions in these screenshots with numbered stylized arrows”

Is there a macos native thing it uses? Or are you talking about screenshots? This draws on your screen instead.

Probably off topic but this is pretty wild to bury in the readme

> By default Mjolnir sends recent prompt and reply text and help-search text to TypeSafe's hosted Jev classifier through a public proxy