thraxil · HackerTrans

há 9 horasdiscuss

You realize he's not a native English speaker, right? His English grammar is better than my Italian, so I don't feel the need to criticize.

thraxil

há 7 diasdiscuss

Not every application uses LLMs the same way. For some use-cases, price per 1M tokens is absolutely meaningful. Eg, we do a lot of pretty basic classification/entity-extraction/summarization type work on large inputs (100k tokens per request being very common). It's pretty easy stuff; Gemini 2.0 Flash was perfectly adequate, quite fast, and cost $0.10 per 1M tokens (and even less when we could make use of the batch API). Every newer more powerful model obviously can handle the same work but costs significantly more. When we're deciding what model to use, price per 1M tokens is definitely a meaningful metric.

thraxil

há 18 diasdiscuss

Inrupt, TBL's company, is doing SOLID for enterprise customers.

thraxil

há 19 diasdiscuss

Have you looked at the W3C's SOLID standard? I haven't looked deeply into what you're doing, but it sounds like a less interoperable version of what SOLID already does. https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol

thraxil

há 24 diasdiscuss

Interesting to read the comments and see the reaction here.

I didn't use Fable (just Opus and Gemini) but I recently ported the `djlint` Python library to Rust, also relying heavily on LLMs (but not trying to one-shot it). `djlint` is a library to lint and reformat HTML and Django template files (and some other formats but I haven't tackled them yet as I don't really have any need). It's currently unmaintained (for a couple years at least) but was part of our CI/CD and the reformat in particular is very slow on a large codebase with thousands of templates. For our code, it took about 4 minutes to run. I generated a Rust port in a similar way, aiming for byte-for-byte output compatability. The Rust version runs on the same code in a fraction of a second; fast enough to put in a pre-commit hook. Some of that was the raw Python->Rust conversion, but a lot was some optimization work that I did afterwards. The Python version was heavily regexp-based, basically running a big slow regexp for every rule that it implements, sometimes running the regexp in a loop starting with each tag it encounters as it goes through each file. For the Rust version, I switched it to properly tokenize the files and then match rules on the AST in a single (or relatively few in some cases) pass. Honestly, there's still a lot of low hanging fruit to make it faster but it's already such a big improvement that I'm pretty happy with it. I'm sure those optimizations could've been done in Python but if I'm the one maintaining the code now, I'd much rather deal with Rust than Python with or without LLM assistance.

thraxil

há 3 mesesdiscuss

I took his Introduction to Cryptography class when he was a visiting professor at Columbia. Absolute master of an old-school chalkboard lecturer. They don't make them like that any more.

thraxil

há 3 mesesdiscuss

Yeah. Back when Gemma2 came out we benchmarked it and were looking at open models. For our use case though, while the tasks are pretty simple, we do need a pretty large context window and Gemini had a big lead there over the open models for quite a while. I'll probably be evaluating the current batch of open models in the near future though.

thraxil

há 3 mesesdiscuss

Thanks. Yeah, for now we're moving to 3.1 flash lite as that's the new cheapest at $.25/1M and is also still "good enough". 2.5 flash is more expensive at $.30/1M (looks like Deep Infra charges the same as GCP/VertexAI for it). I might check them out for Gemma though. We benchmarked Gemma2 when that came out and it wasn't remotely usable for us largely because the context window was way too small. It looks like 3 or 4 might be worth evaluating though.

thraxil

há 3 mesesdiscuss

No. Right now I'm upset that Google has removed (or at least is in the process of removing) the Gemini 2.0 flash model. We use it for some pretty basic functionality because it's cheap and fast and honestly good enough for what we use it for in that part of our app. We're being forced to "upgrade" to models that are at least 2.5 times as expensive, are slower and, while I'm sure they're better for complex tasks, don't do measurably better than 2.0 flash for what we need. Yay. We've stuck with the GCP/Gemini ecosystem up until now, but this is kind of forcing us to consider other LLM providers.

thraxil

há 4 mesesdiscuss

Last time I went through SOC 2 we talked to our auditor about this. His view was that there are and basically always have been auditors/companies that will sign off on anything without verifying it if you're paying them. The rest of the industry knows who they are though. If you are taking things seriously and hire an auditor who does, that's one of the things that they look at when you're reviewing the reports from the services/subprocessors that you use. Ie, you can get a SOC 2 that doesn't mean anything but then any of your customers who know/care will flag it and it won't be worth anything.

thraxil

há 5 mesesdiscuss

Shameless self-promotion, but my own post on Ratchets from a few years back: https://thraxil.org/users/anders/posts/2022/11/26/Ratchet/ Similar basic idea, slightly different take.

thraxil

há 6 mesesdiscuss

Leonard Susskind's "The Theoretical Minimum" series is a great start. His corresponding Stanford lectures are on youtube as well and are a nice supplement.

thraxil

há 7 mesesdiscuss

Working heavily in Python for the last 20 years, it absolutely was a big deal. `pip install` has been a significant percentage of the deploy time on pretty much every app I've ever deployed and I've spent countless hours setting up various caching techniques trying to speed it up.

thraxil

há 7 mesesdiscuss

Nope. Out of the box GCP Cloud SQL instance.

thraxil

há 7 mesesdiscuss

Yep. We have tables that use UUIDv4 that have 60M+ rows and don't have any performance problems with them. Would some queries be faster using something else? Probably, but again, for us it's not close to being a bottleneck. If it becomes a problem at 600M or 6B rows, we'll deal with it then. We'll probably switch to UUIDv7 at some point, but it's not a priority and we'll do some tests on our data first. Does my experience mean you should use UUIDv4? No. Understand your own system and evaluate how the tradeoffs apply to you.

thraxil

há 9 mesesdiscuss

I switched from EE to CS (well, "Computer Engineering" technically) in the late 90s. Not specifically due to Smith charts, but that's relatable. For me it was just realizing that I was procrastinating on doing my EE problem sets, which just started to seem like endless grinding of differential equations, by playing around with whatever we were doing in the couple CS classes I had. I wouldn't say I've made "a large fortune" in software, but it's kept me gainfully employed for a few decades so I think it worked out.

thraxil

há 9 mesesdiscuss

Obviously nothing solid to back this up, but I kind of feel like I was seeing emojis all over github READMEs on JS projects for quite a while before AI picked it up. I feel like it may have been something that bled over from Twitch streaming communities.

thraxil

há 9 mesesdiscuss

Erlang/Elixir supervision trees also rely on process linking, which is implemented in BEAM and doesn't have a real equivalent in most other language runtimes (modulo some attempts at copying it like Akka, Proto.Actor, etc, but it's fairly uncommon).

thraxil

há 10 mesesdiscuss

Yeah, I switched from XMonad (which I used for over a decade) to Sway a few years back. Spent some time trying to duplicate the XMonad behaviour but eventually just realized that spending a few hours getting used to the Sway approach and slightly changing my workflow was a lot easier.

thraxil

há 10 mesesdiscuss

The description of the "meta framework":

  * Thesis/Starting Argument  
  * Counter-Argument (paper requirement from Naval War College)  
  * Rebuttal (different perspective, not your starting argument)

Sounds like someone discovering a variation on the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectical method from philosophy for the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

Paine is likely well versed in the philosophy and knows exactly what she's doing. Pointing this out in case anyone wants to go deeper on this kind of approach. Much ink has been spilled over the years on different approaches, criticisms, etc.