182 karma · joined April 5, 2025
xyra@scry.io
As load increases, the price goes up. There's also exponential egress pricing because Scry is a place where computation happens, not a metaphorical torrent. I'm still tweaking things, balancing between multi-user server load, giving normal active human users lots of priority and no fear in using it hard and deliberately, and fair pricing for agents and automated heavy workflows people set up in the background.
Currently crawling over 1M records/sec. software is still in alpha.
scry.io.
goal is a 10PB NVMe cluster online by November (need funding champions) as a public benefit project, so prosocial researchers and builders and their agents can have low-friction access to running analytical queries over the public internet.
1) Full readonly-SQL + vector manipulation in a live public database. Most vector DB products expose a much narrower search API. Basically only a few enterprise level services let you run arbitrary SQL on remote machines. Google BigQuery gives users SQL power, but it mostly doesn't have embeddings, connect public corpora, have as good of indexes, and doesn't have support an agentic research experience. Beyond object-level research, Scry a good tool for exploring and acquiring intuitions about embedding-space.
2) An agent-native text-to-SQL + lexical + semantic deep research workflow. We have a prompt that's been heavily optimized for taking full advantage of our machine and Claude Code for exploration and answering nuanced questions. Claude fires off many exploratory queries and builds towards really big queries that lean on the SQL query planner. You can interrupt at any time. You have the compute limits to do lots of exhaustive exploration--often more epistemically powerful than finding a document often, is being confident than one doesn't exist.
3) dozens of public commons in one database, with embeddings.
Yeah I've out a lot of care into rate-limiting and security. We do AST parsing and block certain joins, and Hacker News has not bricked or overloaded my machine yet--there's actually a lot more bandwidth for people to run expensive queries.
As for getting good semantic queries for different domains, one thing Claude can do besides use our embed endpoint to embed arbitrary text as a search vector, is use compositions of centroids (averages) of vectors in our database, as search vectors. Like it can effortlessly average every lesswrong chunk embedding over text mentioning "optimization" and search with that. You can actually ask Claude to run an experiment averaging the "optimization" vectors from different sources, and see what kind of different queries you get when using them on different sources. Then the fun challenge would be figuring out legible vectors that bridge the gap between these different platform's vectors. Maybe there's half the cosine distance when you average the lesswrong "optimization" vector with embed("convex/nonconvex optimization, SGD, loss landscapes, constrained optimization.")
debias_vector(axis, topic) removes the projection of axis onto topic: axis − topic * (dot(axis, topic) / dot(topic, topic))
That preserves the signal in axis while subtracting only the overlap with topic (not the whole topic). It’s strictly better than naive subtraction for “about X but not Y.”