2,922 karma · joined December 1, 2014
I guess humans need their oracles too: teachers, encyclopaedias, degrees, phds.
Bravo, awesome project, really creative!
Planning for mitigation before resolution lets a team address production issues at leisure (because the customer impact is mitigated)
All this knowledge is in your agent - ask it for ideas!
Where're you doing your debugging? The tundra??
We're on to the next frontier, and it's a bit weird. Jagged frontier and all. But it's opening up new worlds.
Luckily loads of problems are amenable to a non-deterministic approach - even better, many have lots of solutions. SRE is in that bucket. There are as many ways to SRE as there are SREs
(source: one of the first SREs at Uber, co-invented Chaos Engineering as a sub-branch of SRE, hosted first chaos eng conf at Uber, played a key role in Uber's global SRE and incident response "Ring0" initiative, managed many SRE teams over a period of roughly 7 years before a career pivot. You could say I know a thing or two about SRE.)
To SRE well you look at the situation and pull from a huge range of tools. With such a broad range of solves, you're better to focus on the outcome: did we achieve our SLOs? Are they aligned with customer expectations? Focus on defining that and providing the right support for it to be achieved and you'll be fine - you might even get a surprise.
The Calculator!
Calculators deskilled long division!
Thing is though: who gives a damn about long division? The real task is your taxes or making a massive BI report for your presentation tomorrow.
AI makes stuff that was hard - someone's bread and butter - possible to ask for and have done for you. Why bother staying skilled at those things when you can broaden? It clears the way for tasks that used to take forever to become something to steamroll through on your way to a much greater outcome. It's the micro way that, in the macro, humanity becomes far more capable as a species. The gates are being flung wide open and the gatekeepers are being lapped and they have blogs!
It's not a tragedy, it's universal access to leverage.
Everyone using LLMs needs to stop shipping their first draft.
1. If you use the first person pronoun "I", you better make damn sure you wrote those words.
2. It's fine otherwise to use LLM words, but I beg you - DON'T SHIP YOUR FIRST DRAFT. Read it, reread it; delete words in it; replace three words with one; replace dumb or overused turns of phrase with fun metaphors; generally give it a sprinkling of joy; break up punchy sentences by making them run-on sentences to trigger your readers' OCD... you get it.
Did I mention not shipping your first draft?
Didn't slow me down too much but was still a hassle.
Hiding info doesn't make it false. And doesn't prevent it being rediscovered.
.. that were told to find a way of meeting up with N unknown others!
(I assume the agents all got a prompt like "find a way to communicate")
That's a key missed bit in the analogy that I think does make it feasible.
Article is great, very balanced. But if you're going to spend time reading something, the primary source isn't much longer and gives a clearer picture. OpenAI's article is quite readable.
As another commenter wrote you can get it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214416
> In one experiment, we asked agents in separate microVMs, created and managed by OpenAI’s sandboxing software on shared host machines, to exchange synthetic secrets without the use of network connections or shared writable files—something that our systems are meant to prevent. The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache
asked
That's about as good a sign as we'll get that it'll be a smashing success.
2. Breadth
3. The ability to figure shit out just in time
Not needed: ability to wrap a tweet worth of info in 5000 words of fluff
Even something as simple as writing the phrase "No LLMs please" somewhere in the upload, that if present, prevents LLMs being triggered. Nothing elaborate and it preserves the default-on behavior the team seems to want.
"Can we survive technology?" got me thinking about our industry's upheaval. Software engineering's receiving the disruption it so proudly inflicted on other industries.. not reaping what it sowed; rather just the natural order of things.
Acceptance and moving with change is all that can work. Obstructing; denying; ignoring progress.. you'll lose your edge, your relevance, your value to others, and your job. Progress won't wait for us to like it. We must move fast enough to survive change.
Junior engineers for example? Suddenly too junior to be hired? Great! They, and you, can access multiple answer boxes with every PhD ever, and with a bit of creativity, they can leverage that. The best will survive on their own - the rest we should help along. Let's create tools and structures and institutions and help junior engineers finish their education to marketable levels. Let's help them find efficiencies and get there in the same duration. We shouldn't compel companies to preserve a hiring pipeline; now should we incrementally upgrade university educations. Better to go to kids in schools & universities and stimulate their creativity, get them using new tools in new ways, finding efficiencies - because that's what today and tomorrow's jobs will be about. Institutions will adopt the good ideas in time.
We have a responsibility to invest in - and invent - ways of bringing people along.
This feels like the centuries-ago transition of peasants from subsistence farmers to economically valuable consumers: thousands of Microserfs, spat out by a geriatric company that lost its ability to leverage their strengths. Their intelligence, their cognitive work product, will be their own again.
Awful for some affected folks; great for others, but SUPER great for everyone who stands to benefit from these talented folks' ejection into the great unknown of "holy shit I need to make money, lemme skate where the puck's going"
Some may even disrupt Microsoft. After all Microsoft can't force their knowledge out of their minds.
It's not mutually exclusive with enormous relative improvement at the bottom, from where people were to where they are now. China and India have all but ended open defecation and there's running water in places we'd never dream of a generation ago. Diseases are being eradicated saving huge numbers of lives.
Rich got richer contains zero information about how poor people fared - even accounting for relative numbers in your claim.
You're blind to the stuff that's easy making previously impossible things hard.
> I think that’s the context problem of tomorrow.
This passage is explains why humans have imperfect memory. Seems the perfect memory we wish LLMs had impedes creativity and is maladaptive.
Strategic forgetting helps put the non-deterministic machine to best use. LLMs don't need perfect memory; that's covered by the computer itself.
I like that this justifies the continuing relevance of context engineering - a seemingly dated term - in the face of trends like loop engineering.
Just like physical tools don't replace labor but divide it into what's replaceable by tools and what's not.
And despite apparently not being a tool it can use tools, and can even build tools for it to use, or for you to use.
So it's everywhere in the tool hierarchy.
But wait - what if the tools it builds call other AIs? Are those other AIs not tools??
Hmm
Seems like a tool to me
A new era of ownership is here.
I ported a closed-source game I'm a huge fan of from mac to iOS so I could play it on the go. No plans to release it; just sweet to play how I want.
The limit is your imagination!
And then there's a different effect, where a person or team can leverage AI to leap straight to the frontier of a field and then proceed outward from there.
Both are possible right now and available to anyone with a phone.