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"Summarization of what a search engine would return" is good enough for many of my purposes though. Good for breaking into new grounds, finding unknown unknowns, brainstorming etc.


I have a script that searches DDG (free), scrapes top 5 results, shoves them into an LLM, and answers your question.

I wrote it back when AI web search was a paid feature and I wanted access to it.

At the time Auto-GPT was popular and using the LLM itself to slowly and unreliably do the research.

So I realized a Python program would be way faster and it would actually be deterministic in terms of doing what you expect.

This experience sort of shaped my attitude about agentic stuff, where it looks like we are still relying too heavily on the LLM and neglecting to mechanize things that could just work perfectly every time.


If you think these things are just using a "dumb" search query, and using the top 5 hits, you're in for a lot of surprises very soon.


Well, considering TFA, it would be pretty strange if I did!

My point was it's silly to rely on a slow, expensive, unreliable system to do things you can do quickly and reliably with ten lines of Python.

I saw this in the Auto-GPT days. They tried to make GPT-4 (the non-agentic one with the 8k context window) use tool calls to do a bunch of tasks. And it kept getting confused and forgetting to do stuff.

Whereas if you just had

for page in pages: summarize(page)

it works 100% of the time, can be parallelized etc.

And of course the best part is that the LLM itself can write that code, i.e. it already has the power to make up for its own weaknesses, and make (parts of itself) run deterministically.

---

On that note, do you know more about the environment they ran this thing in? I got API access (it's free on OpenRouter), but I'm not sure what to plug this into. OpenRouter provides a search tool, but the paper mentions intelligent context compression and all sorts of things.


Couldn't enjoy it at all. One of the first scenes shows MI6 officers, during WWII, making plans on a post-1991 world map, with reunified Germany and independent Baltic countries, etc. Kills immersion for me immediately, along with the gender politics every few minutes in a history show. Maybe I'm old fashioned.


Random note: Subaru China published their new BRZ today, which is distinguished by its boxer engine, with (somewhat) symmetric pistons.


I quit a YC-funded start-up based in Shanghai in 2016 to be nomadic for nearly a year. Stayed in 10 countries around the Pacific (Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, US, Canada etc.).

My primary take-away from the the journey is that my wanderlust is finally satisfied. After a year, I stopped moving because, travelling isn't that fun at that point. I want to build large things and have long-term relationships, which is difficult when you are a rolling-stone.

I would certainly encourage my kids to do it when they've got the opportunity. But it's likely that I wouldn't do it myself in at least a decade.


The company has an account on Bilibili[0], where its Chinese name is specified as 鲸鲮. 鲸, romanised as Jing, means "whales" (the animal). So JingOS would be "WhaleOS".

(鲮, romanised as Ling, is another water animal known as "mud carp".)

[https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Za4y1n7pY]


Used to work in a newspaper in Hong Kong and we have a statue of Guan Yu as well...

Anecdotally, the triad worships Guan Yu with black shoes while the police worships him with red shoes.


> the triad worships Guan Yu with black shoes while the police worships him with red shoes.

That's a detail that I did not know!


Preview can modify images. There's a button with a pencil icon that toggles a toolbar for simple image editing, such as adding lines, shapes, or texts.


I've been using the Markup in Preview since they went system-wide in macOS Mojave. (Today I learned that Markup debuted as an extension in Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite. [0])

This comment and its children sent me on a spelunking mission and the treasures I found. Markup has a Loupe tool and Speech Bubbles.!

Such features are many, various, and somewhat obscure, akin to Easter Eggs. (Both undiscoverable and handy to know.)

[0] https://tidbits.com/2018/11/19/macos-hidden-treasures-the-ma...


There’s a little prism icon too which opens a panel for Lightroom-type modifications like exposure, shadows, highlights, levels, sharpness, etc.


I mean I thought I was a Preview power user, but had never clicked that little toolbar button.

Blows me away I can do that stuff in Preview. Wow.


It's got a good solid-color-to-alpha tool too!


Cmd + Shift + A : To show the bar.


My parents (who grew up in rural China in 1960s) love to talk about chopping firewood or collecting mushrooms in the forests, alone or with their siblings, when they were 8 or 10 or something. They often give me parenting advices like "don't worry about the kids; they just need one more pair of chopsticks" (as in you feed the kids and they'll take care of themselves).


Indeed, about 29% of English vocabulary came from French; yet another 29% are directly from Latin[0].

Take your comment as example: excluding the Anglo-Saxon words, 5 are directly from Latin and 2 from French:

Latin words: Latin, Latinus vocabulary, vocabulum directly, directus via, via erudite, eruditus

French words: French useful

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...


Latin is "dead" and that's its advantage.

English is well "alive", and living implies mutation. In 500 years, our children would be reading our English as we read Shakespeare (that is, with difficulty); and in 1000 years, our English would become what Beowulf looks like today (that is, you can't recognize a word).

Latin doesn't change. Caesar's Latin is Vulgate's Latin, which is Newton's Latin, which is the Pope's Latin, which is the Latin used in Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis and Winnie ille Pu.

What is dead may never die. The "English" as we know it will die. Latin will not.


>Caesar's Latin is Vulgate's Latin, which is Newton's Latin, which is the Pope's Latin

Not really. There are significant differences between classical and medieval latin, since during the medieval period Latin was a living language in use by the clergy and educated. The differences wouldn't have been nearly enough to render classical and medieval latin unintelligble to one another of course, but Virgil probably would have scratched his head at some of Thomas Aquinas' grammar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin#Changes_in_voca...


Caesar would rotate vomiting in his grave if he knew you're comparing even his simple ways of using the language to the medieval barbarians. And he didn't speak the same Latin as the founders of Rome either.


Caesar is dead; Romans are no more. Their opinions matter not; what matters is whether we and the future generation consider these authors to have spoken in the same tongue.


Latin is not dead, it is alive and its modern dialects are called Portuguese, French, Catalan, Spanish, ....

The relationship between Latin and e.g. Spanish is exactly the same as between Beowulf-era English and the English we’re speaking now. So I don’t understand your argument that Latin is unchanging whereas English isn’t.


French and Castilian and friends are standardized against some spoken variant. And spoken languages inevitably change over time.

Latin is standardized against the writings of the classical authors, and to a lesser degree, the medieval authors. These authors, being dead, can't change.


Well, the Beowulf-era English is not changing either.


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