Oh man, it’s on the extensive backlog. :) I’m just about to put it up for people to play with, though, so you can clone it and use it or just ask claude to tell you about it.
I think the essay will be something like: adding structure post-hoc lets you build intelligence into the datastore as an architectural matter, not just rely on connections being made during use-time inference, using an embedding with links like this is much different than bulk embedding search, and we need some sort of tests to understand if this helps in practice, although it a) feels pretty good and b) it’s VERY nice to be able to refer to and modify the agents “mid term” memory directly in any event.
Anyway you’ve triggered me enough to say I’ll try and get the repo published today so people can look at it.
> IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed.
I don't think those are mutually exclusive. There can be real problems, and propaganda can magnify those and lead people to decisions that are for the benefit of the propagandist rather than things that will actually solve the problem.
It was the same when I graduated 6 years ago. We had projects to test our ability to use tools and such, and I guess in that context LLMs might be a concern. But exams were pencil and paper only.
It's bitter for me because I like looking at how things work under the hood and that's much less satisfying when it's "a bunch of stats and linear algebra that just happens to work"
If you're building on a computer language, you can say you understand the computer's abstract machine, even though you don't know how we ever managed to make a physical device to instantiate it!
I guess it's nice for non-technical people who don't know how to use `about:config` but beyond that I don't really see the need. Hopefully adding that extra layer of indirection doesn't mean the users will have to wait too long for security patches.
PSA (for the nth time): about:config is not a supported way of configuring Firefox, so if you tweak features with about:config, don't be surprised if those tweaks stop working without warning.
That said, they're admittedly terrible about keeping their documentation updated, letting users know about added/depreciated settings, and they've even been known to go in and modify settings after you've explicitly changed them from defaults, so the PSA isn't entirely unjustified.
"Two other forms of advanced configuration allow even further customization: about:config preference modifications and userChrome.css or userContent.css custom style rules. However, Mozilla highly recommends that only the developers consider these customizations, as they could cause unexpected behavior or even break Firefox. Firefox is a work in progress and, to allow for continuous innovation, Mozilla cannot guarantee that future updates won’t impact these customizations."
Kind of an aside, I mostly use Chrome but I thought I'd give Firefox a go again, Everyone says use tree style tabs but I couldn't get them to display properly without going to about:config to enable custom css and creating a new css file somewhere deep in the file system. It's stuff like that that makes everyone use Chrome.
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