I don't disagree with the main points of the article. But I feel like soon with all the writing that's been hating on AI writing recently on HN, the LLMs are going to be really good at writing articles about how bad AI is for writing...
First principles are your foundational beliefs, orientations, ideas upon which your values are construction, mission is built, direction is set, decisions are made for a business usually (I think the idea applies in general but personally I see the terminology more in technology/business). It's most important for being the deciding factor between two important values or difficult decisions say. For example, if your principles first and foremost say people have a right to their opinion, and your values say people should be respectful to each other and that people should honest, there can be conflict when someone is honestly disrespectful. But first principles would say (in a company at least) that a person has a right to their opinion and that's more important that they were honest about it than necessarily respectful. Contrived example but I hope that communicates the idea! For technology it more means the principles upon which product direct and tradeoffs are based
hey thank you for the insight, i think i found a pretty decent post on HN itself that explains first principles thinking https://fs.blog/first-principles/
It can't be hosted as a cloud service correct (see ValKey by Google, OpenSearch by Amazon), there's a disclaimer on the GitHub about how and why as well.
I think of perfect from two perspectives, one being "finding things I wanted to find", the other being "findings things I didn't know I wanted to find". I think Claude is great if the data isn't proprietary, secret (an all open-source project) but for dealing with Tax documents on my local machine I would hope that a search for my W2 would also find my 1099 I had forgotten I had, it'd be nice if I didn't have to allow the big AIs into everything to do that.
We definitely were combining the rewrite with the opportunity to lay foundation for a more performant architecture, for instance index management and indexing autosharding could be resourced together in the new world with slightly different semantics in the apis. So in general if the traces disagree, we can count on the new version being correct (unless the spec was covered by a TLA spec)!
At the moment the reverse is true though, the simulator and what we've captured as ground truth for the desired design has been refined enough in tests and specs that the code is often the one implicated, and most of the bugs have been in code related to caching correctness and are only exposed through soak testing.
In opposition to Anthropic/Bun, we mostly used a hands-on approach to the rewrite and took the opportunity to capture the original design of Antfly into specs and any missing tests one subsystem at a time so we didn't strive to be as hands-off as "let Claude hill-climb on the tests". Especially since the system as a whole is far more dynamic and depends more on scalability, distributed systems stuff than Bun required!
Thought it is interesting to juxtapose to the Bun rewrite from Anthropic and wanted to talk about why we went the other way! Would love to talk about our process or the technology!
DuckDB is a good one, we're working on that especially for the serverless/lakehouse stuff we've got planned for the next release! I believe we originally had qdrant in our benchmarks but ran into an explosion of testing requirements for each provider and different licensing checks for each but I can drum up those numbers!
I wonder if we'll see a new sort of "role" in the training (user, system, assistant) for unstrusted sources, I'm a little surprised we haven't already. In fact it would probably make sense to have an arbitrary number of entity roles and to be able to configure the chat calls with truth values. Interesting article though.
That being said AI is not code, it's a statistical algorithm with non-determinism baked in. You can write code to run them but it's nothing without the evolution of the model weights from the training process. And you can absolutely make the model weights better aligned with intent.
How much of the apology was written by Claude? How much of the release note process was written by Claude? Will they have better prompts going forward to make sure Claude doesn't write upsetting things into the release notes for devs like silent nerfing? Spooky times.
« Trust us, we’re doing this for the good of humanity » (fills pockets with stock value and externalities from data center polloution) « No seriously trust us , at least we’re not Sam Altman »
Update: « Oh and we’re the only ones who will stop AI from turning into SkyNet and eating your babies, you just have to pay us to make sure we invent SkyNet first »
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