Maintenance is probably less of a factor but it also depends on the use case. Take what I have to say with a grain of salt. Lime is a living material that slowly converts lime to limestone. For some use cases, the lime needs to be replenished often through applying lime wash on the plaster of external walls or wet interior walls.

As for load bearing walls or regular interior plaster walls I'm not sure there is much maintenance you can do and they are fairly durable.

As far as I know Portland cement sets faster and is a stronger but has a life span of decades and does not lend itself to be repaired or replenished.

I'd like to also convey some vibes I have about this topic as follows. Imagine having a 2 storey family home made of concrete that you want passed on for many generations. In 50-75 years, repairs/upgrades would require a lot of demolition as concrete with rebar is very strong. Much of the old material is trashed and hard to recycle. A similar house made of lime based products and some stone and wood would lend itself more easily for similar repairs and seamless upgrades and can maintain the same aesthetic look for longer. It feels like lime based products are appropriately strong and suitable for the smaller scale. The old material can be treated like any old dirt or rubble and is less polluting.

I'm considering applying lime wash between the tiles regularly but not sure what the results will be.

However I do know that some grout and some paints that say they are anti-mold contain Lime or calcium hydroxide as their primary anti-mold ingredient. I think pure Lime putty can be used as pointing material between bricks in humid basements. Lime plaster (lime mixed with sand) can also be used in bathrooms (with some considerations I am not familiar with). So, my best guess is that some mix of Lime can be used as grout. But I can't say for sure.

Something I plan on doing before this winter is to use Lime Wash. Take Lime (CaOH2 in powder form) and mix with water until it has milk like consistency and brush it on grout or on (white) bathroom walls. If it works, I expect it to be a yearly or quarterly ritual and not a one time solution.

EDIT: A fascinating historical material I recently learned about used in bathrooms is called Tadelakt [1] which uses Lime as one of its ingredients.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadelakt

I'm not sure why I remember cement to be water proof. Its possible I infered from how its been used around me. I have seen cement very often used where water contact is expected (bathrooms etc). I have also seen brick walls plastered with an extra layer of cement as putty considered to be rain proof and any leaks were thought of as poor workmanship rather than poor material choice.

P.S. I'm not a builder. I've taken an interest in the topic a few months ago.

1) Quicklime/Slakedlime (Calcium Oxide, CaO)

2) Lime (Calcium Hydroxide, CaOH2)

3) Limestone (Calcium Carbonate, CaCO3)

To keep it simple, typically you start with Quicklime (CaO) and after construction you end up with some mix of all three and after hundreds of years, the masonry transitions to mostly Limestone with microscopic traces of the other two. The slow transition of the lime cycle upon exposure of the masonry to both air and water (rain) ends up making the structure "self healing" and "stronger over time".

Fun fact! Lime putty is anti-mold even in humid conditions because upon exposure to moisture, CaOH2 + H20 becomes too basic for mold to grow on.

Cement/Concrete (based on Portland cement) is water proof but Lime by itself is not. But Roman Concrete, made from Lime and mixing with ash or broken pottery or ceramics makes it water proof [2]. I beleive Roman concrete was used whenever contact with water was expected. Both concrete and Roman concrete have the same underlying chemistry (Pozzolanic reaction) to make them water proof [3].

The fascinating thing is that Lime is everywhere in ancient masonry. Lime is more breathable, workable and sustainable. The only thing is, it requires maintainance, which is why Portland cement has taken over the world.

Modern cement/concrete is amazing for large structures. I hope Lime makes a comeback soon at least partly as putty and for building smaller homes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_(material)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pozzolanic_activity#Reaction

Which is a real problem since you can't intercept/monkey patch the ciphertext to decrypt it locally to be able see the clear-text since we don't have the encryption key/algo/salt. No hacking :(

I assumed that the main agent makes calls to sub-agents locally. Does Codex work in such a way where the main agent makes calls to sub-agents in the backend (openai server) before reaching local?

The choice between just a single party having a veto power vs no party with veto powers seems a little black and white to me. Happy to be enlightened on the matter.

I'm excited for IaC code libraries like Terraform to incorporate this as their default behavior soon! The default behavior of Terraform and co is already to add a random hash suffix to the end of the bucket name to prevent such errors. This becoming standard practice in itself has saved me days in not having to convince others to use such strategies prior to automation.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-account-regiona...

a) AWS will need to maintain a database of all historical bucket names to know what to disallow. This is hard per region and even harder globally. Its easier to know what is currently in use rather know what has been used historically.

b) Even if they maintained a database of all historically used bucket names, then the latency to query if something exists in it may be large enough to be annoying during bucket creation process. Knowing AWS, they'll charge you for every 1000 requests for "checking if bucket name exists" :p

c) AWS builds many of its own services on S3 (as indicated in the article) and I can imagine there may be many of their internal services that just rely on existing behaviour i.e. allowing for re-creating the same bucket name.

This is not me criticising you. I totally understand the urge to say it. We're all thinking the thing you're thinking of. It takes effort not to give into it ;)

The reason I personally would refrain from making such comments is that they have the potential to end up as highest ranked comment. That would be a shame. Topic of S3 bucketsquatting is rather important and very interesting.

AWS Athena hasn't received as much love for some reason. In the next two years I expect major updates and/or improvements. They should kill off Redshift.

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I am going to use this for sure, but it is a little ironic.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone's building a dataset for tool use examples.

The newer gen reasoning models are especially good at knowing when to do web search. I imagine they'll slowly get better at other tools.

At current levels of performance, LLMs having the ability to get well curated information by themselves would increase their scores by a lot.

The attention mechanism does far too much complex thinking for such a dumb task. This is precisely where you need to dumb down and focus and be disciplined rather than do high level next token prediction.

You'd benefit from actually asking the LLM to list the full document and compare, kind of like reasoning, and similar to how LLMs perform better when they break down arithmetic or algebra tasks into smaller steps.

Also my guess would be that the models that perform well are MoE models where there may be an Expert or two that does well on tasks that needs focus rather than intuition. So without knowing anything about Gemini Flash, my guess would be that it's an MoE model.