I’ve given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate an SVG of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never looks quite like what I have in mind.

In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images if you’re prepared to accept whatever comes out on approximately the first try.

Even though this sounded nuts to people in Menocchio’s time, it’s not completely implausible. The whole thing about order arising from undifferentiated chaos is pretty Greek, as is the idea of life arising spontaneously from decaying matter (Aristotle believed that). God arising from some preexisting substance is kind of radical but I’m sure there were precursors to that too. The rest of it is almost stock standard Christian mythology.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46319826

> All of these examples involve assigning to a constant a value known at compile time but none of them will work

Maps are not known at compile time. Hash functions are randomized based on a seed only known at execution time. The hashed value of "HELLO" is actually different each time the program runs. Even if the hash function weren't random, the runtime has to allocate buckets for map values on the heap, which involves calling the OS to get memory addresses for those buckets, etc.

In Go, `const` means "the compiler can completely evaluate this expression and store the final bytes in the executable," which has the effect of making them non-reassignable, but protection from reassignment is not an actual feature of the language the way it is in Java and C++ (goes back to the maintainers wanting to keep it simple).

    let val = arr[i]

    cmp     rdx, rsi        ; Compare i (rdx) with length (rsi)
    jae     .Lpanic_label   ; Jump if i >= length
    ; later...
    .Lpanic_label:
    call    core::panicking::panic_bounds_check

Doesn't the language compiler write the code that checks if the array access is in-bounds? Why would you need to test the compiler's code?

Learning LISP, Fortran, APL, Perl, or really any language that is different from what you’re used to, will also do this for you.

I started my career when on-prem was the norm and remember so much trouble. When you have long-lived hardware, eventually, no matter how hard you try, you just start to treat it as a pet and state naturally accumulates. Then, as the hardware starts to be not good enough, you need to upgrade. There's an internal team that presents the "commodity" interface, so you have to pick out your new hardware from their list and get the cost approved (it's a lot harder to just spend a little more and get a little more). Then your projects are delayed by them racking the new hardware and you properly "un-petting" your pets so they can respawn on the new devices, etc.

Anyways, when cloud came along, I was like, yeah we're switching and never going back. Buuut, come to find out that's part of the master plan: it's a no-brainer good deal until you and everyone in your org/company/industry forgets HTF to rack their own hardware, and then it starts to go from no-brainer to brainer. And basically unless you start to pull back and rebuild that muscle, it will go from brainer to no-brainer bad deal. So thanks for building this muscle!

    > scaling will become problematic as the doc structure approaches the context limit of the LLM doing the retrieval

But yes, still "vibe retrieval".

My grandparents owned a grocery store. Their name was on the sign. If you brought home spoiled meat, that was their name and you as a member of their community that were put out.

When my mom brings home spoiled meat from Stop & Shop, she goes back there not just to exchange it, but to complain to someone about how it messed up her barbecue plans, etc. And I’m like seriously, why would anyone working at Stop & Shop give a rat’s ass about your family gathering? Stop & Shop is owned by a Dutch multinational “food retail” company.

But that’s not the capitalism she grew up with. She actually thinks capitalism is great because it allowed her parents to come over on a boat as teenagers and make lives for themselves, and have extra to send back home. But she hates it when she calls her cable company and ends up chatting with a girl in Singapore. Go figure.

    - guilty of systemic accounting fraud from 1999-2004
    - manufactured a (allegedly known-to-be) faulty ignition switch that led to the deaths of 124 people and injured 275 others
    - currently forcing 20,000 former employees to fight a decades-long legal battle for their earned pension benefits
    - gleefully dumps massive quantities of carcinogens and poisons into the environment, including: lead compounds, chromium compounds, sulfuric and hydrochloride acid (lol), and glycol ethers

Citations here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptiv

Ah ok, that’s a key piece I was missing. That’s really cool, thanks!

Then for the retrieval stage, it presents the table of contents to a "retriever" LLM, which decides which sections are relevant to the question based on the summaries the indexer LLM created. Then for the answer generation stage, it just presents those relevant sections along with the question.

That's pretty clever - does it work with a corpus of documents as well, or just a single large document? Does the "indexer" know the question ahead of time, or is the creation of sections and section summarization supposed to be question-agnostic? What if your table of contents gets too big? Seems like then it just becomes normal RAG, where you have to store the summaries and document-chunk pointers in some vector or lexical database?

> 19% of California houses were owned by investors, ranking No. 36 among the states and just below the 20% national norm.

States with the highest share of investor-owned houses:

> Hawaii at 40%, Alaska at 35%, Vermont at 31%, West Virginia at 30%, and Wyoming at 30%.

States with the lowest are all in the Mid-Atlantic and lower New England:

> Connecticut at 10%, Rhode Island and Massachusetts at 12%, and Delaware at 13%.

Why so low in California (again, I'm baffled that this is "low")?

> the sky-high price tag for single-family homes, the third-highest nationally at $866,100

Regardless, this is terrible for sports fans. Disney will chop this up into “baskets” with one watchable thing padded with lots of other unwatchable-to-mildly-interesting stuff (college hockey from a single camera angle anyone?). Then, when you want to watch some event, you’ll open your ESPN Premium +- whatever app, get excited when you see the event on the home screen, only to be upsold to start your free trial of ESPN NFL++ Hulu Fans Only Bundle. The only solution is to boycott the whole damn thing, which is what I am doing, and I love having the extra cash for tickets to local minor league games, etc.