Levenshtein distance is not only a well-understood problem, it's small, self-contained, and extremely well-represented in the training data. The kind of problem where even small/bad models can excel. The golden standard for those tasks is just "use a library" so no wonder the beefy models are expensive: you're chartering a commercial airplane to go grocery shopping.

My personal benchmarks are software engineering tasks (ideally spanning multiple packages in a monorepo) composed of many small decisions that, compounded, make or break the implementation and long-term maintainability.

There's where even frontier models struggle, which makes comparisons meaningful.

The inevitable "iron law of oligarchy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

I'm surprised you're surprised.

Giant corpos steal work from millions of independent artists and the State ruled that IP laws didn't apply to them, only to us common mortals.

My personal experience is that for production-grade code you need to steer the agent more often than not... so yes, at least some of us are watching the LLM code.

I mean: you still have the problem regardless of following HTTP verb semantics or not.

Don't do that, and you solved nothing.

Either I'm missing what you mean, or half the comments here are missing the point of idempotency.

Let's say your server received this request twice within one minute:

    {
      items: [ { id: 123, amount: 1 } ],
      creditCardInfo: { ... }
    }

There is simply no way to make the requests idempotent without an idempotency key. The only way to tell both situations apart is to key the requests by some UID. The HTTP verb is irrelevant.

Did I misunderstand what you meant?

I've been thinking a lot about this today and I think you might have a hidden gem here. Where can I reach you to talk more about this?

Feel free to drop an email (address in my profile)

What would I use Pollen for?

I'm not sure I understand the "seed" metaphor.

Uh, how? This might be a country thing but you don't have to join any union in my country. You do, if they represent your interests. Big companies have multiple, competing unions, and the anarchists (which refuse state subsidies and are fully self-funded) are pretty good at what they do.

If you have to join a union isn't that essentially a racket?

There's not a lot I can say that isn't covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union

[0] https://hurl.dev/

They all failed and were subsumed by the two (read: one) big groups in Europe. Far left and libertarians were crushed in the past two legislatures.

Now it's PfE's turn but the antibodies are already in the bloodstream (the two big groups are already signing their covenants to protect the oligarchy) and Trump did them dirty (they're now scrambling to distance themselvesb from USA's and Israel's ties) so they're DoA and will fail too.

This said: I understand your points, and thanks for the civil discussion.

As someone from the "whole rest of the west", no, they're not different at all. Very minor details change, but the net outcome is the exact same and suffer from the exact same problems.

You can't escape the iron law of oligarchy.

> Democracies are good at crushing dissent?

They're not only good: they are the best. You don't need to curb dissent by violence if you discourage dissent by social manipulation. It's the cheapest and most effective tactic: keeping the populace docile.

If you manage to equate "democracy" (again, quotes intended) with democracy (lack of quotes intended), most of the work is already done.

"What are you, antidemocratic!?"

"Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos"

There's a reason my country's system trembled when the bipartisan system was challenged as new parties emerged... but it was curbed within two legislatures without a single shot fired and now we're back to an even stronger bipartisan representation. Quite the fine job, actually.

We even have a name for this: "the state's sewers". They're very effective. There's a reason the state's armed forces routinely infiltrate unions and other citizens participation platforms.