What I couldn't tell from the article was if the author somehow achieved a multimodal arithmetic relation without needing CLP using a stack machine. That would be a neat technique.

I feel like it could be majorly disruptive, but idk if it's going to prolong the apocalypse or bring it about sooner -- or if it's a big nothing burger.

But the demo[2] is super cool.

[1]: https://taalas.com

[2]: https://chatjimmy.ai/

Love this, I've never heard it put that way before.

i.e.:

1. Do I start with an RLHF tuned model, "pretrain" on top of that (with adapter or by freezing weights?), then SFT on top of that (stack another adapter, or add layer(s) and freeze weights?) (and where did I get the dataset? synthetic extraction from corpus?), then RL (adapter, add layer(s) and freeze?)

2. or do I start at SF tuned model, ...

3. or do I start at raw pre-trained model, ...

Would love to know what the matrix used was.

> Post-training methods allow teams to refine model behavior for specific tasks and environments.

How do you suppose this works? They say "pretraining" but I'm certain that the amount of clean data available in proper dataset format is not nearly enough to make a "foundation model". Do you suppose what they are calling "pretraining" is actually SFT and then "post-training" is ... more SFT?

There's no way they mean "start from scratch". Maybe they do something like generate a heckin bunch of synthetic data seeded from company data using one of their SOA models -- which is basically equivalent to low resolution distillation, I would imagine. Hmm.

Some quotes from the video:

> ...at the same time, we're a people company.

> Your work will live on in our products.

> Doing the right thing for Atlassian while acting with humanity and doing the right thing for all those on all sides of this set of decisions.

Wow. There's a lot to unpack here.

https://www.metalevel.at/acomip/

  mi1(true).
  mi1((A,B)) :-
        mi1(A),
        mi1(B).
  mi1(Goal) :-
        Goal \= true,
        Goal \= (_,_),
        clause(Goal, Body),
        mi1(Body).

As a challenge, see how easy it is to write a metainterpreter in another language of your choice. Alternately, see if you can think of any way the metainterpretation system in Prolog could be improved.

Finally, think of what would happen to this if we changed the syntax and introduced something like object.field notation.

So while logical programming can be achieved with other syntaxes, the metaintrepretive aspect will be lost. I have yet to see a language that does this better.

Thinking about the amount of thought and energy that went into this, back in 1987 -- mostly preinternet, pre-AI. Damn.

I feel really lucky that we get to build on things like this.

[1]: https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~dale/lProlog/proghol/extra...

I realize formal verification with lean is a slightly different game but if anyone here has any insight, I tend to be extremely nervous about a confidently presented AI "proof" because I am sure that the proof is proving whatever it is proving, but it's still very hard for me to be confident that it is proving what I need it to prove.

Before the dog piling starts, I'm talking specifically about distributed systems scenarios where it is just not possible for a human to think through all the combinatorics of the liveness and safety properties without proof assistance.

I'm open to being wrong on this, but I think the skill of writing a proof and understanding the proof is different than being sure it actually proves for all the guarantees you have in mind.

I feel like closing this gap is make it or break it for using AI augmented proof assistance.

Padme: You're scanning for vulnerabilities so you can fix them, Anakin?

Anakin: ...

Padme: You're scanning for vulnerabilities so you can FIX THEM, right, Annie?

I see a lot of comments about folks being worried about going soft, getting brain rot, or losing the fun part of coding.

As far as I'm concerned this is a bigger (albeit kinda flakey) self-driving tractor. Yeah I'd be bored if I just stuck to my one little cabbage patch I'd been tilling by hand. But my new cabbage patch is now a megafarm. Subjectively, same level of effort.

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

Prolog: "Mistakes were made"

As an avid Prolog fan, I would have to agree with a lot of Mr. Wayne's comments! There are some things about the language that are now part of the ISO standard that are a bit unergonomic.

On the other hand, you don't have to write Prolog like that! The only shame is that there are 10x more examples (at least) of bad Prolog on the internet than good Prolog.

If you want to see some really beautiful stuff, check out Power of Prolog[1] (which Mr. Wayne courteously links to in his article!)

If you are really wondering why Prolog, the thing about it that makes it special among all languages is metainterpretation. No, seriously, would strongly recommend you check it out[2]

This is all that it takes to write a metainterpreter in Prolog:

  mi1(true).
  mi1((A,B)) :-
          mi1(A),
          mi1(B).
  mi1(Goal) :-
          Goal \= true,
          Goal \= (_,_),
          clause(Goal, Body),
          mi1(Body).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@ThePowerOfProlog

https://www.metalevel.at/prolog

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmBkU-l1zyc

https://www.metalevel.at/acomip/

Sure go ahead and roast me but please include full proof method you use to make sure that never happens that still allows you to use credentials for developing applications in the normal way.

Actually my primary value is emacs integration with claude.

I have an mcp with one function ( as_user_eval ) which allows it to execute arbitrary s-expressions against the portal package for emacs.

I use this often with custom slash commands, i.e., `/read-emacs`, which instructs claude to use that mcp to pull the context from multiple pseudoregions in to the context window (along with filenames and line numbers). This saves me from having to copy paste all of that.

I understand what the others are saying but the using the portal to talk to a running emacs client I don't find to be particularly "discoverable" on the cli.

I can say things like, "show me in emacs the test that failed", or, "highlight the lines you are talking about", or, "interactively remap my keybindings to do X", or, "take me to the info page that covers this topic".

This, paired with chrome devtools and playwright, had been a real productivity booster for me, and is quite fun.

I use voice dictation for this so it feels like I'm in Star Trek :)

I'm sure in 10 minutes we will be onto the next version of MCP... skills, ACP, Tools, whatever.

But this extensibility/discoverability for me has been nice. I make no stronger claims than that about "what it is for" or "what is should be", as I am a simple hacker with simple needs.