caust1c

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
3,293
Submissions
415
Member since
Feb 13
Programmer. Hacker. Building RunReveal, the Security Data Platform

    https://runreveal.com
    https://twitter.com/Caust1c
    https://www.abraithwaite.net
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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
This problem left as an exercise for the taxpayer. /s
Comment · 2 months ago
IMO big models are not a product in and of themselves. Inference is just a new type of compute. I'm confident that in two or three years, every product will have inference capabilities integrated into the experience, and models will become less and less distinctive from one another.

What most products need from a model is a pretty short list: the ability to make tool calls well, accurate recall, and the ability to follow directions without wavering (whether or not those directions are baked into the weights or provided in a system prompt). That covers 95% of inference utility in products.

We're nearly there, and I believe these capabilities will fit on small models.

Because of this though, I predict hardware demand will stay high despite demand for "hosted" inference dropping. Unless there's some regulatory shenanigans that step in to say otherwise.

Comment · 2 months ago
I actually just installed forgejo in My Home lab and loving it. Thinking about moving the companys code hosting to it next.
Comment · 2 months ago
Azure's going to suffocate github. I'm curious to see what's next. Will self-hosting the code repository come back in vogue or will another social-coding platform take off?
Comment · 2 months ago
My RSI flared up just looking at this keyboard. Hard pass!
Comment · 2 months ago
Good points. I looked up the definition for prediction and I suppose I'm stretching what I view as prediction.

> A prediction is a statement about what you think will happen in the future, often based on experience or knowledge. It can also be referred to as a forecast or an informed guess

Based on my reading of this definition, compression may inform prediction but it is not itself prediction. The examples cited in the blog post are examples of probabilistic recall based on past events or instances. More context means a higher chance that the recall is more likely to be aligned.

But it's hard for me to accept the leap to compression == prediction because in my mind a prediction is an informed guess about something that hasn't yet come to pass. But thinking more about it, time is a human concept and so who's to say the temporal reference means anything at all here. Maybe probabilistic recall is the same as predictive forecasting if time is an invented concept and essentially means nothing?

Is everything fundamentally deterministic if you know everything in the universe or does free will exist?

IDK to be honest, I'm just more frequently surprised by new things that happen every day than I am at things that stay the same, even if mostly things stay the same. Maybe I just don't notice them and nothing actually ever happens.

Side note: the inevitable consequence of this line of reasoning will eventually become that LLMs given enough power are in fact intelligent and sentient, and I'm worried about how that affects humanity as a whole. Are we about to subjugate the most intelligent thing humanity has ever created, or is it about to subjugate us?

The rabbit hole gets deep quick when making the leap between a fancy recall mechanism and novel prediction, but I agree they're not that different in the end. I just believe it's important to be nuanced or else we'll miss when AGI actually happens (maybe it's already here).

Comment · 2 months ago
Compression is not prediction, it is recall. Can we make predictions based on compression? Absolutely. Is memory encoded into physical neurons technically compression? I would argue also yes.

However, going from compression to prediction is a large jump that is unsubstantiated by this article and based on the claim that probabilistic recall is also prediction.

Two perfect counterpoints to this are markets and weather patterns. One cannot predict future events based on past performance or behavior. Change is the only thing that's constant, and chaos/entropy is everywhere we look.

For simple problems like programming, sure predictive recall works amazingly well, but let's not pretend LLMs are actually predicting something. This is exactly why LLMs suck at doing anything novel; they lack imagination and creativity.

Comment · 4 months ago
Where's the source code for the database itself? Looks like the repo is just a client.

Congrats on the launch!

Comment · 6 months ago
> I’d like it to eventually pay for itself [...] — but that’s a problem for later.

Hard pass from me dawg. If you don't know the business model now, folks like me are tired of trusting their data to randos on the internet without a plan for sustainability. Guaranteed to end up being just another data farm.

Neat you got the domain tho.

Comment · 7 months ago
I'm getting tired of everyone saying "MCP is dead, use CLIs!".

Yes, MCP eats up context windows, but agents can also be smarter about how they load the MCP context in the first place, using similar strategy to skills.

The problem with tossing it out entirely is that it leaves a lot more questions for handling security.

When using skills, there's no implicit way to be able to apply policies in the sane way across many different servers.

MCP gives us a registry such that we can enforce MCP chain policies, i.e. no doing web search after viewing financials.

Doing the same with skills is not possible in a programatic and deterministic way.

There needs to be a middle ground instead of throwing out MCP entirely.

Comment · 7 months ago
Disclaimer: OP (Caust1c) is not Jitesh, just following hn recommendations w/ post titles.
Comment · 8 months ago
> FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!

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