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Some mild whataboutery: is the purpose of a cancer ward to fail to cure a large fraction of its patients[0]?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...


“what it does” describes the actions taken - cancer wards work to treat cancer (which is their purpose). Outcomes of what they do isn’t relevant to the point.

The purpose of most social media companies is to manipulate people for financial and political gain which is what they do.


I think that "manipulate people for financial and political gain" is an outcome of what social media companies actually do - I was under the belief that in a general sense, they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers, independent of whether or not a given ad buyer wants to manipulate people.

> they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers

This is where they manipulate in my mind. They maximize that time by exploiting human psychology, manipulating people into scrolling their feeds endlessly eh?


Both miracles are illness-recovery related and feel to me quite like regression to the mean, but I can imagine this is somewhat of a strategic move from the Catholic church to bring some relatability into things.


For me, the USP Warp used to have was generating shell commands from prompts inside the terminal - but Cursor has had this in its embedded terminal for a while now so increasingly I find myself using Ghostty instead



> One of the consequences of this is that we should always consider asking the LLM the same question more than once, perhaps with some variation in the wording. Then we can compare answers, indeed perhaps ask the LLM to compare answers for us. The difference in the answers can be as useful as the answers themselves.

There was once a coding agent which achieved SOTA performance on SWE Bench Verified by "just" running the agent 5 times on each instance, scoring each attempt and picking the attempt with the highest score: https://aide.dev/blog/sota-bitter-lesson


Anecdotally I think I have heard "what all" most commonly spoken by Indian English speakers - though that's probably quite far outside the scope of this site.


It appears that e2b runs Firecracker microVMs (https://e2b.dev/blog/how-manus-uses-e2b-to-provide-agents-wi...)

It shouldn't be too hard to get a Firecracker orchestrator running locally - the articles here were very helpful when I was doing this myself: https://jvns.ca/blog/2021/01/23/firecracker--start-a-vm-in-l...


I've worked somewhere where CORBA was used very heavily and to great effect - though I suspect the reason for our successful usage was that one of the senior software engineers worked on CORBA directly.


I have a biased opinion since I work for a background agent startup currently - but there are more (and better!) out there than Jules and Copilot that might address some of the author's issues.


And those mythical better tools tools that you didn't even bother to mention are?


Presumably if they did, they would be accused of promoting their startup :)


But he said there are more and better out there. "More" implies more than one :)

And promoting own startups are usually okay if that is phrased okay :)


By no means are better background agents "mythical" as you claim. I didn't bother to mention them as it is easy enough to search for asynchronous/background agents yourself.

Devin is perhaps the one that is most fully featured and I believe has been around the longest. Other examples that seem to be getting some attention recently are Warp, Cursor's own background agent implementation, Charlie Labs, Codegen, Tembo, and OpenAI's Codex.

I do not work for any of the aforementioned companies.


> as it is easy enough to search for asynchronous/background agents yourself.

Ah yes. An unverifiable claim followed by "just google them yourself".

> Devin is perhaps the one that is most fully featured and I believe has been around the longest.

And it had been hilariously bad the longest. Is it better now? Maybe? I don't really know anyone even mentioning Devin anymore

> examples that seem to be getting some attention recently

So, "some attention", but you could "easily find them by searching".

> Charlie Labs, Codegen, Tembo

Never heard of them, but will take a look.

See how easy it was to mention them?


>Ah yes. An unverifiable claim followed by "just google them yourself".

Some agent scaffolding performs better on benchmarks than others given the same underlying base model - see SWE Bench and Terminal Bench for examples.

Some may find certain background agents better than others simply because of UX. Some background agents have features that others don't - like memory systems, MCP, 3rd party integrations, etc.

I maintain it is easy to search for examples of background coding agents that are not Jules or Copilot. For me, searching "background coding agents" on google or duckduckgo returns some of the other examples that I mentioned.


I am suspicious that the buffalo mozzarella registers as "tangy" at all - though I suppose it travelled quite a long way


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