That's funny, because I recall in 2015 hitting their endpoint for a large-ish customer, and if you added a boolean to get the total result count, it would 500 every time, presumably because it was doing some kind of "SELECT count(1)" over a postgres table. IIRC, Stripe was ruby internally for a long time, no?
Also their documentation was frequently just straight up incorrect (as in the described json schema for a response was violated. keys missing, different field names, etc.).
But it's been over 10 years, has it improved since then? I'm still in my impression of their stack from back then, although they were decently mature by then as well.
I recently had to implement a stripe payment system for a client (having never used it before) and found their documentation to be accurate and excellent (at least for the Java SDK and relatively basic use case).
No love for Stripe but IMO their documentation feels like a first-class product.
I think the specific cases where it failed was when the customer was one of their earlier ones. My guess is that some data schema migration happened, and older data was being served which didn't quite match. So perhaps recency wouldn't potentially even surface those problems either.
You might want to look at how a small mob orchaestrated by and comprised of Bush's campaign flooded voting offices to stop a recount, as part of a successful effort to steal the election from Gore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
They didn't even need torches to subvert democracy. I think a majority of Americans are under the misconception that they live in a civilized democracy, and that they have been for a while. But if you look under the covers (or if you're a minority), or just learn history, then you'll find that it's not.
I got a third party replacement battery in my iPhone. The battery works just fine and the reason is simple, I no longer live in the US, where the phone was purchased, and if I want to keep my 2 eSIM slots, then I can't get the phone fixed in Hong Kong. Anyone who thinks Apple is very convenient has never lived in multiple countries, imo.
But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).
But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
> Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
Simpler than that: money and control.
Marked up replacement parts for and the inability to compete because “not Apple certified” comes with disabled features.
The best part of market capitalism, no market! Pure profits because we make the rules!
Europe has a long tail of MNOs and MVNOs that don't support eSIM well enough. In China, SIM activation requires visiting a store, ID verification etc. so they only recently added eSIMs, and with limits: only Chinese iPhones can install a Chinese eSIM, and foreign eSIMs cannot be installed onto a Chinese iPhone while you're physically in mainland China.
I think they can be useful for quickly iterating through benchmarks and trying lots of ideas, but they won't come up with them on their own. Also, I'm not sure why, maybe some mean reversion thing, but they will never, ever suggest writing a tool to make their own life easier, get more accurate information, or anything. Once I point it at a tool, it can be ok at using it (I say ok because they seem to skim the help docs, which is truly ironic, considering I seem to read it more thoroughly even though I'm 100x slower at it. I assume this is some token saving system prompt), but they won't suggest it for you.
This is why I'm not worried about being replaced for now or the forseeable future. For all of the improvements they've made, this part just never seems to change. They could slap another heuristic prompt for the edge case, but eventually it'll revert to the mean again.
I think there is a way to use LLMs to help with programming, but not when I'm not the driver in the seat writing the tests and deciding the architecture. Also I would never ship code written by them as the final product for anything I care about. Since I, like most people, find reading code to be arduous. The more fun thing to do is to force yourself to rewrite it all, treating the LLM's work as a rough draft.
> they will never, ever suggest writing a tool to make their own life easier, get more accurate information, or anything
Make sure you process doesn't depend on anyone reading your mind.
When I run into things like this, it becomes a one-liner in my instructions/harness or in the canned prompt/skill I use that sets off a process.
In this case, I instruct agents to proactively build/improve diagnostic tooling if it would help them with their task + if it meets a bar of generalization/reusability (else it should be an ephemeral probe that gets abandoned at the end of the solution).
People have been having this same debate in a very similar way on typed languages vs untyped interpreted languages. I think that, in a similar vein, if you look at the trend over time:
- the addition and standardization (with incomplete coverage) of the solution of adding typing to Python
- how much people are re-discovering the value of performance + typing (e.g. Rust)
then I'm going to take a small leap and extrapolate that the trend will be similar here.
The equivalent of the "one off script in python" will be the LLM, and the long term stable and maintainable solution will be something much more structured and focused like Jev.
And if I asked people to name companies which retain a good public perception of being not entirely profit driven, the ones that would most likely come to mind are ones like Costco, where there's someone who is setting the tone and not leaving it to the committee of free market/investors to decide the fate of the company. I wonder if there are parallels here to other similar economic models, hmm...
companies like Costco, Patagonia etc are rare why ? because deliberate actions & care have been taken to go against the grain of what a company should do.
just like the USA at it's founding - deliberate actions were taken etc that were counter to the normal. & going against the wind takes a lot of energy.
at a certain point in time - you run out of energy or you've to keep keep reinvesting to not run out otherwise barbarians are knocking down at the gate.
The problem with “profit driven” is that it reduces motives to a lowest common denominator. Short term profit? Long term profit? Brand value that can be leveraged later?
Costco, specifically, I have a good story about. Jim Sinegal spoke at my MBA program, and he talked about when they were starting and the challenge was a value prop of “buy bulk, lower cost” contrasted with bulk actually being more expensive than small quantities, therefore needing to target higher incomes.
Part of the solution: wider parking spaces. Make people feel like their expensive cars are safer, it’s easier to get in and out of the car (especially for older people, who have more wealth), and differentiate from typical stores.
Now, you tell me: would you be just as happy with cramped parking spaces because the larger ones are profit-driven? Does motive even matter here?
Costco has a policy to cap margins at 14% or something to that order. And it's disciplined enough that it's broken off with major brands that tried to dispute this.
It's profit driven in its own way, but against the grain of modern corporate strategy.
This is a good observation, with the observation that there are two different levels of latency requirements. Most of the time, I would be pretty happy with an untyped, unsemantic, mildly smart heuristic based ident completion while the asynchronous semantic one finishes.
The nice thing about this dual setup is that I tend to only want the semantic one if I'm thinking more, so there's naturally a larger time budget for it.
One must always think about the experience they want in UX first, rather than the tools they want to build.
Cool idea. The pricing model reminds me of my time working in algorithmic trading, haha. I'll try this out for some queries I wanted to run.
I suppose the scraping you're doing is a huge part of your value proposition, but I would like to gently nudge you in the direction of making the datasets available via p2p (e.g. a torrent) like how Wikipedia distributes its snapshots in the spirit of democratizing access to data that is becoming increasingly walled off. Also, I think another potential benefit that kind of bulk sharing would have is relieving the congestion from those doing the equivalent operation to extract data via the querying interface.
I agree in sentiment, and really a lot of this is Google's doing. It's been around a decade since they switched to approximate results and started encouraging people to search via sentences. I believe this is the one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird
The internet for all of its activity is becoming harder to index because the classic dumb search engines were turned into personalized semantic people pleasers.
The classic model for knowledge discovery still exists, though. You find a blog you like, and use that as a thread of knowledge. You join a community and talk with someone and share resources together. Join a small group chat and post with those people. Your knowledge sharing comes from people you share interests with.
Go to a library, ask your coworkers. If you put in the ground-work, it's possible to do that. For seeds of knowledge outside of your local network, at this point you have to find the indexers that work for you.
Personally, I am in the process of writing the infrastructure for my own search engine, and maybe I will share the tech broadly one day. For now, I'll keep my inventions to my closer personal circles.
In general, I think people should be able to more easily maintain their own offline indices, and share knowledge graphs peer-to-peer rather than relying on a centralized one, in my opinion. This tech has no monetization opportunity, though, so I'm guessing that's why it's relatively under-developed, but luckily for me I have enough money and now enough time to develop and release it (and similar tools).
> You find a blog you like, and use that as a thread of knowledge. You join a community and talk with someone and share resources together. Join a small group chat and post with those people. Your knowledge sharing comes from people you share interests with.
It is hard to find communities where people are not evangelical and soon you become an evangelist.
I am using LLMs to build my own graph of thoughts and try my best to follow them with critical eyes. Do not want to be influenced by or influence others.
Also their documentation was frequently just straight up incorrect (as in the described json schema for a response was violated. keys missing, different field names, etc.).
But it's been over 10 years, has it improved since then? I'm still in my impression of their stack from back then, although they were decently mature by then as well.
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