I'm curious who the ideal customer of this should be. If we're a startup with our own harness, are we a good fit? What would qualify us or disqualify us from being a good user?
I think startups are a great fit. Getting a really good agent out of the box lets you scale and give your customers value fast. All you need to think about is the business logic: system prompts, tools to give the agent, skills, etc. You won't need to spend time on building the infra layer, orchestration loops, memory, implementing automations, etc.
Yeah I know some of my team members have invested a lot of time in this. Could definitely be worth chatting with them on what improvements could be made here. We're starting to deprioritize our consumer facing agent harness, in favor of more infrastructure level improvements we are making.
Developers with customer-facing chat products are the ideal customer.
If a startup has a specific flow they want the agent to take and their traffic is bursty, then I'd recommend using a framework like Mastra and deploying onto a sandbox.
For long-running always on agents where it's important to learn the users preferences overtime, our approach is the highest ROI.
Interesting. We definitely have long-running agents where certain preferences are key. However, some of the preferences are likely going to be shared universally across our customers. Is there some way of triaging this feedback into permanent improvements in agent performance?
It is possible to do it (ex: run a background process that analyzes memories across customers and updates the system prompt based on the findings). A specific implementation would depend on your application. Feel free to email me rajit@prismvideos.com if you'd like to talk further.
I think that if you went back in time to 1868 and told Senator Jacob M. Howard that a century and a half in the future, the primary consequence of the citizenship clause of the 14th amendment would be that foreigners from all over the world would attempt to immigrate to the US, even on temporary work visas or explicitly contrary to federal immigration law, with the intent of bearing or begetting a child on US soil who would be legally counted as a fellow-citizen who, upon coming of age, would go to the polls and vote with all other citizens; and that further the parents of this child and their political sympathizers would use the very presence of that child as a justification for why it was immoral to restrict the federal government's lawful authority to control immigration to the United States - that he would've spent a bit more time considering the exact wording of the text.
The "birthright" citizenship clause of the 14th amendment was intended to clarify the citizenship status of the recently freed black slaves. That intent is clear by contemporary written material.
Now, you could absolutely argue that whatever the intent of the amendment was, it still protects the present-day state of Chinese mothers having zero ties to this country popping over for a few months and giving birth to a fully-fledged American citizen, because the law says what it says. That's a much better argument than saying that the Civil War was fought for the right of transient visitors or illegal immigrants to this country to birth citizens, because that's just absurd.
This is like saying - 'I don't understand why anybody would ever buy a pizza from a store. All you have to do is get some flour, water, tomato sauce, cheese, mix the flour and water together, whip the dough, add tomato sauce, put cheese on top of it, cook it for 20 minutes, and then serve it.'
So __much__ value is in the fact things are easy. Money is __not__ the most valuable thing in the world.
How is it easier when you still have to human-approve the creation interactively, and we have no idea how long this service will be around or if pricing will change (which could result in being locked out of accounts agents created and later used for something important / signed up for an API used in your code)?
Sorry, but that’s not the correct analogy. There’s such a thing as taste, and only 1 out of 10 people can get it right, while 9 out of 10 can get code right.
Holy shit this is horrible. It really shows the true cost of having a disciplined public society. People love to hate on SF, and the homelessness. But I think it’s a society that prioritizes individual freedom which allows for both this outcome and the entrepreneurial environment we see.
None of this post seemed like necessary costs. You can arrest criminals while allowing more than one shower per 5 days, along with all the other absurd rules and restrictions here.
Japan absolutely does not stop being Japan just because they change their prison policy. Just like Sweden doesn't stop having a very well run society just because they don't have the same prison policies as the Japanese.
You can have western values while also having Japanese peacefulness.
Hard disagree. Prison is the one you're not supposed to enjoy, jail is the place you use to keep people BEFORE they are judged.
A jail should limit the people held only as much as needed for the safety of the public and the handlers, but no punishment should be inflicted because no one's a convicted criminal (yet).
And in any case, prison should have a strong component of making the guilty person fit to live among others. A person that's been made to sit still staring at the wall for all their waking life for years is a person I definitely don't want as a neighbour, because there's no way they come out of that sane.
Society can be optimized for the law-abiding without being needlessly cruel.
Jail's job is to keep you around during your legal process. You're not supposed to enjoy jail but it's not supposed to be torture, either. Torture does not belong in a civilized society and especially should not be used against those who have not even been formally charged. much less convicted, of a crime.
Sorry, I think you mean abiding*. But laws are not some moral edicts handed down by god. They can and often are wrong or seriously misguided. Laws can and should be broken if and only if the agent at hand has a thorough understanding of why they are violating the law. Breaking a law and antisocial behavior are not necessarily equivalent.
This is not about enjoying or not enjoying jail. If you happen to live and work in Japan in a typical job, getting arrested and held within this process for 23 days almost certainly means you're getting fired because you essentially have no contact with the outside world and even if you manage to sneak a word out through your lawyer, most of the employment contracts have clauses to extent of automatic termination for both missing enough days and breaking moral character.
So even if the prosecution decides to drop your case, you're already fucked -- this is not how proper justice system should work.
While I agree jail doesn't need to be enjoyable, it should at least be humane and free from torture (psychological or physical).
Also remember that this article is about an experience before any charges were filed, before she'd seen a court room, before she even had the opportunity to prove her innocence or be convicted. "You are not supposed to be in jail" is a laughably naive way of looking at this type of situation.
If someone was arrested and their charges dropped, then what the government did was torture to a law abiding citizen and they should have a duty to compensate them appropriately.
Right, but there's a core conceit we use in the US (mostly) that you are innocent until you are proven guilty, and if you are wrongfully accused (as was evidently the case from the author), you should perhaps NOT be put into such a grim set of living conditions with essentially no rights.
In this case, the author evidently _was_ a law abiding person, so the optimization failed, senselessly, likely out of a systemic effort to strike enough fear in the populace to over-index towards avoiding the possibility of this sort of situation. (Much like Singapore caning people for minor offenses.)
Whether or not you agree that such draconian punishments or processes are effective or fair is a different discussion, but this person was LITERALLY not supposed to be in jail, so how fair is it that they were removed from polite society for over a month in such poor conditions and at considerable expense?
Wait until you will be thrown in jail and tortured for nothing. I have seen frw individuals like you who think "oh I obey the lay so this wouldn't happen to me".
One of my mentors created Blackboard. It used to be very very good, but he sold it to private equity, and they immediately fired all of the customer support and developers, 3xd prices overnight leading to the 'blackboard sucks' problem. This gave the opening for Canvas to eventually come on to the scene and dominate.
My wife and I each have to use it as we're both following an online master's at the same university... it's definitely gone downhill (compared to the days where I originally used it ~20 yrs ago in college; tracker-riddled, slow); surprisingly, a recent change made it so that you can only attend online lessons in Chrome (haven't had time to see if this is just a user-agent thing).
I asked claude to decipher this and it refused. I asked gemini and it was permissible. Very interesting to see ROT-13 banned via Anthropic as a 'prompt injection' risk.
Anecdotes __are__ data. How much weight you ascribe to it as being representative is different. But you cannot disqualify it as 'not data'. It is usually a leading indicator of what could potentially show up in these more robust datasets.
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