manapause

Model + Harness = Agent

Shame us what you lose when your turn to someone or something you trust for empathy and instead receive the opposite. Our body-personality would not produce venom if we didn’t need it to survive.

AMEN. If AI has made a developer into a curmodeon, I honestly would love to meet them.

The fact that in the 1950s and 60s our best and brightest from around the world dreamt of working for jonas salk or joining the space program.

for the last 30 years that same level of talent was aggressively pursued to give us Google Adwords, complex insurance-backed financial products, a corporate culture of feckless cowards in leadership, the best of us never stop interviewing. literally an epidemic of dystopian psycho-afflications due to doomscrolling that threatens to devolve future generations thanks to weaponized dopamine manipulation, advertising so pervasive that it could bring down entire goverments (or companies, which are now bigger), or an entire adult generation of intelligent loners who may never own a house...

But AI, AI is what people are mad at?

After 25 years in systems engineering, I was in a state of ennui with technology. I had loved building computers, hacking systems, gaming with my friends so much as a child I built a career out of it.

I worked at a large technology firm where we had a product release bottleneck due to 1 UX engagement artist who's talents were so in-demand we had multiple products backed up because this person had to give birth to a journey that wow, REALLY engaged you

IF a site that sold books, Adwords, Facebook, Twitter toxic-celebrity culture, an infatuation with ourselves and our devices...what if the emperor really has no clothes? what if we are all really lame, lonely bullies to whom the accumulation of wealth comes a cost of empathic and emotional intelligence and a desire to be non-human...

IS THAT THE GOAL? What are we doing here? Creating Optimus Prime, Agent Smith, or Hedonism bot? Maybe all 3 of them fighting for the future? Sold, I'll take it. I fight for Hedonism bot.

nothing AI could do could make me more upset that what humanity has done to itself over the past 30 years. If you are a subject matter expert in technology, NOW is your time.

I just read that the use of dating apps has decreased considerably.

Scammers taking advantage of the weak is more difficult when Joe-luddite asks an advertisement-free AI and eschews wading through a pagerank advertising platform or asking their home amazon-wiretap scams to find the truth themselves - a truth that they can engage with that is somewhat advertising free (for now?)

If you are angry about AI, then go ahead and leave.

Note: I am replying to my own post to say that Kultivait llama.cpp functionality is currently broken but under active development.

Ollama proxy and model selection does work. If you run into issues or have any questions please feel free to reach out.

If you have both ollama and llama.cpp installed on your MBP, and are interested in utilizing your local model as a cost-saving preprocessor for your frontier models, consider using https://github.com/Standard-Pentest/kultivait!

"kultivait init --setup" to evaluate your machine's hardware, access to frontier cli-tools, download models, and create a proxy for ollama to get started. works great with opencode!

I also use it for a chatbot assistant for customer onboarding. Gemini deserves some kudos for their willingness to allow entry level subscriptions access to API-keys to build solutions with.

This is so true. Every junior sysadmin I have trained over the years (including myself) has had a “are we being attacked?!” moment when tasked with WAF report analysis, monitoring fail2ban logs, etc.

Monitoring WAN traffic really gets the paranoia juices flowing.

It depends what your goals are and what you are using it for. This space is fluid and my answer last week would be different than my answer today! That said there’s no substitute for hard work, here are some resource to get you up to up to speed:

https://carteakey.dev/blog/local-inference/local-llm-optimiz...

https://botmonster.com/ai/self-hosted-ai-agent-frameworks-20...

Personally I find myself swapping models depending if I am engaged in “trad-development” vs building agentic probes or apps involving imagery. Tailscale the LLM to your deployments and ta-da!

What about at the device level?

“You must be this tall to ride this ride”

“ you must be 18 to own an iPhone 18+ “

I apologize for the drive-by question, and I appreciate your takes!

Can confirm, my experience in “loop engineering” was “this is neat” for 45 minutes until a daily ration of tokens was evaporated. The quadratic cost trap is prohibitive to experimentation.

As a localLLM evangelist, I am hopeful this will bring more attention to the joys of rolling your own sovereign AI.

The irony in AI triggering societal collapse due to gross economic malfeasance is just fun to think about.

If AI was around in the early 2000s Countrywide.ai would have been a thing.

The more sensational the headline the less I believe that the authors were present in technology 15-20+ years ago. People forget that Reddit used to be 2 parts programmer-humor 1 part snuff.

Show me an abliterated frontier model that is able to breakthrough the surrounding supporting models and actually hold state to produce contraband and I’ll gladly supply my personal image making making a silly face in a compromising position if it wouldn’t make the testers feel better.

Do they need to be tested like this? Yes. But it would take the carbon footprint of a commuter air terminal and the land rights of am small town in the high Sierras …. all converted settlers of Catan style into tokens …. just to lobotomize a fine tuned model to get close.

That said I appreciate the work you’re doing

20 or so years ago while working for a Startup in the Home-Health EMR Space - it was my job to develop and integrate the proper processing of incoming visit forms. After an outage, I performed an audit of our incoming forms and noticed some anomalies in the billing patterns of doctors belonging to one clinic. In other words, these doctors either had the highest concentration of extremely sick patients - or they were committing Medicare fraud.

At the end of the post mortum with the CMO, as I was getting ready to leave I decided to bring this to his attention. I’ll never forget the change of mood preceding the dressing down I received: “do not ever put yourself in a position to make clinical decisions.”

3 months later, the charting anomalies were so egregious that the CMO’s spot-checks led him to sit the medical director of that physicians clinic down for a chat. They were good doctors, but they were over-billing. A year and a half later their practice goes under pre-payment review, and four years after I wrote a script that noticed an anomaly - the head MD of the practice was sent to prison for 4 years after collecting millions of dollars in over-billed house calls.

I loved working in healthcare, and I still miss it to this day. I don’t know where I am going with this, but right now I believe there is a diagnostic technology out there that is being used in veterinary science or piloted in some other country that could save a statistic level of lives …. However, due to the fact that doctors practice medicine and we don’t, as a group they act as defacto gate-keepers (which they are entitled to be as clinicians), the best thing you can do is to incentivize them with money (like Obama did) with Medicare bonuses for using an EMR that logged CCRs and alerted the doc if the patient didn’t have certain vaccine information in the elderly.

If the first guy to wash his hands was seen as a lunatic, the first geriatric practitioner to give over an iota of their clinical practice to automate Rx dispersal while navigating poly pharmacology concerns will go to jail for a narcotics crimes or will be labeled to heretic until Medicare pays them all for it.

If your name is John Smith, and you prompt Gemini to act as a robust OSINT tool, you will experience the vicissitudes of Chaps firsthand as the tool normalizations of vector space yields an answer that will not only never get close to identifying you because it has lumped several John Smiths together like asking a dog to fetch your shoes and it comes back with a Footlocker in its mouth.

It’s a good question. That said unless there are compliance or fallback concerns i would prefer a service that burns my data on departure.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but from my experience in this space in order for a model to exercise judgment it must force itself to operate in a strict chain of thought mode. Since all LLMs are predictive creatures, I started to care a lot more about my judgment settings, the transparency of them, and the presence of a judgment loop in either the development or functionality of an application built these days.

Not exactly sure where I’m going with this, but my work with creating penetesting tools for LLMs, the way that I use judgment is critical to the core functionality of the application. I agree with your concern and I will just say that the more time I spent concerned with chain of though where now I will make multiple versions of the same app using a different judge set a different “temperaments” and I found it to be incredibly enlightening as to the diversity of applications and approaches that it creates.

  Even using BMAD or superpowers, I can make five versions of an app without judges involved and I feel like I’m just making the same app five times because the API begins to coalesce around the business problem you want to solve. The vicissitudes of prediction tools always want to take the safest bet for the greater good, but with the judge involved we can make the agent force itself to actually be hostile about what exactly we’re trying to do, which has produced interesting and fun results.

As an amateur sauna evangelist, I can say my experience sauna usage 1-2 times a week has greatly improved my life and quality of sleep!

If you give 100 monkeys 100 guns and room full of building materials, how long will it take before they build a house?

How long will it take before they rob a bank?

If they do either of those things will the results have been intentional from the simian’s POV?

Not notepad++! (Opens WhatsApp) OpenClawd express my discontent across all my channels and draft an email to send to IT tomorrow morning. Also turn off the lights off and go to bed. (Somewhere in china, all the lights go out)

There is capital “A” Active Listening, which is in a family of behavior modification techniques in which the interviewer can follow the aforementioned scripts to increase engagement…

And lowercase active listening, IMHO is genuinely being interested in the experiences of the person talking that your line of questioning disarms the subject into sharing stories that add personal, “cultural” context to their choices which could be considered taboo.

The tactic become normalized amongst the extremes of both sides. “ 5% of the wizards casting 85% of the spells.”

Beautifully said. I believe wholeheartedly that in real life, disagreements between two people hinge on an ability to disarm each other through charm and disposition. The less you know someone, and the more they appear to earnestly try to understand you - becoming heated and firing phasers just feels unbecoming; why would I perpetuate personal loneliness or ennui in a moment that is genuinely devoid of it?

In short, death by acquisition by dice.com

This is a perfect recipe!

I’ve found the best strategies are the ones you can abandon. clearly defined tactics and an appropriate application of people and resources require a quarterback with an ability to audible.

It’s possible to make no mistakes and still lose, it’s when people get offended about something they are wrong about that creates a tolerance for Pyrrhic victories.

My first job out of college I was hired to follow around an MSP/IT consultant and learn what he did, specifically to cut the expense of having a MCSA/network engineer coming in weekly for basic desktop support.

I met him in the server closet and asked “hey, I’m new here - do you mind if I look over your shoulder?” He turned around and smiled, “if you are here to help, then you should sit down and I’ll walk you through setting up Exchange mailboxes for these doctors.” Before he left, he walked me through a RAM upgrade and gave me his lucky red screwdriver “ you got this, just call me if you have any issues.”

Later in my career, I continue to learn lessons from this interaction; lately the lesson has been one of “don’t be awesome in a vacuum” - a little bit of encouragement to the new guy can go a long way to adding another person to your on-call rotation that you trust.

20 years later, I still have his screwdriver - and I bring it every time we have lunch every once in a while.

Life is too short to not let the people who make life enjoyable for us know so.

Work is work, that’s why they call it work.

That’s funny because I thought they captured it perfectly. Cults can be blissful places; the experience and friends I’ve made amidst the madness I’ve experienced in startups made me stronger in the end.

I rely on rsync because I want to keep critical system-backup tools small and portable without installing anything.

Recovery from addiction became so much more meaningful when you realize that failing at recovery is part of the process.

I was trying to keep a death grip on sobriety. The clenching and clawing while putting up appearances... life brings us sadness. sometimes at times of desperation, the only thing I have left is my reaction.

When I look back on my mistakes, it all feels insane; the pathology of feedback loop neurosis had me chasing tornados with a butterfly net. What would catching it do for me?

Recognize the stillness where you are _right now_ my friend, and we can sit here for awhile and watch those clouds join the others as they roll over the horizon.