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philipodonnell

1,520 karma · joined July 22, 2015

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philipodonnell··on The last time my family was replaced by technology
I don’t know, somehow the pace seems different, these transitions felt more like the last generation retiring, and the next generation doing something different, instead of it happening to everyone at the same time.
philipodonnell··on Ollaya – Ollama for open-source, Jev-style decision models
What the best way to see how a homegrown version compares?
philipodonnell··on Markdown in /src
I think these are different things. The source code, it’s tests, it’s documentation, it’s data. They are different perspectives to approach a given body of work while together building an overall understanding. It doesn’t matter at all where the files live but when you approach the work from that perspective you know how to find it, and I don’t think next to the source but away from the others is a good combination.
philipodonnell··on Do not fear AI. Fear AI companies
This landed for me. I wonder though if we aren’t giving a pass to the companies who pay the AI companies to replace their employees.
philipodonnell··on DAG Workflow Engine
This particular example aside, I don’t think it being derivative and simplified is necessarily bad. Libraries that are popular today were written for humans and reinforced by LLMs via training. It’s unlikely they represent the ideal interaction surface for an agent.

There was a study recently that LLms prefer resumes written by LLMs rather than by humans. Stands to reason they would prefer apis written by LLMs.

This is probably the early days of such intentionally simplified agentic semantic primitives like “DAG Workflow” where the answer for why not Temporal is that LLMs prefer different things than humans.

philipodonnell··on Show HN: Sup AI, a confidence-weighted ensemble (52.15% on Humanity's Last Exam)
Is the difficulty that in high entropy situations, you can’t really tell whether it’s because the model is uncertain, or because of the options are so semantically similar that it doesn’t matter which one you choose? Like pure synonyms.
philipodonnell··on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI
Despite being a different kind of writing, there are some interesting parallels with the article in what you wrote here
philipodonnell··on Many Small Queries Are Efficient in SQLite
I’ve been experimenting with LiveStoreJS which uses a custom SQLite WASM binary for event sync, so for simplicity I’ve also used it for regular application data in browser and found no issues (yet). It surprised me that using a full database engine in memory could perform well vs native JS objects at scale but perhaps at scale is when it starts to shine. Just be wary of size limits beyond 16-20mb.
philipodonnell··on Composing APIs and CLIs in the LLM era
Of all the interface modalities available, CLIs seem like the most natural for copilots to work with. Lots of examples in the training data, universal interface for help, maps well to the sequential nature of token generation, similar syntax for different OSs… I can see them replacing skills and MCP et al from the model’s perspective.
philipodonnell··on A lawsuit says Workday's AI shut out applicants over 40
How do they prove this? It sounds like the plaintiffs basically claimed they were rejected a bunch of times and since the resume had recognizable indicators of protected classes they must have been discriminated against?

Don’t get me wrong, I do this work, and Workdays statement of “we don’t use protected classes” instead of “we test our models to prove they are unbiased when given recognizable indicators of protected classes” is pretty telling. Because it’s hard and if you solved it you would be proud. If you don’t control for it it WILL discriminate. See Amazon’s experiment a decade ago.

I’m just really curious how all this plays out in front of a judge.

philipodonnell··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
You should just need the AGENTS.md right?
philipodonnell··on 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
Anyone have a link to the actual report?
philipodonnell··on Show HN: Move to dodge the bullets. How long can you survive?
This is a great use case for using an algorithmic difficulty ramp where it can really dial in that curve to solve for getting people to play longer over multiple sessions.
philipodonnell··on Building agents using streaming SQL queries
I’ve built lots of pre-LLM data processing pipelines like this and the more I read people putting “agents” into this kind of context the less they resemble agents like the Anthropics of the world defines and the more they just resemble functions. I wonder if eventually there won’t be a distinction and it’ll just be a way to make processing and branching nodes in a pipeline less deterministic when you need more flexibility than pure code-rules can give you.
philipodonnell··on Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally
Isn’t this an arbitrage opportunity? Offer to pay a fraction of the cost per token but accept that your tokens will only be processed when the batch window isn’t big enough, then resell that for a markup to people who need non-time sensitive inference?
philipodonnell··on Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?
What kind of customers are using this API? I’ve had many similar thoughts but I get hung up on the idea that customers are “developers” from a marketing standpoint, because those developers are developing something and that something is probably a bigger driver of utility that a truly generically developer tool like Cursor.
philipodonnell··on In the US, a rotating detonation rocket engine takes flight
If I’m understanding this correctly, if you set off one bomb the explosion travels at a certain speed, but if you put a bunch of bombs in a circle and set them off one at a time, the very last explosion will be going a lot faster than the first one?
philipodonnell··on Evolving OpenAI's Structure
The contributors to the charity get a write off too
philipodonnell··on Emergent Misalignment: Narrow Finetuning Can Produce Broadly Misaligned LLMs
There’s a trope where the best white hat is a former black hat because they can recognize all the tricks, I wonder if training an LLM to be evil and then fine tuning it to be good will produce more secure code than the opposite?
philipodonnell··on The future of AI is Ruby on Rails
FWIW I’ve been doing a lot of work with text to SQL and in that space verbosity in naming tables and columns matters a lot because it adds additional context about what data is in the table and how it can be used. Think “subs.id” versus “subscriptions.stripe_customer_id”.
philipodonnell··on Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies
Very cool! What did you use to make the ER diagram?
philipodonnell··on Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges
Hi. Maybe anecdotal, Brother MDC-J480DW, had it about 3 years, always bought third party ink, two weeks ago I had to replace the color ones and it started saying there was no ink even though ink was clearly visible, it failed on two different colors from two different sources, and the three different black cartridges, then bought legit from Walmart and worked perfectly. I can’t speak for everyone’s experience, but mine was definitely changed recently to always say third party ink was empty, and I’ll junk it once this ink runs out.
philipodonnell··on Leadership Power Tools: SQL and Statistics
I’ve been working on some tooling to create better views of analytics based on the idea that people don’t like to write joins so why not create logical views that do all possible joins. Appreciate any feedback. https://github.com/eloquentanalytics/pyeloquent
philipodonnell··on Leadership Power Tools: SQL and Statistics
I think a lot of times this is not about skill sets but more that data engineers don’t build datasets with UX in mind. The examples in this piece are not what show up when a leader browses a real database with hundreds of tables stuffed with abbreviations and numeric/short codes. If you want your leaders to use your data, you have to design your data to be used by leaders, not teach them SQL and statistics.
philipodonnell··on SpiceNice – An Open Source Spice Database
I often wonder if you can create databases like this using the data in the training datasets of LLMs. Generate the list of spices by asking for categories, countries of origin, etc and then asking about a list of properties for each. You could use these kinds of Wikipedia lists as a validation mechanic.
philipodonnell··on Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
Enhancing the comments on the existing data model seems to be the most common approach for sure. I'm implementing this as a data architecture at several clients and I've found creating a whole new logical structure designed for the LLM is really effective. Not being bound by the original data model lets you solve several problems related to the "n-hops" question, avoiding needing the comments, and the semantics of how data engineers define columns. Some more details here [1], but obviously you can implement this totally yourself by hand.

[1] (https://github.com/eloquentanalytics/pyeloquent/blob/main/RE...)

philipodonnell··on Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
I’ve been doing a lot of work on semantic data architecture that better supports LLM analytics, did you use any framework or methodology to decide how exactly to present the data/metadata to the LLM context to allow it to make decisions?
philipodonnell··on Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale
This thread was wild.
philipodonnell··on Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI
Is OpenAI as a company more like a publisher or a model?
philipodonnell··on Show HN: PRQL in PostgreSQL
I often wonder if NL-SQL tasks would benefit from an intermediate query language that is more compatible with the next-logical token approach that is used to generate the code. Obviously there is less of this in the training set, but if it transpires in a testable way, you could generate training data yourself from known good sql queries? Are there any languages that have been designed specifically for this?
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