I had to do a refund on an Amazon order lost in shipment, and the AI-powered flow before you can speak to an agent is so bizarrely incomprehensible that if I were a cynical man I’d assume it was intentional.
@patio11
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Map/Reduce with Actual Maps: CS Perspective
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My CS brain can’t help but say that this is map/reduce with actual maps involved.
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Scaling non-scalable solutions: paradox or necessity?
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Not for the first time, by the way, is “How do you do a thing that doesn’t scale?” answered by “Scale it.”
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LLMs Achieve Seven-Year-Old Planning and Execution Abilities
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Non-ironically an important milestone for LLMs: can demonstrate at least as much planning and execution ability as a human seven year old. https://t.co/yiYunaTCSE
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) 3 mai 2025Non-ironically an important milestone for LLMs: can demonstrate at least as much planning and execution ability as a human seven year old.
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Chain of Thought: How LLMs Think Recursively and Invoke Tools
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Nope, it’s a thing called “chain of thought” where the LLM basically recursively invokes itself and outside tools to e.g. think up search terms, get results back, read them, not find it, back to the tank to think of new search terms, another tool invocation, etc.
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LLMs Will Entirely Replace Search Functionality
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LLMs are going to entirely eat that search, FWIW. (To my great edification, as I do that constantly for written and audio artifacts.)
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Japanese Bureaucracy Status and Talent Selection Impact
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The Japanese government is extremely capable of awarding status to bureaucrats, and historically that gets a lot of Japan's best to select into joining the bureaucracy. Whether that has broadly positive results is a complex topic that I am someone constrained from discussing.
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Civil Service Incentives and Policy Implementation Failures
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And so our civil service races down an incentive gradient to avoid getting in the paper and avoid the ire of elected officials, who have their own incentive gradient isolating them from policies which they pass.
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Government Lacks Reward Pathways for Innovation Success
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But we have basically no pathway for rewarding success. Mikey mentions that if you invent Gmail you end up taking home an eight figure award. Not only can we not do that in government (our own choice, to be clear), we can't even seem to award status for success.
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Civil Service Accountability and Project Management Failures
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You won't be fired as a civil servant, and won't suffer any consequence at all really, if your project is over budget, doesn't achieve goals, and arrives years late. All of that is par for the course; we wouldn't have a civil service left if there were actually consequences.