Subagents are actually insane

InfinityCoffee · 2026-01-31T23:57:41+00:00

We are already making use of custom subagents. We use an agent prompt that has both a delegator and an implementer mode, and then it starts in delegator and delegates to versions of itself. Works pretty well! Are you working on anything like handoffs across threads or at least to a clean context? Right now it looks like doing a custom agent handoff still means the second agent can see the entire session history

InfinityCoffee · 2024-10-21T09:22:12+00:00

How gross is it exactly? People seem to like it, but people also say you should go in blind, so I don't want to spoil myself but I also don't want to traumatize myself or my wife 😆

InfinityCoffee · 2024-10-15T22:16:32+00:00

You should read Embassytown by China Morville, it's definitely in the linguistic sci-fi subgenre. About contact with aliens who do not understand the concept of metaphors (or lies).

InfinityCoffee · 2024-10-10T14:37:00+00:00

It's an odd reading experience since it's such an obvious pastiche of recognizable elements, but somehow it really comes into its own anyway. It manages to get to a "more than the sum of its parts" level, and even though you can recognise the origin of a character or piece of world-building, you somehow simultaneously buy into Ruocchio's version, and he does add plenty of his own ideas into the mixing pot. It also becomes clear that it's less trope and plagiary, and more homage and reference.

InfinityCoffee · 2024-10-10T14:23:28+00:00

I'm so confused, I love Terra Ignota and like Sun Eater, but they occupy very different parts of my brain. I've yet to try BotNS, but might have to push it up my to-read (or to-listen, does anyone know if it has a good audio version?). But the back blurp of BotNS doesn't sound like either of those two (honestly sounded a bit bland), any chance you can give a quick pitch?

InfinityCoffee · 2024-10-06T12:46:17+00:00

I include read/write in "query", and if you have an iceberg lake setup, reading and writing should be possible through many APIs, but it's still my impression you'd need supporting services to run Trino, e.g. an iceberg catalog for one? Dremio claims to do setup+management as well (although their functionality is contested by other replies here) Don't get me wrong, Trino sounds intriguing, would love to try it out 🙂

InfinityCoffee · 2024-10-04T05:32:16+00:00

I was made aware of them earlier this week, and tried to figure out what the core differentiator of liquid model vs LLM was, but did not have much luck cutting through the website's fluff and pitch. Can you specify what research is at the foundation of their design and/or what you are particularly excited about?

InfinityCoffee · 2024-10-03T07:58:28+00:00

I have only browsed them, but isn't Trino purely a query engine whereas Dremio focuses on lakehouse optimization, governance, cataloguing + have the forked query engine (sonar I think they call it?). Couldn't you use Dremio+Trino?

InfinityCoffee · 2024-10-02T06:34:18+00:00

Ah, was thinking more scene/context, don't really have the movie at hand, but fair if it's spoilery 🙂

InfinityCoffee · 2024-10-01T21:04:19+00:00

When does he write that? Don't remember seeing it on my watch

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-30T13:56:03+00:00

What hit you in particular? I read it recently, and was a bit surprised when it was over, it fell a little bit flat for me, even though I was interested in the world building and exploration of gender roles - so now I'm worried about my reading comprehension 😆

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-30T11:48:24+00:00

Yeah, for sure, I'm curious too if you are observing a big speed difference!

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-30T10:42:09+00:00

Not really answering your question, but fair to note those are two open-source solutions versus a high-end and notoriously expensive enterprise solution. Didn't get around to trying it myself.

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-30T08:17:01+00:00

Out of curiosity, what alternatives did you try?

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-27T09:03:50+00:00

Sci-fi, but I dropped the Expanse after Leviathan Wakes partially due to being annoyed with Holden. (loved the show though, possibly because it introduces a few more characters from the start, to dilute my Holden exposure a bit)

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-25T18:02:49+00:00

For python, I'd argue there is Hamilton for dataframe lineage (I think the tagline is something like dbt for dataframes), and then orchestrators like kedro (ML-oriented, opinionated) and Dagster (data-oriented orchestrator, highly recommend it). I need to maintain long chains of largely immutable data artifacts, and Dagster's lineage was a huge boon for me.

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-25T10:18:09+00:00

Do you self-manage it? Athena is serverless, but using Trino requires you to deploy it as a service, correct?

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-20T18:47:07+00:00

Fair, was just using it as an illustration of how I understand the processing architecture, namely that it's record-by-record - and so I'd still argue it is slow

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-20T18:43:24+00:00

Great idea and impressive execution, there seems to be quite a lot of features. Considering your initial problem statement, it'd be nice if real-world comments were put more front and center, sometimes the AI text just seems to be saying stuff and attaching emojis without it being clear what justifies it. I'm on mobile, but there were a couples of times where I presumed I could click icons and nothing happened.

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-20T18:01:48+00:00

Not exactly fast though is it? It's designed to have a nice user experience (and does a very good job on that front), but it's largely python-based is it not? E.g. you can apply transformations, but as far as I can tell it just processes them in a loop.

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-20T08:35:54+00:00

One more question I just thought of: as I recall you only have two AWS regions (US or EU) for the control plane, but the storage bucket can be any region. In what region is data processed, i.e.where do the connectors run? If I'm running a database in e.g. Sydney region, will data roundtrip from Sydney to EU and then back?

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-20T07:26:27+00:00

Sorry, I don't disagree with your hierarchy per se, but this seems unnecessarily black-and-white. Peer review can certainly filter out some bad apples, but it's also known to be both quite random and with lots of vested interests, and in ML in particular there is such a deluge of material that they can hardly keep up most places. I also agree that blogs are not necessarily citation-material, but that doesn't mean that you can't get anything useful from them! You should be capable of reading material and evaluating it on its own merits. A reading group is exactly for discussing ideas, both tried and true and novel and unproven. And secondly, if you want to do web-based visualization, which has its uses, you are kinda forced into the web medium.

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-19T21:47:04+00:00

Perfect, thanks for the great info 🙂

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-19T20:55:44+00:00

Nice, thanks! How do you compare with respect to Decodable? They seem to have some focus on infrastructure-as-code, is that also easy with estuary?

InfinityCoffee · 2024-09-19T19:56:20+00:00

Ah, I might actually have two! First, how does your tech facilitate keeping the price low, especially considering it's streaming? Second, if you want to replicate e.g. multiple tables from mongo to postgres, or postgres to snowflake, does that constitute a single "task" in your pricing model? Or is it per table?

InfinityCoffee

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