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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Hashicorp recently changed the license of Terraform and its other core products from MPL to BSL, restricting commercial use and preventing competitors from offering services based on the code. While this makes business sense for the now-public Hashicorp, it upset many users who saw it as undermining the open source nature of the projects. In response, the OpenTF project was launched to fork Terraform and maintain it under a truly open source license. While Terraform is not as likely to cause vendor lock-in as databases, its dominance as a developer tool could be impacted by this change and emerging alternatives. Interestingly, the video ends by humorously discouraging viewers from supporting the OpenTF project in opposition to Hashicorp’s licensing change.

    Via Kagi universal summarizer




  • Contrary to some misconceptions, these SIMD capabilities did not amount to the processor being “128-bit”, as neither the memory addresses nor the integers themselves were 128-bit, only the shared SIMD/integer registers. For comparison, 128-bit wide registers and SIMD instructions had been present in the 32-bit x86 architecture since 1999, with the introduction of SSE. However the internal data paths were 128bit wide, and its processors were capable of operating on 4x32bit quantities in parallel in single registers.

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  • GPT-4 writes better code than the junior developers on my team. I wish they would use it as a rubber duck, at the least.

    It often requires iteration and asking for certain things (logging, error handling, simplification/maintainability, etc.) but it gets there. I think it would eventually be possible to get AI at a place where it thinks about these things automatically instead of requiring prodding.

    Still doesn’t replace people, but makes them more effective.



  • FWIW, the AI features are not used to provide search results; they are all on-demand and triggered by the user (via Quick Answer, or Universal Summarizer, or the “discuss this site” feature).

    The founder is well aware of the problems with AI and that is taken into account when deciding how to use it in Kagi.

    See this link: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy

    Generative AI is a hot topic, but the technology still has flaws. Critics of AI warn that “[AI] will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge”.

    From an information retrieval point of view, relevant to our context of a search engine, we should acknowledge the two main limitations of the current generation of AI.

    Large language models (LLMs) should not be blindly trusted to provide factual information accurately. They have a significant risk of generating incorrect information or fabricating details (confabulating). This can easily mislead people who are not approaching LLMs pragmatically. (This is a product of auto-regressive nature of these models where the output is predicted one token at a time, and once it strays away from the “correct” path, for which the probablity grows exponentially with the length of the output, it is “doomed” to the end of output, without the ability to plan ahead or correct itself).

    LLMs are not intelligent in the human sense. They have no understanding of the actual physical world. They do not have their own genuine opinions, emotions, or sense of self. We must avoid attributing human-like qualities to these systems or thinking of them as having human-level abilities. They are limited AI technologies. (In a way, they are similar to how a wheel can get us from point A to point B, sometimes much more efficiently than human body can, but it lacks the ability to plan and the agility of human body to get us everywhere a human body can)

    These limitations required us to pause and reflect on the impact on search experience, before incoporating this new technology for our customers. As a result, we came up with an AI integration philosophy that is guided by these principles:

    AI should be used in closed, defined context relevant to search (don’t make a therapist inside the search engine, for example) AI should be used to enhance the search experience, not to create it or replace it (similar to how we use JavaScript in Kagi, where search still works perfectly fine when JS is disabled in the browser) AI should be used to the extent that it enhances our humanity, not diminish it (AI should be used to support users, not replace them)