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Schedule tasks on the web

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Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#141

Post by embedding-shape »

aspenmartin wrote: post #135
jwpapi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t see it coming. I was full on that camp 3 months ago, but I just realize every step makes more mistakes. It leads into a deadlock and when no human has the mental model anymore. Don’t you guys have hard business problems where AI just cant solve it or just very slowly and it’s presenting you 17 ideas till it found the right one. I’m using the most expensive models. I think the nature of AI might block tha…

I think this sounds like a true yet short sighted take. Keep in mind these features are immature but they exist to obtain a flywheel and corner the market. I don’t know why but people seem to consistently miss two points and their implications - performance is continuing to increase incredibly quickly, even if you rightfully don’t trust a particular evaluation. Scaling laws like chinchilla and RL scaling laws (both t…

> - coding is a verifiable domain

You're missing the point though. "1 + 1" vs "one.add(1)" might both be "passable" and correct, but it's missing the forest for the trees, how do you know which one is "long-term the right choice, given what we know?", which is the engineering part of building software, and less about "coding" which tends to be the easy part.

How do you evaluate, score and/or benchmark something like that? Currently, I don't think we have any methodologies for this, probably because it's pretty subjective in the end. That's where the "creative" parts of software engineering becomes more important, and it's also way harder to verify.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#142

Post by [deleted] »

hirako2000 wrote: post #132

Oh my, did Anthropic invent Cron jobs as a service? It's a game changer. Edit: my mistake. It's inferior to a Cron job. If my repos happen to be self hosted with Forgejo or codeberg, then it won't even work. If I concede to use GitHub though I don't have to set up any env variables. Schedules lock-in, all over the web.

[deleted]

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#143

Post by PurpleRamen »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67
monkeydust wrote: post #64

I do feel people will end up using this for things where a deterministic rule could be used - more effective, faster and cheaper. See this starting to happen at work...'We need AI to solve X....no you don't"

Maybe. The problem of "execute task on a cron" is something I've noticed the industry seems to refuse to solve in general, as if intentionally denying this capability for regular people. Even without AI, it's the most basic block of automation, and is always mysteriously absent from programs and frameworks (at least at the basic level). AI only makes it more useful on "then" side, but reliable cron on "if" side is al…

Most of the industry today is educated to avoid manual hacky solutions on single servers. You need to have fancy UI, frameworks with easy feedback and layers on top of layers who maintain other layers. Cron is an ancient tool with arcane syntax which offer barely anything out of the box, you have to know it and work it to get something out of it.

And there is also the mindset to avoid boring loops, and prefer event driven solutions for optimal resource-usage. So people also have a kind of blind spot for this functionality.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#144

Post by talkin »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #136
hirako2000 wrote: post #132

Oh my, did Anthropic invent Cron jobs as a service? It's a game changer. Edit: my mistake. It's inferior to a Cron job. If my repos happen to be self hosted with Forgejo or codeberg, then it won't even work. If I concede to use GitHub though I don't have to set up any env variables. Schedules lock-in, all over the web.

You jest, but for some reason the industry stubbornly refuses to solve the "cron job as a service" problem for end-users, whether on the web or in the OS. I feel this is rooted in problems that extend beyond computing. Regular people are not allowed to automate things in their life. Consider that for most people, the only devices designed to allow unattended execution off a timer are a washing machine, some ovens and…

> for some reason the industry stubbornly refuses to solve the "cron job as a service" problem for end-users, whether on the web or in the OS.

Such a service will always be destroyed by the bell-ends who want to run spam or worse activities.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#145

Post by aspenmartin »

embedding-shape wrote: post #141
aspenmartin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this sounds like a true yet short sighted take. Keep in mind these features are immature but they exist to obtain a flywheel and corner the market. I don’t know why but people seem to consistently miss two points and their implications - performance is continuing to increase incredibly quickly, even if you rightfully don’t trust a particular evaluation. Scaling laws like chinchilla and RL scaling laws (both t…

> - coding is a verifiable domain You're missing the point though. "1 + 1" vs "one.add(1)" might both be "passable" and correct, but it's missing the forest for the trees, how do you know which one is "long-term the right choice, given what we know?", which is the engineering part of building software, and less about "coding" which tends to be the easy part. How do you evaluate, score and/or benchmark something like…

because it has business context and better reasoning, and can ask humans for clarification and take direction.

You don't need to benchmark this, although it's important. We have clear scaling laws on true statistical performance that is monotonically related to any notion of what performance means.

I do benchmarks for a living and can attest: benchmarks are bad, but it doesn't matter for the point I'm trying to make.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#146

Post by WJW »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #136
hirako2000 wrote: post #132

Oh my, did Anthropic invent Cron jobs as a service? It's a game changer. Edit: my mistake. It's inferior to a Cron job. If my repos happen to be self hosted with Forgejo or codeberg, then it won't even work. If I concede to use GitHub though I don't have to set up any env variables. Schedules lock-in, all over the web.

You jest, but for some reason the industry stubbornly refuses to solve the "cron job as a service" problem for end-users, whether on the web or in the OS. I feel this is rooted in problems that extend beyond computing. Regular people are not allowed to automate things in their life. Consider that for most people, the only devices designed to allow unattended execution off a timer are a washing machine, some ovens and…

What is wrong with things like the Zapier scheduler? (ie https://zapier.com/apps/schedule/integrations) For running locally, there's also a plethora of cronlikes for every OS under the sun.

I think the core problem is not so much that it is not "allowed", but that even the most basic types of automation involves programming. I mean "programming" here in the abstract sense of "methodically breaking up a problem into smaller steps and control flows". Many people are not interested in learning to automate things, or are only interested until they learn that it will involve having to learn new things.

There is no secret conspiracy stopping people from learning to automate things, rather I think it's quite the opposite: many forces in society are trying to push people to automate more and more, but most are simply not interested in learning to do so. See for example the bazillion different "learn to code" programs.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#147

Post by aspenmartin »

nprateem wrote: post #139
aspenmartin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this sounds like a true yet short sighted take. Keep in mind these features are immature but they exist to obtain a flywheel and corner the market. I don’t know why but people seem to consistently miss two points and their implications - performance is continuing to increase incredibly quickly, even if you rightfully don’t trust a particular evaluation. Scaling laws like chinchilla and RL scaling laws (both t…

But the issue isn't coding, it's doing the right thing. I don't see anywhere in your plan some way of staying aligned to core business strategy, forethought, etc. The number of devs will reduce but there will still be large activities that can't be farmed out without an overall strategy

Why do you think this is a problem? Reasoning is constantly improving, it has ample access to humans to gather more business context, it has access to the same industry data and other signals that humans do, and it can get any data necessary. It has Zoom meeting notes, I mean why do people think there's somehow a fundamental limit beyond coding?

The other thing you're missing here is generalizability. Better coding performance (which is verifiable and not limited by human data quality) generalizes performance on other benchmarks. This is a long known phenomenon.

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#149

Post by brianjking »

girvo wrote: post #107
gowthamgts12 wrote: post #5

interesting to see feature launches are coming via official website while usage restrictions are coming in with a team member's twitter account - https://x.com/trq212/status/2037254607001559305 . also, someone rightly predicted this rugpull coming in when they announced 2x usage - https://x.com/Pranit/status/2033043924294439147

Funnily, Anthropic's pricing etc. why I'm using GLM-5 a bunch more outside of work. Definitely not Opus level, but surprisingly decent. Though I got lucky and got the Alibaba Coding Model lite plan, which is so cheap they got rid of it

Does GLM-5 have multimodality or are they still wanting you to load an MCP for vision support?

Re: Schedule tasks on the web

#150

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #98
9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t recall if IFTTT had/has a basic cron or not, but it sure has/had put a lot of basic automations in the hands of the general public. Same for Apple Shortcuts, to some extent, or Zapier.

This is a larger topic that's worthy of a comparably large rant, which I really don't want to do right now, but to keep it short, in my subjective view: - IFTTT was great when it started; at some point, it became... weird, in a "I don't even know what's going on on my screen, is this a poster or an app" kind of way. - Zapier is an unpenetrable mess, evidently targets marketers and other business users; discovery is h…

Similarly short on reply here, but quickly: IFTTT: hah, I agree. It was awesome when it was more about IoT than Spotify to Google Sheets.

And re: Zapier: yes, that’s the key to Zapier, from my experience: usage in marketing and the “power user” base.

Re: shortcuts: (I live in the Apple ecosystem) Shortcuts + AppleScript is gold on macOS. Shortcuts + iOS is about to be game changing - it already changed the game, it’s just nobody has been playing it, because it’s not “fun”.

After Siri+Gemini+Shortcuts, everyone will be playing it, I suspect, even on Android, it will get built somehow.

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