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The session you cannot take with you

earendil.com

21–30 of 238 posts

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#21
post #16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because with the alternative they'll require you to "confirm your e-mail" instead of just picking a password

I'm actually more annoyed by having to pick passwords than confirming my email.

Picking passwords is a job best left to password managers. You don't use a hand crank when riding an elevator, do you?

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#22

This is an important article. I hadn’t realized it was already getting this bad. Like a frog enjoying a nice warm bath ... > Most people do not switch their operating system or phone provider every week either. But even if you do not utilize that freedom, it matters because it changes the relationship you have with the provider and the provider has with you. This is why it’s important to utilize your freedoms. Do NOT…

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

This is the way.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#24
post #10

This is an important article. I hadn’t realized it was already getting this bad. Like a frog enjoying a nice warm bath ... > Most people do not switch their operating system or phone provider every week either. But even if you do not utilize that freedom, it matters because it changes the relationship you have with the provider and the provider has with you. This is why it’s important to utilize your freedoms. Do NOT…

And yet people still go with Sign in with Google as the only login method.

I’ve actually started ignoring services where that’s the only login possibility.

Sorry even if your platform is the greatest thing ever, but I’ll find a different tool. I’ve read one too many stories about Google (or Apple!) closing the entire account over some bullshit unnecessary reason like “fraudulent” gift card issues or whatever. I’m certain the affected people would’ve preferred to just pay back the amount in question instead of losing their entire Google Drive, or their 20 years of iCloud Photos or whatever.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#25

This is an important article. I hadn’t realized it was already getting this bad. Like a frog enjoying a nice warm bath ... > Most people do not switch their operating system or phone provider every week either. But even if you do not utilize that freedom, it matters because it changes the relationship you have with the provider and the provider has with you. This is why it’s important to utilize your freedoms. Do NOT…

>Like a frog enjoying a nice warm bath...

Exactly :-)

Call me naive but I think dark patterns are a short term strategy for winning and I'm optimistic that in the long run they will be replaced with those that are more respectful and oriented to the greater good (granted, the long run might take more time than one hopes for).

Given that the pendulum can sometime swing back fast enough to be able leverage it, it might be a good time to focus on models that are both open weights and economically viable to run to build the next great thing.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#26
I think the article gives a very good overview of a problem that most users of AI rarely evaluate / have to grapple with.

There really is a surprising amount of coupling that happens with many of the "frontier inference providers", where a lot of the powerful non-LLM extensions (web search, code execution) are packaged as simple "tools" on the surface, that build up a lot of moat. Those are parts that are in theory nicely separable from the inference API, and could be externalized via MCP servers, but are usually not offered as such by the inference providers themselves, and are often only available in a slightly less powerful variant from other providers.

We've faced that issue repeatedly while building a on-premise provider-agnostic Chat UI & platform[0], where even adding something as simple as an in-chat image generation tool for the end-users (which is just a build-in tool in the OpenAI Responses API), becomes a bit of an ordeal (though part of that is due to the MCP spec missing a native file transfer protocol as of today[1]).

I am quite hopeful though, as with recent shifts of interest towards open weight models, there will be more opportunities for companies offering alternative implementations in a easier plug-and-play manner.

[0]: https://github.com/EratoLab/erato

[1]: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol...

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#28
OpenAI has been nudging their users toward the Responses API lately. Chat completion can still do everything if you are clever. The obvious reason to push everyone into the Responses API is that the reasoning process can be locked down and encrypted. The semantics of the chat completion API are fundamentally transparent. 100% of the tokens are visible.

If you have patience and the willingness to endure a little bit of pain, you can still retain autonomy over the entire reasoning process while using the latest 5.6 model family. The only downside is that you are now fully responsible for it.

Consider that when you flip your agent's reasoning level to "xhigh" or whatever, it's not some magical model internals being pushed around. There isn't an actual "try harder" knob on the black box. This is merely orchestration of many instances of one or more model types based upon some proprietary harness logic. The chances you can develop a domain specific reasoning process that outperforms the frontier providers is still very good.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#29
post #10

This is an important article. I hadn’t realized it was already getting this bad. Like a frog enjoying a nice warm bath ... > Most people do not switch their operating system or phone provider every week either. But even if you do not utilize that freedom, it matters because it changes the relationship you have with the provider and the provider has with you. This is why it’s important to utilize your freedoms. Do NOT…

And yet people still go with Sign in with Google as the only login method.

I am guessing that's because Sign in with Google is the least of the evil, as compared to other popular OAuth Sign-in options like Facebook, X...

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#30

It's one thing that the APIs don't return the reasoning tokens in a readable fashion. But then why do I have to send them the whole conversation every time? If they don't allow me to see parts of the conversation then they should have the burden of storing and transmitting it, and shouldn't charge more and more the longer the conversation gets (unless opaque token caching kicks in) like some LLM Shlemil the painter.

Because if you don't, you trash the KV cache and things get way more expensive. We wrote about it here: https://earendil.com/posts/prompt-caching/

Encrypted reasoning content is one of the things we keep as blobs in the transcript, even though we can only send it back to the original provider that created them, as otherwise we cannot keep caches live.

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