Live data from Hacker News

The session you cannot take with you

earendil.com

231–238 of 238 posts

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely is getting quite challenging. That said, a lot of user experiences are modelled around retaining transcripts for longer than a few minutes. Every claw or chat based application creates a very real user experience desire of that conversation being something you can continue, even weeks after when the model might have gone away / have been replaced. Now unless you fully want to commit yourself to one prov…

All the power to you, and I hope Pi will be able to continue its unified layer. However, there is an alternative: model the session fully in the provider native structures, extract only what is needed for harness specific branching, and treat a provider switch as a _migration_ that you apply at the time of the switch. So treat a provider switch as a migration from provider A to B, with custom logic, etc. This is IMO…

This path would only be viable for one or two providers and even does not work within one provider. For instance within OpenAI many of their models do not share the same capabilities. The complex of what you are suggesting is staggering considering the number of providers and models involved.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the economical definition of monopoly. It's not about 1 single actor owning the market but rather about unilateral change. Obviously a single actor owning 99.99% will be able to shape the market ... but also one owning a lot less, e.g. 30% if even if they don't collude with another actor owning e.g. 21%.

what you are describing sounds like an oligopoly not a monopoly. A company cannot realize monopolistic benefits without > 50% control of a market. That's not to say there aren't benefits to a large market share, but they are different and we have different terms for them.

>A company cannot realize monopolistic benefits without > 50% control of a market.

I don't think that's true at all. Why 50% specifically? This is not about political votes or anything like that. It's about being the largest player by a margin, usually.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what are you building, and how? Im working on two side projects and I have to try hard to hit the limit with Claude (like use fable and a deep research task)

Small games. One thing is I have it doing a LOT of visual verification of its results, which uses a lot of tokens. I also tend to throw some huge tasks it can't do yet and watch it burn a zillion tokens, and I usually learn more about where it's limits are and am sometimes happily surprised by its success or partial success. I'll infodump though. I built https://wordpeek.app https://scramble-quest.app and https://pla…

Nice thanks for sharing!

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#234
post #23

BTW the web page uses massive iGPU if you don't have a fast machine.

I came here to complain about something similar, the excessive use of box shadows on both the top and the sides. It made the text horrible to read on mobile, if it not for Firefox's Readability mode.

I saw the weird subtle pattern and first freaked out that my monitor's backlight was failing (high flicker rate revealing LCD refresh patterns). I also was playing a video with the browser in the background and it was choppy, and I first thought it was my video player messing up until I realized the web page had some pointless background animation.

I just tested again and even my cursor gets jump over the page. Amazing they'd do this for such a subtle, useless effect.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what you are describing sounds like an oligopoly not a monopoly. A company cannot realize monopolistic benefits without > 50% control of a market. That's not to say there aren't benefits to a large market share, but they are different and we have different terms for them.

US law sets the breakpoint for when a company is considered a monopoly at 30% of a market. It's never actually enforced, of course, but may be worth noting.

[what does the ftc say about it?](https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...)

    Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are features that only work with session transparency / ownership? e.g. - with model XYZ and their open reasoning token we are able to improve our skill ABC by 20% - cross checking between models improves results by 10% and is only possible with full context visibility

> What are features that only work with session transparency / ownership? That's sort of the thing: very little (beyond switching models and providers). Obviously what you lose is a convenient way to run analytics over your own sessions if more and more information is not revealed to you, but before encrypted prompts that wasn't that much of an issue anyways.

But analytics is not a convenience. Just take audits.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#237
post #202
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they could store the reading traces and validate the user hasn’t edited them server-side? They could sign reasoning traces so they can’t be counterfeited?

both openai and anthropic actually do this and let you as a harness store only the encrypted contents of thinking traces to be passed again on further turns but they only have the key to unencrypt it so its jibberish for final users https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/responses_ap...

yeah the article says that. but parent talked about just signing it, idk if it's still really moveable then either though...

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#238

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…

I've never considered the conversation and reasoning to be more than transient. If you want to carry forward a session, you must produce a context artifact.

IMO this is like wanting to dump the intermediate state of an LLVM compilation and expecting to reliably resume it across platforms.

Post reply on HN