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The session you cannot take with you

earendil.com

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Re: The session you cannot take with you

#81

Post by noduerme »

mike_hearn wrote: post #68
dd8601fn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s odd, I just saw my first one of these today. Some former Figma person linked an AI site comp designer. I was going to give it a shot, but the only choice was a Google login. So very weird.

It's not that weird. Building a modern accounts system is a lot of work and people don't like creating new accounts. So it's the path of least resistance for developers and users.

It's not even that it's hard to build a modern account system. It's that if you put your site behind a private / custom account system, and you post a link to it on HN (for example), everyone and their mother complains that it's requiring an email address and password. But if you put the same site behind a Google auth, most people wouldn't think twice to click the button.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#83

Post by gb2d_hn »

solarkraft wrote: post #9

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…

It was with the transience of valuable agent session dialogue in mind that I built https://www.agentkanban.io - A key feature is context capture in the tasks which you create on the board and then progress in agent sessions. Supported agents are currently Claude and Github CoPilot in VS Code. All of your context is captured in the task and can be reloaded into new agent sessions at any point in the future. Tool use is intentionally discarded because it is proprietary in nature and therefore breaks the promise of session portability.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#85

Post by pcthrowaway »

blauditore wrote: post #56
placebo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> [...] 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 This is definitely not the way most software has been going in the past decades. It's rather the opposite: Companies play friendly to obtain a user base, then start applying more and more dark patters to further increase their pr…

Also, see Android and iOS which have a monopoly on the mobile OS market

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#86

Post by pcthrowaway »

wwind123 wrote: post #29
agilek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Google is more evil than X or Meta by some assessments

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#87

Post by lukebuehler »

I think there are two things going on more generally:

1) providers increasingly adding hidden state that the user or developer cannot inspect, port, or do anything with. This is clearly bad.

2) providers increasingly diverging how they implement certain features and the APIs becoming quite complicated and provider specific.

The former makes porting sessions or transcripts impossible, the latter just more difficult.

IMO, it is fine and expected that provider APIs are starting to diverge and adding features that cannot be easily ported between providers. The time where the OAI completions API functioned as a universal standard is coming to an end. For example, I generally prefer the new responses API (minus the closed/hidden stuff).

The problem is that many product, library, and SDK authors are still pursuing the "unified abstraction across all model providers" ideal. Just stop doing that, and at least #2 is fine. You can still port parts of the session, but not everything.

I mean just think how difficult it is to add a unified abstraction across, say, databases: some products can do it, but the abstraction is still often leaky. Hence, we've come to accept that our data store layer is often quite technology/provider specific. It will be the same with model providers.

(edit: intro sentence)

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#88

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

lukebuehler wrote: post #87

I think there are two things going on more generally: 1) providers increasingly adding hidden state that the user or developer cannot inspect, port, or do anything with. This is clearly bad. 2) providers increasingly diverging how they implement certain features and the APIs becoming quite complicated and provider specific. The former makes porting sessions or transcripts impossible, the latter just more difficult. I…

> providers increasingly diverging how they implement certain features and the APIs becoming quite complicated and provider specific

This post only talks about the former.

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#89

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

fypanto wrote: post #82

This is exactly what I'm working on. Very rough yet but it's progressing nicely. https://github.com/pantoniou/fyai The idea is that your session data are what's important, and what you need to keep yourself, using a model similar to git.

This doesn't (and cannot) solve what the post is talking about

Re: The session you cannot take with you

#90

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

steilpass wrote: post #59
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were thinking about it while writing it. I think one thing at least open source harnesses can do is push back on using some of these conveniences from the providers. For instance the moment we start compromising on the idea of portable sessions, then there will be less pressure (For instance people asked for OpenAI server side compaction or built-in native web_search support). The real thing that will take this al…

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.

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