91–100 of 179 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compile times, I can live with. You can run previous models on the gpu while your new model is compiling. Or switch from cargo to bazel if it is that bad.
What compile times do you work with? I use bazel and it still hurts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big benefit of letting agents run code is they can process data without bloating their context. LLMs are really good at writing python for data processing. I would suspect its due to Python having a really good ecosystem around this niche And the type safety/security issues can hopefully be mitigated by ty and pyodide (already used by cf’s python workers) https://pyodide.org/en/stable/ https://github.com/astral-sh/…
(Pydantic AI lead here) That’s exactly what we built this for: we’re implementing Code Mode in https://github.com/pydantic/pydantic-ai/pull/4153 which will use Monty by default, with abstractions to use other runtimes / sandboxes. Monty’s overhead is so low that, assuming we get the security / capabilities tradeoff right (Samuel can comment on this more), you could always have it enabled on your agents with basically…
You guys and astral are my favorite groups in the python ecosystem
This feels like the time I was a Mercurial user before I moved to Git. Everyone was using git for reasons to me that seemed bandwagon-y, when Mercurial just had such a better UX and mental model to me. Now, everyone is writing agent `exec`s in Python, when I think TypeScript/JS is far better suited for the job (it was always fast + secure, not to mention more reliable and information dense b/c of typing). But I think…
1. Large built-in standard library (CSV, sqlite3, xml/json, zipfile).
2. In Python, whatever the LLM is likely to do will probably work. In JS, you have the Node / Deno split, far too many libraries that do the same thing (XMLHTTPRequest / Axios / fetch), many mutually-incompatible import syntaxes (E.G. compare tsx versus Node's native ts execution), and features like top-level await (very important for small scripts, and something that an LLM is likely to use!), which only work if you pray three times on the day of the full moon.
3. Much better ecosystem for data processing (particularly csv/pandas), partially resulting from operator overloading being a thing.
This feels like the time I was a Mercurial user before I moved to Git. Everyone was using git for reasons to me that seemed bandwagon-y, when Mercurial just had such a better UX and mental model to me. Now, everyone is writing agent `exec`s in Python, when I think TypeScript/JS is far better suited for the job (it was always fast + secure, not to mention more reliable and information dense b/c of typing). But I think…
Python has the advantage that everybody sort of knows it is bad and slow, which is an important trait for a glue language. This increases the incentive to do the right thing: call a library written in C or Fortran or something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's been a constant stream of v8 VM sandbox escape discoveries since its dawn of course. Considering those have mostly existed for a long time before publication it's very porous most of the time. And Python VM had/has its sandboxing features too, previously rexec and still https://github.com/zopefoundation/RestrictedPython - in the same category I'd argue. Then there's of course hypervisor based virtualization a…
part of why rexec is "historical" is that Guido was looking at some lockdown work and asked (twitter, probably?) the community to come up with attack ideas (on a specific more-locked-down-than-default proposed version.) After a couple of hours, it was clear that "patching the problems" was entirely doomed given how flexible python is and it was better to do something else entirely and stop pretending...
This feels like the time I was a Mercurial user before I moved to Git. Everyone was using git for reasons to me that seemed bandwagon-y, when Mercurial just had such a better UX and mental model to me. Now, everyone is writing agent `exec`s in Python, when I think TypeScript/JS is far better suited for the job (it was always fast + secure, not to mention more reliable and information dense b/c of typing). But I think…
Having been doing Python for over a decade and JavaScript. I would pick Python any day of the week over JavaScript. JavaScript is beautiful, and also the most horrific programming language all at once. It still feels incomplete, there's too many oddities I've run into over the years, like checking for null, empty, undefined values is inconsistent all around because different libraries behave differently.
Such changes take time, and I favor an "evolution trumps revolution"-approach for such features. The JS/TS ecosystem has the advantage here, as it has already been going through its roughest time since es2015. In hindsight, it was a very healthy choice and the type system with TS is something to be left desired in many programming languages.
If it weren't for its rich standard library and uv, I would still clearly favor TS and a runtime like bun or deno. Python still suffers from spread out global state and some multi-paradigm approach when it comes to concurrency (if concurrency has even been considered by the library author). Python being the first programming language for many scientists shows its toll too: rich libraries of dubious quality in various domains. Whereas JS' origins in browser scripting contributed to the convention to treat global state as something to be frowned upon.
I wish both systems would have good object schema validation build into the standard library. Python has the upper hand here with dataclasses, but it still follows some "take it or throw"-approach, rather than to support customization for validations.
This feels like the time I was a Mercurial user before I moved to Git. Everyone was using git for reasons to me that seemed bandwagon-y, when Mercurial just had such a better UX and mental model to me. Now, everyone is writing agent `exec`s in Python, when I think TypeScript/JS is far better suited for the job (it was always fast + secure, not to mention more reliable and information dense b/c of typing). But I think…
3 reasons why Python is much better than JS for this IMO. 1. Large built-in standard library (CSV, sqlite3, xml/json, zipfile). 2. In Python, whatever the LLM is likely to do will probably work. In JS, you have the Node / Deno split, far too many libraries that do the same thing (XMLHTTPRequest / Axios / fetch), many mutually-incompatible import syntaxes (E.G. compare tsx versus Node's native ts execution), and featu…
You do? Deno is maybe a single digit percentage of the market, just hyped tremendously.
> E.G. compare tsx versus Node's native ts execution
JSX/TSX, despite what React people might want you to believe, are not part of the language.
> which only work if you pray three times on the day of the full moon.
It only doesn't work in some contexts due to legacy reasons. Otherwise it's just elaborate syntax sugar for `Promise`.