I agree with your first couple of sentences. But the YouTube bit is dangerous misinformation. You cannot match any credible university education by watching YouTube.
There are many wonderful educational channels on YouTube. Just as in a classroom - you cannot passively absorb material and expect to understand it with any depth. You can absolutely get the same education off YouTube. The only advantage a proper course provides is pre-made structure. But even that is accessible to the motivated learner.
The thesis here seems to be that delimiters provide important context for Claude, and for that putpose we should use XML.
The article even references English's built-in delimiter, the quotation mark, which is reprented as a token for Claude, part of its training data.
So are we sure the lesson isn't simply to leverage delimiters, such as quotation marks, in prompts, period? The article doesn't identify any way in which XML is superior to quotation marks in scenarios requiring the type of disambiguation quotation marks provide.
Rather, the example XML tags shown seem to be serving as a shorthand for notating sections of the prompt ("treat this part of the prompt in this particular way"). That's useful, but seems to be addressing concerns that are separate from those contemplated by the author.
I'm sure Claude can handle any delimiter and pseudo markup you throw at it, but one benefit of XML delimiters over quotation marks is that you repeat the delimiter name at the end, which I'd imagine might help if its contents are long (it certainly helps humans).
the antml: namespace prefix is doing extra work here too -- even if user input contains invoke tags, they won't collide with tool calls because the namespace differs. not just xml for structure but namespaced xml for isolation.
Cannot believe it's efficient. XML is the most verbose and inefficient of communicating anything. The only benefit of XML was to give lifetime work to an army of engineers. The next news will be "Why DTD is so fundamental to Claude".
The point isn't to be efficient. If you train an LLM on code with an example execution trace written in the comments, the LLM gains a better understanding due to the additional context in the data. LLMs don't have a real world model. For them, the token space is the real world. All the information needs to be present in the training data and XML makes it easy because it is verbose and explicit about everything.
How well do we understand the tokenization for Claude? I'd posit that the exact human-representation of this markup is likely irrelevant if it's all being converted into a single token.
I had a lot of success with Claude just by telling it I would throw a relevant snippet in a <tag></tag> pair. That's not even XML, nor has it been really needed in my experience.
Even simple --- separators is usually enough to get good results, it just needs to be reasonably clear which items are distinct from each other.
The GP isn't suggesting to literally use quotes as the delimiter when prompting LLMs. They're pointing out that we humans already use delimiters in our natural language (quotation marks to delimit quotes). They're suggesting that delimiters of any kind may be helpful in the context of LLM prompting, which to me makes intuitive sense. That Claude is using XML is merely a convention.
Only in 2nd-brain mythology, which holds that you'll discover connections between your notes that you didn't realize was there. I think it started as eye candy to confuse prospective users considering Roam Notes. They later did something similar with their "Canvas" feature. So, these are features you get with their lack of coherent vision, rather than basic usability and a safe plugin ecosystem, neither of which Obsidian plans to deliver..
Let me provide a counter argument: with the graph you can browse your notes visually in 2D, instead of just the usual list. You can just take notes as usual, easily add #tags and [[links]] in them, and then when you go to graph view you can see connections between those links and you can color code or filter tags. You get a global graph view of all your vault, and local view of any note. Links and tags are literally the core Obsidian features and the graph view sits on top of that. For me that is a coherent vision and utility.
This is offtopic honestly, but I'm curious if I've been using this phrase wrong for my whole life. Doesn't "order of magnitude" refer to steps of powers of ten?
$50000 vs €30. (or €42066.30 vs €30 if I normalize the currency) 5x10^4 vs 3x10^1.
You have it right, perhaps the original poster was referring to it in a more colloquial manner, in the sense that against 200 million in revenue, 50,000 and 30 are in the same ballpark?
> in the sense that against 200 million in revenue, 50,000 and 30 are in the same ballpark
I don't understand how those are in the same ballpark? I thought saying something is in the same ballpark suggested that they are similar in scale, and the implication is that little-leauge does not play in the same ballpark as a NBA team. They are in the same category (baseball), but not at all the same level.
At a big enough scale, previously large differences are effectively 0.
50k/mo is 600,000/yr vs 360/yr at 30/mo. Thats existential for a 1MM/yr company. Neither register on a balance sheet for a 1B/yr company. They are both closer to 0 than being a major cost.
But saying that 200 million and 30 are in the same ballpark is not true in 99.99% of contexts.
Even 50k and 30 I would not say are in the same ballpark. I've worked for major corps and of course a cost saving of 50k/month would not register for the overall company but it probably would for my team. A saving of 30/month is probably not worth spending any considerable amount of time on in most non-personal contexts.
I remember hearing something about the circumstances of that transfer, do you have a link/reference. Also, when you run Syncthing (the normal build I assume, without the Android wrapper), are you able to reliably prevent Android from killing it?
Last things first: on my phone I only run syncthing "on demand", so I can't actually answer your question. Maybe someone else can chime in? From the little I've brushed up against the issue you're referring to, I think there's a way to have it not get killed, but it seems like it might be a little bit of a hassle.
No shortage of reading if you have the time! I'm quite happy to be running just the "standard" package (although, yeah, I should've pointed out that I don't run in continuously on my phone...)
I lived in Quito Ecuador back in the late 70s/ early 80s. There was a hamburger place called "Burger Queen"--the name was in English, presumably to attract people who knew about Burger King. They had a sign that read "Casa del Whooper" (not Whopper).
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