I hadn’t heard of ASD-STE100 until last month when the TinyGo AGENTS.md added it as a requirement, along with some other tidbits to improve life for maintainers.
It’s been really productive and I’ve been asking my agents to communicate using it more and more. I believe it’s relieved my cognitive load a bit while working with them.
[In 2013], "Agents" caused Knight Capital to lose $450M in 45 minutes [1]. Implemented by humans and effected by computers, in the end it was really because of two reasons:
* multiple levels of inappropriate controls and unintended consequences in several complex systems
* the inability, both politically and technically, to turn it off
EDIT: Comments indicated I was confusing, so I added a date to make clear that this is pre-LLM agents. My apologies, I intended to illustrate parallels and the post-mortem so we can learn from it.
Edited for clarity, thank you. I wasn't trying to muddy the waters (doesn't mean I didn't), it's a term I've used for a long time. I did mistakenly think the quotes would help disambiguate. I don't know what Knight called them; the first S in "SMARS" is Smart.
This confused me at first, so adding a tiny bit of context: The agents referred to here have nothing to do with AI Agents, and the linked report is from 2013.
Not directly relevant to the post being discussed, except as an example of how runaway automation can lead to unintended and large harmful consequences.
Thanks for the feedback, I have edited to not confuse.
I considered it relevant as it involves the algorithmic/computing implosion of a 17-year-old market making company, in the young field of electronic trading agents, with heavy regulation Federally (SEC) and industry self-regulation (FINRA), which includes compliance and audits. Mandatory pre-trade rules such as 15(c)3-5 were less than 5 years old then and even more regulation came out of that incident.
The article is calling for embedding, controls, and regulation in LLMs. Understanding how the same processes utterly failed a decade ago might be useful in understanding how to proceed.
On disposable code, I’m waiting on an Adafruit Feather microcontroller to come in the mail. I asked Astra to make a me web-based Feather simulator, kinda like the iOS simulator with screen and buttons, so I could work on my UX while I waited.
Something like that would have been a multi-month project a year ago, but I did it in twenty minutes rather than pay for expedited shipping.
Noting that qDot already figured all this out, along with a discovery layer. The spec has not been publicly released, can anybody verify if MHS wraps buttplug.io like MCP wraps JSON-RPC?
I am more interested in the question of how Y-Combinator has changed Stanford over the last two decades rather than the question of how Stanford should change to accommodate Y-Combinator.
Notice there is no mention of ethics, philosophy, or human connection, except maybe Zuck being a psych major. Do we really want the future of education to be an incubator pipeline?
That said I wholehearted agree with the second half of this paragraph: "In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
For the first part, I suspect that money, and the safety net it provides, is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship than its collegiate advocacy. It's hard to start a company or join a fledgling one when you are staring at an immense debt.
I had a similar thought... starting a business is risky. And health insurance (among other things) is expensive. Once the VC class starts pushing for health care reform (among other things), maybe I'll take what they want seriously.
Younger founders coming out of college are somewhat insulated from health insurance concerns. Many of them can remain as a dependant on a parent's employer sponsored group plan until age 26. Others are eligible for Medicaid due to relatively low cash income. Once a startup reaches the Series A funding stage, the larger VC funds have existing arrangements with commercial health insurers to offer group coverage.
I do agree that we need healthcare coverage reform but don't expect a lot of political pressure from that particular group.
Funny how the US produces many more and more successful startups, while in Germany health insurance is like 200 bucks a month (if you have no income) and I think even free if you're unemployed.
To be fair, I wouldn't pin the blame on YC. Few people go to Ivy League universities to ponder ethics or philosophy. These schools are widely seen - by students and by parents - as an incredibly expensive way to "10x" your earning potential and influence. They were producing Mark Zuckerbergs for a good while.
Yes, they accept some number of gifted people from underprivileged backgrounds, but these people are not the ones defining the school's culture. For most people, success at Harvard is to become a politician or to get very rich (or both).
I am LMFAO about claims that Cornell is too "woke", like there is a woman's studies department, but also a Hotel Management school, a Business school, an Engineering school, ROTC, an ag school, a vet school, etc. Very vocational stuff. My wife studied animal science and she teaches people to ride horses. Yeah I am proud of the Nobel Prize winner who teaches an introductory physics class that I helped with, but I am also proud of the guy who grows potatoes on top of Mt. Pleasant to test their suitability for potato chip production.
> For the first part, I suspect that money, and the safety net it provides, is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship than its collegiate advocacy.
An old HN comment captured this perfectly, it’s my favorite analogy of entrepreneurship [1]
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
I'm making a LED Camel Totem for Burning Man. I had the idea to make a Koons-style balloon animal.
I explored this idea with ChatGPT, asking it to make some reference images. I also asked for some prompt generation. I have weak sketching abilities (it's on my list to improve), so this is how I "storyboard".
To be cheeky, I asked Claude to make balloon simulator from which I could eventually drop into Fusion360 to muck with and 3D print. CamelKoons was born! [1]
I wanted a Golang backend and web frontend. Fable pretty much one-shotted the step-one scaffolding: Golang physical simulation of a single balloon, streaming geometry to a Web application. Vibed through various issues and then step two was multiple balloons with twists (which were just choke points).
In the world of disposable, hyper-focused software, this tool remained static to Dromedary Camel topologies. A generalized topology feature is left as an exercise for the reader's LLM.
I like empowering my agents to loop [2]. So, I used Claude-in-Chrome to do some loops where Claude positioned the Camel and could screenshot it. I also gave it an HTTP endpoint to position the camera for itself and me.
Eventually, I wanted to push views and comments from the Web page, so I added a comment box. Claude Code used its new-to-me "monitoring" feature to watch for that action and react to it in the session. Claude made itself a "look-at-camel" skill, so cute! [3]
While the balloons were looking interesting, I noted it wasn't very Koons-like and Claude reminded me that Koons was art and we were doing physical simulation. So then we started distorting the physical model. Of course we also added model export, etc.
After tokenmaxxing, I ended up with something that was a cross between a poop emoji and an alien dildo.
I'm now learning the Forms feature in Fusion360 and following a great balloon-dog tutorial on YouTube. I think this guitar approach will win out over my Guitar Hero approach.
The practice described there is close to shamatha (calm abiding). Just sit and when thoughts arrive, simply label it as “thinking” without prejudice or attachment and carry on.
A common occurrence is the thought that oneself is thinking or labeling too much. This is close to the recursion / self-reference you are referring to. The practice thereof is to simply accept that (and your labeling of inner activity and all wrapped up in that) and carry on abiding. The inner chatter that you are not meditating well enough is a funny one.
It’s been really productive and I’ve been asking my agents to communicate using it more and more. I believe it’s relieved my cognitive load a bit while working with them.
https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/blob/dev/AGENTS.md
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