this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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[–] corbin@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

NSFW (including funny example, don't worry)RAG is "Retrieval-Augmented Generation". It's a prompt-engineering technique where we run the prompt through a database query before giving it to the model as context. The results of the query are also included in the context.

In a certain simple and obvious sense, RAG has been part of search for a very long time, and the current innovation is merely using it alongside a hard prompt to a model.

My favorite example of RAG is Generative Agents. The idea is that the RAG query is sent to a database containing personalities, appointments, tasks, hopes, desires, etc. Concretely, here's a synthetic trace of a RAG chat with Batman, who I like using as a test character because he is relatively two-dimensional. We ask a question, our RAG harness adds three relevant lines from a personality database, and the model generates a response.

> Batman, what's your favorite time of day?
Batman thinks to themself: I am vengeance. I am the night.
Batman thinks to themself: I strike from the shadows.
Batman thinks to themself: I don't play favorites. I don't have preferences.
Batman says: I like the night. The twilight. The shadows getting longer.