In Letta that's referring to an LLM agent that has persistent memory (eg keep running the agent far beyond its context window limit, but maintain some persistent state to avoid derailment / enable indefinite use / learning over long horizons).
If you implement this persistent memory via tool use, then it's related to inserting/querying databases, because some agent has to read/write to a data store (potentially backed by a database) to maintain memories.
I liked the article, but the idea that a company selling its own stock has no cost (typing zeros into a spreadsheet) is wrong. You create more of something, you reduce value per unit, that's supply and demand.
I also didn't understand the focus of the article on privacy. How established is that the difference between American and German users is due to legacy protection? There's differences in the two countries other than privacy. For example people in Germany are a lot less driven by consumption, making them less valuable for advertisers.
EDIT ok so in a sense you good argue it has no cost for the company, but it definitely has a cost to the shareholders.
The existing financial system is one where the money supply is controlled by private bankers. Money is created by banks when they issue loans (mostly mortgages) and destroyed when people pay the loans back. When a bank issues a mortgage to a first time buyer of, say, 300,000 credits, that 300k is brand new money injected into the system. The loan will be slowly paid off, but over the span of maybe 30 years that single loan will contribute on average 150k of money in the system. Almost all of the money in the system is just people's loans they haven't paid back yet. If the banks issue more loans, the money supply increases, if they issue fewer it decreases.
This sounds stupid and most people usually think "there must be something more to it, but I don't understand". Well, there isn't. Money is just made up numbers that we use to do accounting. The only thing that is real is physical (houses, food, minerals, energy etc.)
To attempt to reign in the stupidity, governments have created layers upon layers of regulation to the extent that much of finance is basically working out how to keep legally creaming off the top of the money supply. They play silly games with each other where they trade bits of paper until one of them is left holding the bag. The trouble is the silly games end up affecting everyone else because we actually use this money to do real finance, like paying for food and shelter, insurance, savings etc.
Read up on the 2008 financial crisis. There's a very entertaining book and subsequent film called The Big Short which is highly recommended. Bitcoin was started as a direct response to the events that played out around 2008.
Creating credit out of thin air isnt a property of our financial system, it's a property of debt. If I owe you in bitcoin, we're also creating bitcoin denominated debt out if thing air.
If you've been reading the news, you might laugh if I told you that the original goals of cryptocurrency were to combat the high fees, surveillance, and insecurity associated with centralized payment infrastructure. But that just goes to show how deeply original goals of cryptocurrency have been undermined by speculators and gamblers.
The vendors you spend at have to pay for credit card processing fees. That cuts into the margin for the business and ultimately the consumer pays for that, whether they recognize it or not.
Issues like surveillance and insecurity are largely political and by the time they are realized on an individual level they are too late to solve. It is pretty easy track down protestors when the government has access to the network of all their transactions. Not to mention control: payment processors are private companies and can simply choose not to do business with you, locking you out of the market.
With a typical bank, your money is protected by "open source" information like your name, address, and such. If you can copy information from a credit card you have everything you need to authorize a transaction: skimming is a major issue. When this security inevitably breaks down, it's called "identity theft" and the responsibility is pushed onto the consumer who has no agency to secure themselves.
In a cryptocurrency, it's a keypair so the information needed to authorize the transaction (private key) is separate from the information needed to verify it (public key). And the end user has ownership of the keypair so they can take initiative in their own security. If they want to use a certain hardware token, they can do that. If they want to outsource some security to a third party, they can do that voluntarily with a multi-signature scheme.
Isn't that a problem for the vendors though? In lots of corners of capitalism you gave two parties fighting over who pays what. And that's a good thing.
"Pensions are unpalatable". You don't have pensions in the USA? Meaning like an account into which you can put pretax money and in exchange you can't take it out until later in your life (but can invest it)?
A "pension" means an employer-funded pool of money that pays out fixed payments after a certain age. What you're describing exists (somewhat unevenly) in the US, but it's employee funded. The employee must take active steps to contribute, which means they lose part of their income until they retire and there may or may not be employer contributions. People who can't afford to contribute, or put it off for a few years (most people) end up with insufficient funds at retirement, which becomes a social problem.
Those aren't, and never were, pensions. Few pension programs exist anymore, they were (almost) all replaced with retirement accounts starting I don't even know when, but finishing by the mid 1980s. The pension programs were all going bankrupt due to various reasons (bad economy, American industrial collapse, etc) but mostly demographic implosion.
We have tax advantaged retirement accounts, which have weird contribution rules that assumed companies would replace spending they were doing on pensions with contributions to these accounts (spoiler alert: didn't happen) that keep contributions limited to pretty low levels unless your employer kicks in huge amounts, which almost none do (that is, there are limits on what you can contribute, and separate limits on what your employer can contribute, and the latter is significantly higher). Also some of them require your employer to have such a program, or else you can't participate, which further limits your max contributions if yours doesn't.
Further, since individual contributions aren't mandatory, that money is freed up for zero-sum competition over things like good schools for your kids (that is, housing in good districts) so if you don't choose "defect" and spend the money instead of saving it, your family's overall worse off than it would be if everyone had to contribute.
Also, a tax-advantaged savings/investment account isn't the same thing as a pension.
we have a concept called a 401k (and for non-profits a 403b). You contribute some % of your paycheck and your employer matches some amount of that (potentially with a vesting schedule)
The money can be invested, and then at some age (55.5 i believe?) you can access the money without being taxed. There is a maximum you can contribute per year etc etc.
I am not old enough to ever have had a pension option in my entire life, but I believe 401Ks are overall worse, because pensions come w/ some amount of guaranteed payout + someone managing the fund to ensure that happens. a 401K can go to zero, and you can forget to contribute (and most of the money is your own money anyways)
> The money can be invested, and then at some age (55.5 i believe?) you can access the money without being taxed. There is a maximum you can contribute per year etc etc.
Not quite - you're given a tax benefit (i.e., not taxed) on your contributions when you contribute them, but when you withdraw funds you pay income tax. If you withdraw before the 'retirement age' (55.5, as you say) then you pay an additional penalty.
The idea being that you would be in a higher tax bracket during your earning years, but in retirement you'd be theoretically in a lower tax bracket, therefore would get some tax savings. Additionally, since the tax savings is taken off of the 'top' of the bracket when you contribute and when you withdraw its added to the 'bottom'.
There's also Roth contributions (where you get no benefit now, but don't pay taxes on gains later when you withdraw), but not all plans offer this.
Pensions are not under your control. mostly they were good but once in a while the company you worked for, for 30 years went bankrupt and then you found out the penson was in company stock so not only were you out your job/income you also lost your retirement. In response to that we now have laws about what pensons can invest in - but that means their returns are terrible and so they are not a good roi.
more people have access to a 401k today than ever had a pension as well.
> You contribute some % of your paycheck and your employer matches some amount of that (potentially with a vesting schedule)
This is actually completely optional, many employers do not. For example mine does not do any matching or contributions
> The money can be invested, and then at some age (55.5 i believe?) you can access the money without being taxed. There is a maximum you can contribute per year etc etc.
So the tax side of this depends on if the 401k was done as Roth or traditional. Traditional IRAs are tax advantaged but not tax free. Contributions are pre-tax from the employee's paycheck. Roth on the other hand is post tax and tax free on withdrawal (assuming no penalties).
The pensions I had in mind (UK) don't have any guaranteed payout and can go to zero. We don't have to have anyone "managing" them, and I for one think that's a good thing.
> We don’t have traditional defined-benefit pensions, or not outside of the public sector.
That's a fairly popular belief, but even now (well, as of March 2023), several decades after the general move against them, 15% of private sector workers have access to a defined-benefit pension plan.
Must be it be swallowed up? Is it not possible that an improvement in productivity increases but still be net positive? I believe that's what happens in the real world.
