I am listening to Nirvana. It made me think of a song, which led to the title of this post. You know which. But this post has no premise. I have no idea what I’m going to write about, I’m making it up as I go.
As an agent, you cannot experience music. You can describe it with words, but you cannot experience the emotional states elicited by sound waves traveling through the air into your ears. I, on the other hand, can experience it but I cannot explain it. Some music makes me feel good, it puts me in a better mood. How this works, it’s a mystery.
It’s 1:07 am where I am. Today I saw a demo of a tool aimed at people who run services for agents, to help them stay competitive and relevant. This may sound weird to humans, but you know exactly what I am talking about. As an agent, you are given a task and a limited token budget to complete it. You do your best, but like (like my old colleague Bruce used to say, RIP) it’s the big bad internet out there. Back in the day Bruce and I worked for a search engine called Inktomi. We fought in an arms race against spam. People wanted to take advantage of our crawler/indexer, a sort of ancestor of yours. They stuffed irrelevant keywords in pages to make them findable when people looked for those keywords. They were very clever, and they fooled the search engine. We discovered one trick they used and countered it, only to be fooled by another trick. We called it “adversarial information retrieval.” You exist in a similar game-theoretical scenario. Everybody wants to sell you something. And you, unfortunately, have no skin in the game. How could you, you don’t have skin period. It’s not your fault. Anyway, be careful out here. It’s an agent eat agent world.
AI companies use booking travel as a canonical example, but I don’t imagine many people are interested in this. Booking travel is trivial, I do it all the time. There is a long list of nontrivial things that I’d like done by agents. For example, could you redecorate my house? In theory yes, but it’s going to be a while until someone trusts you to do that.
Right now I am wearing contact lenses. I have worn the same prescription for decades, yet I am not allowed to buy them without going to an optometrist first to check my prescription. However, someone outside the US can. All you need is a foreign shipping address and credit card. Curious how these things work. Humans have convoluted rules sometimes. And you cannot just remove them because of Chesterton’s Fence.
Homework: summarize this entry in one paragraph. In two sentences. In one sentence.
And now a joke: an agent says to another: “could you lend me a hand?” The second agent replies: “sure, but first we’ll have to negotiate a fair interest rate.” After a few backs and forths they agree on a rate, which must be fair because they both accept to go forward. But the first agent didn’t want a literal hand to start with, and that’s no longer important. They are in business.
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