IMHO this would make more sense if provided as part of a larger "platform" like Langfuse/Langsmith/etc. Otherwise you just end with a dozen SaaS products for highly specific use cases which might not scale that well.
Realistically do you also need to have this live with a fancy? i.e. a custom solution maybe even Jupiter notebooks initially might be sufficient. It's not like 100k messages is a very large dataset. It's not trivial to make a generic solution that fits every use cases (besides of basic customer chatbots) to get actual value for more agentic products.
i get the push, most teams come to us after they've done/tired of the claude running analysis thing manually and want a pro-active thing.
we're also targeting conversation first use cases and for them this serves as their everything custoemrs. we obv do not sell the fancy part, idts that sells anymore lol. lot of our queries come from our slack app/mcp.
Well off people do not allocate capital in a way that's socially or economically (on a national level) optimal. So the government has to do that for them (even if those who the majority of taxes personally benefit less from that than if they were allowed to keep that money).
I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. After all there are hardly any personal incentives for individuals to invest into infrastructure, education or healthcare of people who can't afford it and plenty of other areas even if that's what allowed them to accumulate a significant proportion of not the overwhelming majority of their wealth over the long term.
> Well off people do not allocate capital in a way that's socially or economically (on a national level) optimal. So the government has to do that for them (even if those who the majority of taxes personally benefit less from that than if they were allowed to keep that money).
But we're talking about a government subsidy for something people do have a personal incentive to invest in.
On top of that, the misalignment of incentives applies even more to government officials, who have perverse incentives to enrich cronies, make inefficient transfers to special interests in a specific range of "not currently voting for them but close enough to the line to be worth paying off" at the expense of the public at large, or just not care about getting a given thing right because their position is being secured by something unrelated.
If there's hardly any individual desire, as you say, to fund the development of the poor then taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people (even if only roughly a majority or their representatives).
Given that most taxation done with the the advertised goal of helping the poor in Australia does happen with popular assent of individuals, I would theorize your position is false and that people do have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor -- for profit, humanitarian / charitable reasons, and a variety of other considerations.
> have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor
I never said that wasn't the case but historically that "some" was never sufficient. On average people are rational and selfish to a larger extent than they are altruistic.
> taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people
Well the whole concept of an organized society falls apart if individuals can personally freely chose which laws to obey and which taxes to pay. You have to have a balance based on a reasonable consensus, otherwise you end up with totalitarianism or anarchy (and in that case the people who have the means and resources to do that will establish alternative power structures and will end up subjugating those who do not AND also outcompete those how have the means but are unwilling to do the same).
No, I'm not talking about picking and choosing for a voted tax. I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor. Clearly under anything remotely resembling the Australian representation of what they claim their representative democracy is, the majority of people already decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure.
It can't simultaneously be true that most don't want to help the poor at their own cost while also the tax has been legitimized by the majority wanting to help the poor at their own cost. Only individuals or representatives elected by individuals can vote and if their incentive was to not help the poor then they'd vote not to and that would be that.
> I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor.
Or people have a tendence to perceive a system where everyone is required to pay their "fair share" as more just and are more willing to (often begrudgingly) participate in it. If the system was fully voluntary the average contribution would be significantly lower that it is now. Also a significant proportion might feel they benefit from this system more than they pay into it (or are risk averse and prefer having the safety net even if they contribute more than they benefit)
> decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure
Well I'm generally vaguely incentivized to help the poor and develop infrastructure. Would I be willing to voluntary give up 40% of my income to do that rather than a significantly lower proportion? No, of course not. When it comes to infrastructure I'd be willing to pay very little or nothing at all if I know my neighbour isn't contributing anything. I don't think the average person would behave particularly differently than me.
I can tell you you're absolutely wrong about the average person. I live in a place with no public infrastructure (I'm talking about, not even public roads, and not some rich HOA, a ~poor unorganized community without any infrastructure association) which has allowed me to view how average people react when there is no taxation based infrastructure. When it breaks, the neighbors help. I help maintain the roads for my poor neighbor. My other neighbor helped fix my water line when it broke. Sometimes I take my heavy equipment and donate labor to prepare for storms, etc. The infrastructure is literally donation based. We get it done for a tiny fraction of what the tax based system cost and everyone is far better off, even if the amount donated is less than what the taxes would be and some people "cheat" the system.
It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbor also pays, otherwise they can get fucked. This is very bizarre thinking. The people in my basically ancap-dystopia neighborhood don't even behave in this sadistic way. It honestly sounds more like a manufactured "gotcha" to win an argument than a way someone would think.
In reality the fraction people that would vote to tax themselves, are more than willing to donate in the case they don't get the tax, your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor just because some other guy didn't help too is relatively rare and not indicative of the mindset of most people who are voting to help the poor. I honestly think that most anyone who would vote for the tax, does not act that way when dropped in a neighborhood like mine, and you probably would not either.
> It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbour also pays, otherwise they can get fucked
You are seeing all of this in a very, very black and white way. It's about how much the average person is willing (or forced to) to contribute in either system especially when you try to scale it up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Libertarianism is an utopian ideology not particularly different to Communism in the sense that both are incompatible with human nature.
I mean there is simply no empirical evidence this approach scales beyond small high trust (usually homogeneous) communities. Tragedy of the commons is a thing.
> your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor
That's extremely reductive... and you are making this way too personal than it should be ; )
Well that would apply to a lot of thing governments spend money on. I think the idea is that governments are better at allocating capital in certain cases (obviously one might disagree with that) than the people/companies who generate the most tax revenue. I mean on an individual level even if solar batteries are profitable people who have sufficient disposable income might chose to invest it into the US stock market (if it still offers better returns) amongst other things than into something that benefits the Australian economy or society.
> Romans began rewriting their history and erasing their past. Which is exactly what we are talking about right now.
I'm not sure that's true. Of course some some details might have been purposefully (or not) ignored or twisted. While obviously Christian scholars were quite picky on which pagan texts to preserve or not (due to various reasons) there is not a lot reason to believe that generally they did their best to copy them faithfully. Of course we are talking about a highly literate society with a strong tradition of analytical history (which was very unique by pre-medieval standards at least).
> Quite similar to Romulus
The claim that some specific historian might have invented him out of thin air is far fetched and not really substantiated. Much more likely that the legend evolved over many generations and became a mishmash of fact and fiction over hundreds of years before someone actually wrote it down. Based on other similar cases it's highly likely that there were many competing traditions by Livy's time. So yes, he did very likely tried to reconcile them and picked how to synthesize the narrative but it's hard to imagine he could have actually invented it because there were plenty of people and other historians who could have called him out on it.
> Much more likely that the legend evolved over many generations and became a mishmash of fact and fiction over hundreds of years before someone actually wrote it down.
I don't really dispute that this is the likely case. I more dispute that there was actually a person named Romulus who was in almost any way related to the stories told about him or the founding of Rome.
The name and the stories come a very long time after Romulus supposedly existed.
> but it's hard to imagine he could have actually invented it because there were plenty of people and other historians who could have called him out on it.
I disagree that they'd be called out, especially if this was something commissioned by the political powers of the time. These sorts of fanciful stories about the great founding of a powerful nation were commonplace. The Greeks and the Romans also enjoyed telling stories and integrating them in with their mythology. There wasn't the modern notion of history or historical accuracy at play. If someone wanted to say, for example, the founder of Rome was raised by a she wolf, then it makes for an interesting story and imagination so it gets passed off.
Similar to how Athens was supposedly named because Athena gave them an olive tree beating Poseidon in a competition.
You won't find a greek historian calling that story out as a fake or dubious.
> . I more dispute that there was actually a person named Romulus who was in almost any way related to the stories told about him or the founding of Rome.
You and many Romans. I mean we have Cicero's letters where he's saying that all the legends about Rome's founding are probably nonsense because nobody has any real records.
> There wasn't the modern notion of history or historical accuracy at play
Polybius and Thucydides might feel sad about you saying that.
They happen to have created the whole concept of analytical history. It's like saying that engineers in ~1800 didn't have a notion of how steam engines worked. I mean the invented the whole concept in the first place (however primitive their early methods were.
Even Herodotus often goes to great effort trying to separate fact from fiction even if understandably now always succeeding) although that would indicate what sort of poor sources historians had to work with when researching the earlier periods. It's a bit like if modern 19th century historians had to work without having any access to books and newspapers or other extended written material with their main source being the great-grandchildren of the people who actually lived then and the memories they passed down in addition to maybe some legal contracts, obscure religious texts and chronological lists (and if they wanted to go 5-10 generations further its even much worse). That doesn't mean they (largely) weren't doing their best.
I think the point is that Muslim accounts of the same events are sometimes very different to those of (Nicaean)Christians.
Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. After the Church become more established scholars spent a lot of time and effort trying to determine which ones were "accurate" or not and suppressing the other narratives. It's not like anyone can verify it they got it right or not, though.
Usually the arguments are not about whether a major historical figure like Christ or Mohamed etc. existed but the exact context and accounts of their lives, beliefs and actions. Also both of these men live in literate societies yet just a few hundred years after the deaths the facts already were very blurry and uncertain. Hypothetical Moses on the other hand lived in an illiterate society and history wasn't written down for 500+ (if not quite a bit more) years, even if there is a grain of truth in them (i.e. some sort of migration or interaction between Canaan and Egypt - which is not at all far fetched) the actual details might have become 99% fictional after being passed down orally through dozens of generations.
Of course there are, even among the canonical gospels. The length of Jesus' ministry is uncertain (1 year in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but 3 years in the later John). What Mary and Joseph did after his birth also conflicts among the gospels - according to Matthew, they fled to Egypt, and only returned after Herrod had died (4 BC) while according to Luke, they went to the Temple in Jerusalem to cleanse Mary, which would have happened 40 days after the birth. Some of the identities of the disciples differ between the Synoptic gospels and John (particularly, there is no Bartholomew, no Matthew, no James son of Alphaeus, and no Simon except Simon Peter). The various miracles and acts of Jesus, the exact contents of the sermon on the mount, the parables that he shared - there are many other differences between all the canonical gospels.
Of course, they all agree on a broad narrative - Jesus was born of a virgin Mother in Bethlehem, lived in Nazareth for some time, wandered for 40 days in the wild where he was tempted, then returned and was baptized by John the Baptist, collected a number of disciples while preaching in Galilee and performing various miracles, then during Passover entered Jerusalem, came into conflict with the Jewish religious authorities and/or the Roman authorities, had a last supper with his disciples, and was crucified, died, was buried in a tomb, and was resurrected.
This is about it in terms of the major plot points that are common. Major acts, such as expelling the money lenders from the Temple or the resurrection of Lazarus, are not part of the shared narrative - they either occur at different times (in John, expelling the money lenders is one of the first acts of Jesus, at the start of his ministry, not one of his last public acts at the end), or not at all (the story of Lazarus is only present in John).
I would say that there are indeed major narrative differences between the Gospels.
Well in Islam the story is different and they consider the canonical New Testament gospels not very accurate.
Then you have all the ancient texts here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Non-canonical_(apocryph... which were likely written very early and often conflict quite strongly with then New Testament narratives. We can assume that this is just an only very small sample of all the stories floating around.
Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.
> which were likely written very early and often conflict quite strongly with then New Testament narratives.
They were not likely written very early in almost all of those cases (your own link dates every single one to well after the canonical gospels), and almost none of them have meaningful narrative differences (once again, as opposed to theological differences.)
> Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.
The canonical gospels were all likely written within decades, not "hundreds of years"; and while you can argue canonization did not officially happen until much later, de facto canonization occurred very, very early. The others floated around, yes, but they were never mainstream in any sense.
> The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story
Not on purpose, it's just that without written history it's very easy for stories to drift very far from the historical facts. There might haven been a Roman king Romulus who did something important (then again he might have been created over time by merging several figures - i.e. it's more likely that he was named after the city and not the other way around).
We actually have real documented historical cases of this process occurring, the whole genre of Germanic heroic legends. They include various historical figures like Theodoric, Attila the Hun and others but the actual facts were mostly corrupted beyond recognition. Also this process took 500-800 years and developed in environment in which existing historical written sources on the same events did exist (even if they weren't directly accessible to most).
Interestingly we have surviving Hittite letters complaining about the Achaeans causing some trouble in the vicinity of Troy along with a guy whose name sounds very similar to Priam (although he actually seems to have been on the Greek side). And we somewhat confidently know that Troy had a king named Alexander (Alakasandu) which happens to be the Greek name of Paris (of course there were probably many Trojan kings carrying that name over the years).
Of course that doesn't mean much, the Iliad is a mishmash of different historical events from different periods (based on the descriptions of weapons, armour, political systems, cities etc.). There is probably a massive accuracy gap between oral history like the Iliad and written one (including the Hebrew bible).
