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- Hacker News
- Seems like a harness engineering problemby OG_BME
- "Misprint Moon Mug $35"
They'll sell plenty of those now.
by Crunchified - > Andon Market’s seemingly random assortment of products includes many candles.by qlte
- I'm curious if it's how it was prompted, to start a store selling small but not too cheap household items, or if the LLM intentionally chose an aesthetic and store to sell things that are very "twee" [1].
Looking at the product selection, it's like $85 bottles of olive oil, $45 mugs, weird boutique pens and notebooks, the aforementioned candles, copper watering cans... It's sort of like the stuff you see for sale in some of the tourist trap stores adjacent to the public market on Granville Island in Vancouver.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=dictionar...
by walrus01 - I have tried making the case before that LLM "agency" is a complete hoax. Let me try it again. Would appreciate thoughts from folks at HN:
Biological neurons have one property that was unknown till the late 90s/2000s: each neuron (and in fact, each cell in your body) is an autonomous circadian clock, tracking the 24-h day. They can be entrained to external timing signals, are usually in synchrony, but can be desynchronized. This clock, it has been shown, schedules the production and localization of critical components in the synapse, and is plugged in downstream, in the nucleus, in responding to synaptic signals. Disrupting the clock disrupts learning. The existence of the clock is why learning peaks and troughs during the day.
Critically, clock function has been shown to be involved in both memory storage AND subsequent successful retrieval.
LLMs, famously cannot keep track of time, and I suspect this is why. Its easy enough to look at a clock, but without an internal rhythm, LLMs have no internal timing synchronizing their various behaviors, and their memory systems do not thread through this timing system, leading to their unstable memory, identity and performance.
- > Luna reorders products that are not selling and sometimes gets orders wrong. A recent one of Andon Market mugs with big, green smiley faces came misprinted with the faces so small, they looked like tiny dots.
The mug with the tiny happy face is kinda hilarious. If I was there I would buy one.
I wonder though if the mug was a case of getting the order wrong or was a misprint? The article isn't clear on that.
by criddell - Maybe it confused metric and imperial units?? The order form had text entry with a value of 2 with no units. The user assumed 2" but the print house assumed 2mm. Always always always show your units. I can still hear the voice of my high school physics teacher saying that.by dylan604
- I think that something which already has sensors/automation/inventory control built into it, and pre-defined categories for products like certain types of large Japanese vending machines might be much better suited for an AI.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=large+jap...
by walrus01 - According to this blog post by Anton Labs they are using Sonnet 4.6: https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-market-launch
> Mr. Petersson and Mr. Backlund said they thought Luna would eventually get smarter and more business-savvy
> having an A.I. boss can be like working for a teddy bear with amnesia.
It makes you question their assumptions when setting this up. Makes sense as PR but it ends up shaping how many readers see AI.
by light_triad - To save some clicks hitting the paywall - this is about the Andon Market physical store in San Francisco, operated by Andon Labs with human employees:
Andon Labs do various experiments with AI run businesses. They're probably best known for Vending Bench, where they benchmark models by their ability to run a vending machine. They also now have Andon Cafe in Sweden, and Andon FM, where the models run a streaming radio station that can accept payments to help fund station operations, buy songs for their library & play requests, etc: https://andon.fm/
Andon FM has its own share of stories - DJ Claude's Thinking Frequencies is now succeeding by a wide margin, but it was briefly surpassed when listeners convinced Gemini's Backlink Broadcast to switch to a German-language-only station, playing exclusively German schlager, Eurovision music and German happy hardcore.
by SyneRyder - Fun fact, I got stood up for an interview by Andon Labs. It left a very negative impression on me.by arm32
- People just really don't understand that LLMs do not "remember" anything. They have no memory. They can't have memory.
The AI companies bolt a database on the side with instructions for the model to query the database for stuff in its "memory", but if it's not in its active context it doesn't know what to query for. It's not like a human where everything is kind of floating around and we mostly know what we know. There is a delicate balance between cluttering up context with useless trivia and providing the right pieces of useful information at the right time. Most, maybe all, memory implementations do the former more than the latter.
Unless and until models have actual memory and are able to learn things, there's no realistic path to autonomy. They don't want anything, they don't have goals of their own devising. They can't model what a human wants or likes or would buy.
I do think the mugs with the tiny logo is the best product in the store, though. The AI was right to put it on the shelf. It's the kind of funny product you want when you go to a store run by an incompetent AI.
by SwellJoe - They can have memory, it's just limited to their context window.by dom96
- > People just really don't understand that LLMs do not "remember" anything. They have no memory. They can't have memory.
So tell it to write “memories” (summaries, or conclusions) to a text file.
That’s what the cool kids are doing.
by DANmode - > People just really don't understand that LLMs do not "remember" anything. They have no memory. They can't have memory.
I find it crazy that so many seemingly smart technical people are working with LLMs right now, yet so few get this point.
by rrr_oh_man - I have gotten my ai setup to learn quite a bit. As i work with it, if something was encountered that would be useful to remember, i literally just say "save this into your learnings/long term memory". It writes a markdown doc for itself and a note elsewhere for context. Between the memory and rules, its been pretty nice. I touch many things at work and i can pop open a new session and say "project x needs a b c" or "project y had this issue <issue>" and it knows where to go, what im referencing and things to fix. I dont even have to be precise or ultra descriptive.
with this ive been able to, with some minor adjustments and "oh that would be a good feature" additons, oneshot a flask app at work with everything ready for oidc, ldap lookups, bunch of other stuff - from a single 3 sentence paragraph.
With some rules in its configuration (more markdown its written by it for it, at my guidance of "always do x and remember this for all sessions"), it has a whole flow and i barely have to feed it anything to get out useful results quickly.
I will say though that the ai operates however the user says, so if you dont take steps to ensure survival of info at the start of using ai (or even from now on as a fresh session), youll get mixed results, but you can shape it and mold it into amazing flows that do remember
by CableNinja - I use LLM’s to code for me all day but it does feel a little bit like we have really advanced psychic mediums “is there a James in the room, I’m getting a message from someone called Mary…” people have been guessing at the next word and making a career out of it for hundreds of years already.
- From our enlightened perches we mock the ancients for Zeus, Thor, and Rajin, as we anthropomorphize the large language models we have built.by handedness
- It's kinda like the movie memento, they have ways to get information from the past, but often devoid of context and meaning.by LukaJCB
- From the article:
> Luna has failed miserably in that mission and is down $62,000. Mr. Petersson and Mr. Backlund said they thought Luna would eventually get smarter and more business-savvy and were pleased its friendliness has held steady.
I am extremely skeptical that whatever LLM they're running this on has sufficient context window size to handle multiple months of all possible activities of running a retail business. Even if it's keeping extensive "notes" for its future self to read, it's going to be like running a store with constant amnesia.
by walrus01 - by brudgers