Copasetic Flow

 I haven't mentioned my portfolio site here before, but I did manage to fix page view tracking on it today, so that's kind of nice. It was the final project for a digital portfolio  class I took at City College San Francisco and highly recommend. History Research Recap I'm offloading a significant amount of research work for my history of physics book, The Gladych Files , onto an orchestrated platform of LLM agents in Gas Town . The bulk of the work is to research passengers on trips the main characters of the book took from the 1930s to the 1950s. One of the main subjects of the book is Tom Slick . While returning from a trip to attempt to spot the Lochness Monster while he was a student at Yale—seriously, I love this book—he was aboard a ship, the Normandie, with Hedy Lamarr. The ship also had over 1,000 other passengers including the grandchildren of Henri Matisse . My  agentic AI research team comes to task because it's not a small project to research each of a t...

 Moving the camera to see the sky in CesiumJS maps has always been a little bit difficult for me. So,m when CesiumJS announced their baseline MCP for controlling the camera on CesiumJS maps, I leaped at the chance to try out an MCP and to grab hold of better control of my map camera.  This week, the sujbect of eclipses came up in my Gladych Files research. ( Ferry Barrows Colton , famed National Geographic Science writer of the 1940s was part of the 1947 Brazil eclipse expedtiion, and was also on board the Normandie with Tom Slick in 1937.) That reminded me of the following picture I took of the 2017 eclipse from Wyoming.  I've wanted to identify the stars on that picture for years, so I was curious if CesiumJS had accurate constellation maps for a given date and time. Turns out, they do. But, how to look at the stars? I revived my version of the  MCP camera control server for CesiumJS in a few minutes by starting Codex in the repo directory on my local machine, a...

 Thijs is new prior to today, usage was broken out between Sonnet and other models like this It's unclear ot me if I tripped a flag somewhere as I approached my weekly limit, or this dialog is reflective of a new Anthropic usage report. I switched Gas Town over to all Sonnet models a few weeks ago for two reasons. First, to get more usage per week. Second, I've found that for the creative research work I have the polecats (LLM agents in Gas Town parlance), Sonnet works much better than Opus 4.8. The research is for a book detailing the funding of mainstream general relativity by fringe science industrialists in the 1950s. It requires polecats to, for example, see the name Lucia Hobson, and immediately jump to the fact that Nikola Tesla was the best man at her father's wedding. Thus far, Opus 4.8 has been a little to stick-in-the-mud to pull this off, but Sonnet 4.6 makes the association for a lower token cost. Using Codex Instead I switched over to codex to run research an...

 While doing research for a book I'm working on, The Gladych Files , I wondered into the weeds of statistical analysis of LLM AI agent performance which relates to my everyday sort of work in engineering. One of the things I really enjoy about The Gladych Files, however, is that it's never long before the project pulls me back towards ham radio. The statistical analysis project involved determining how often, and with what certainty AI agents could find out that Lucia Hobson was the daughter of Rear Admiral Richmond Pearson Hobson and then make the further link that Nikola Tesla was the best man at Rear Admiral Hobson's wedding. While estimating how difficult this was to do with plain old human operated web searches this morning, I came across W. E. D. Stokes! Stokes came into the picture as Lucia Hobson's husband. What I didn't know was that he was one of the founders of The Radio Club of America. His original interest in radio came from wanting to control a mod...

 I'm working through a methodology to study the behavior of teams of agents via observation of real-world tasks. As usual with LLMs, the concept of repeatable results is squishy, especially as compared to non-LLM deterministic computing. My finding last week was that LLM agents, especially Claude (per Google's research), can exhibit stigmergic , (a fancy word for how insects, like ants, 'learn' where important locations are from other insects), learning and behavior. In short, agents given the exact same instructions, (prompts), can and often times will exihibit different behaviors if they can see the results of the work of other agents. If you want to study the variance in the behavior of an LLM agent over multiple runs, this stigmergic behavior has to be accounted for. Otherwise, we're not measuring the behavior of an LLM agent with a set of inputs and prompts. With stigmergic behavior, if we're not careful, we're observing the behavior of a community of ...

 It was fun getting to use Anthropic's Fable-5 for a few days. Hopefully the chance will come up again. For the moment, the US government has denied access to non-US citizens.