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by jiggawatts 52 days ago
I have no trivial tasks.

Just last week, I was trying to map the weird and wonderful column names emitted by a NetScaler’s detailed REST log into OpenTelemetry semantics.

The NetScaler is basically abandoned by its dying vendor. Hence, its new features like sending logs directly to Splunk compatible receivers are basically undocumented. I’m sure there’s like three of us masochists out there stumbling our way through the brambles.

The Open Telemetry end is a mess of “deprecated” and “beta”, copying the shifting sands of other cloud native projects like Kubernetes.

Even with carefully curated Markdown documentation references and sample logs, every modern “frontier” AI makes basic mistakes and hallucinates like crazy no matter how I stuff their context.

This isn’t an Erdős problem! This is just getting logs from point A to point B.

1 comments

(I would drop this somewhere more relevant but apparently replying to a thing from 17 days ago would be necroing here + PMs are hard or something)

>[1] With what prompt!? I like the terse output! Do share...

Not sure if it's complete or completely right, but the matter came up in a recent session, and when asked what gave, Jim 'n' I came up with some supposedly relevant factors, at least one of which is news to me (supposedly, steering LLMs using negative instructions isn't counterproductive anymore (not that I'd been resisting the temptation anyway)):

https://gemini.google.com/share/7af54a6861d7#:~:text=What%20...

With the caveat (or bonus) that it can go (?:too)? far when told to "be blunt" and not to "pull punches":

https://i.vgy.me/WHRZD7.png (from 2024-09) (in this case, in user-config persistent instructions in Kagi's multi-LLM thing)