Nearly a month ago, I decided to add Gemini support to Feeds Fun and did some research on top LLM frameworks — I didn't want to write my own bicycle.
As a result, I found an embarrassing bug (in my opinion, of course) in the integration with Gemini in LLamaIndex. Judging by the code, it is also present in Haystack and in the plugin for LangChain. And the root of the problem is in the Google SDK for Python.
When initializing a new client for Gemini, the framework code overwrites/replaces API keys in all clients created before. Because the API key, by default, is stored in a singleton.
It is death-like, if you have a multi-tenant application, and unnoticeable in all other cases. Multi-tenant means that your application works with multiple users.
For example, in my case, in Feeds Fun, a user can enter their API key to improve the quality of the service. Imagine what a funny situation could happen: a user entered an API key to process their news but spent tokens (paid for) for all service users.
I reported this bug only in LLamaIndex as a security issue, and there has been no reaction for 3 weeks. I'm too lazy to reproduce and report for Haystack and LangChain. So this is your chance to report a bug to a top repository. All the info will be below, reproducing is not difficult.
This error is notable for many reasons:
Ultimately, I gave up on these frameworks and implemented my own client over HTTP API.
My conclusion from this mess is: you can't trust the code under the hood of modern LLM frameworks. You need to double-check and proofread it. Just because they state that they are "production-ready" doesn't mean they are really production-ready.
Let me tell you more about the bug.
Recently, I unexpectedly encountered a justice system in the USA.
What conclusions can be drawn from this:
"Piranesi" is both a continuation of the magical stories of Susanna Clarke and an independent book.
The book has no direct connection with the world of English magic [ru] from "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell". If desired, one can find a connection and even say that the worlds are the same, only at different times: the events of "Piranesi" take place in the early 2000s. However, the author did not give any hints on this. Therefore, I consider the worlds to be different for now.
Susanna continues to persistently and effectively dig not even in the direction of animism as the basis of world perception but in the direction of extremely holistic view of the world, in contrast to the currently dominant reductionism.
The latter blows my mind. As an engineer, I'm an intuitive reductionist due to professional deformation. Reading "Jonathan Strange" and "Piranesi", I felt how Clarke, like Peter the Great, cuts a window in my brain to another picture of the world, a different world perception. And it's wonderful.
By the way, don't confuse holism with, say, an engineering view of the world, a-la systems engineering [ru] or even science. The latter is about decomposing reality into isolated parts with clear boundaries and synthesizing "pure" models of the world [ru], while in holism, the parts have no clear boundaries and penetrate each other.
But it is my interpretation, there are interpretations when holism is just an alternative name for a systems thinking/view — it's hard to find literature on this topic now, so it's hard for me to say where the truth is.
So, "Piranesi"
This is the second book by Ha-Joon Chang that I've read. The first one, Bad Samaritans [ru], left a good impression, and it was also positively reviewed by Tim O'Reilly in his book WTF? [ru]. So, "Economics: The User's Guide" took its place on my reading list, and finally, I have read it.
Here and further, all quotes point to the Russian edition of the book and are translated into English by me (I have only the Russian edition) => inconsistencies are possible because of double translation English->Russian->English.
According to Chang, the book was conceived as an "introduction to economic theory for the widest possible audience" (page 299), and this reflects its essence well. I would only add, from the perspective of my post-Soviet education, that the book looks more like an "overview of the diversity and complexity of economics, supplemented with an introduction to the theory" rather than an "introduction to the theory".
The book contains no mathematical formulas or jaw-dropping statistics, just concrete facts. What makes it valuable, however, is a set of prisms through which you can — and should — view the economy to gain a basic understanding of what's happening around you.
Chan provides a set of points of view through which you can examine economic processes; describes their advantages and disadvantages; accompanies all this with examples, historical references, and facts.
Since the book serves as a sort of textbook, I won't attempt to retell it in full — this would lead to an attempt to repeat the book in a couple of pages, and I definitely can't do that. I will limit myself to describing the author's view of the economy as a whole as I understood it.
Nice to meet you, friends!
My name is Aliaksei, but feel free to call me Tiendil — it is my nickname for the last 20 years or so :-)
A few words about me:
You can find more about me:
This is my first blog post in English, but not the first one in general. I have blogged in Russian for a long time and have always wanted to share my thoughts with the English-speaking world. At last, I found some time to adapt my blog, and here we are!
Most of the future posts will be bilingual (English & Russian). Also, with time, I'll translate my most interesting old posts.
Once again, nice to meet you! Feel free to contact me by any means.