What are some alternatives? I've been tinkering with langgraph as of late and frankly the whole space is so polluted with SEO and vibe-coded systems the old "classics" were the safe bet for me.
Langchain the company makes three different main products, all of which are differing levels of bad in my experience.
LangGraph, for agent/workflow orchestration is the least bad of the three, but has solid alternatives these days, such as OpenAI’s own Agents SDK, or Pydantic AI.
LangSmith, the platform for prompt authoring/experimentation/observability isn’t great but is useable. I would much prefer Langfuse over it at this point.
Langchain, the library for interfacing with LLMs, is absolutely terrible. There is virtually nothing good to say about it, and in fact is so bad that the fact that LangSmith more or less requires you to use Langchain to some degree is probably the biggest knock against it. Langchain doesn’t even need an alternative, literally just interfacing with the LLMs directly through their clients are often simpler, more flexible, and preferable to using Langchain.
There are so many products in the space right now, I hesitate to say “best” because I have only scratched the surface. It’s the best that I’ve tried. The main things it has going for it:
- It’s open source
- It has the right level of abstraction IMO. A lot of products in the space are over engineered, which make them brittle and a pain to work with. Langfuse is focused enough that it does what it needs to well, but is flexible enough to use with a lot of other tools.
- The developers seem competent. Their roadmap looks solid and they develop very quickly for a team their size.
- It works. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve tried to do something with Langchain products where it just breaks doing simple things. Lots of bugs, bad documentation. Langfuse is better in this regard.
- It’s cheaper (at least it is cheaper than LangSmith). LangSmith charges you for seats and per trace. They charge you even more if you want to keep a trace for more than 14 days, and even then you can only keep traces for a max of 400 days, even if you are hosting on your own servers. Langfuse charges you for seats and that’s it. If you are self-hosting you can do what you want with your data.
There are possibly other platforms that are similar to Langfuse as well, but it’s the best I’ve encountered so far.
For other open-source alternatives, check out https://github.com/agenta-ai/agenta (I am a maintainer), we're more focused on evals and collaboration between subject matter experts and engineers (friendlier UI, powerful prompt engineering flow (playground, eval from UI, etc..)).
Maybe I grew out of the age range or maybe the whole market of silly knick-knacks has died out but they definitely drove my interest in all things electronic.
As a US citizen I can only hope that this kickstarts alternatives and paid for options in the spaces big (ad)tech dominates here. These bloated monopolies with short lived products or soon to be acquired competitors are getting old. (And these constant layoffs and shareholder/promo driven development to a smaller degree)
“Death Machine” was from the perspective occupants of other vehicles and pedestrians. Pretty stupid spin on pretty big box that’s clearly safe for passengers.
I'd be curios to try vGpu with Qubes. It's definitely a security issue and has been left behind on newer NV consumer hardware but would be neat for low-risk qubes. I do have to admit that the performance is still great w/o hardware acceleration.
Not that I’ve seen or heard of but my assumption is that it is mainly due to the relative rarity of partial/vgpu offerings outside of organizations. (Other than Blender render farming and some smaller upstart p2p gpu time reselling.)
I’d say Intel’s 12th gen igpu has “best supported” consumer vGpu offerings available and it’s through sr-ion I believe as well. I’ve had it on the back burner on my homelab until a recent performant gui need had come up.
I forget how many PE sessions I had with cup stacking but it’s definitely ingrained somewhere in my head. If anything I thought at the time it was for hand-eye coordination without having a ball flying at you and it was surprisingly easy to pick up with those competition cups.
Nowadays it makes for a fun free for all drinking game as everyone fumbles stuck together red cups.
The most disheartening part of this ban is that it’s just about the only thing the government can agree on. IMO Mitt Romney slipped the truth in saying:
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
TikTok is the first and just about the only place I’ve seen content about corporate greed, the accelerating disappearance of the middle class and the real downstream effects of US foreign policy that hasn’t been whitewashed.
The ball is in China’s court now, if they can provide a space where this class consciousness can continue to grow they’ll easily get equal/better (though I think magnitudes greater) returns than Russia’s recent social campaigns.
This is like saying that people who are against civilian casualties in the wars in iraq and Afghanistan are all pro 9/11 and love al-qaeda. How does the boot taste?
What's the implication?
That we as a society and/or government have a more just consciousness?
There are certainly are issues in China but are these "popular headline" talking points worse than the suffering we have here? And that's even after assuming they are factual.
We sell prison labor for pennies. We allow individuals to create epidemics and slap them on the wrist. We allow the future of our next generations to be squandered for today's profits. We allow our government to be just as captive to the desires of private parties in a way that's effectually reduced elections to a non-choice.
I don't think anyone with a conscious can say we're any better and that's without taking into account our worst contributions of genocides/wars/instability to the global community.
But in the end w/e, you have your freedom tinted glasses on (it must be nice) and the average american is screwed on our current trajectory.
Let me genuinely ask you something because you seem to be all over this thread with a strong different opinion, and I'm not so arrogant as to believe it's impossible that I'm wrong.
Do you really think, in real world terms, that China could not accomplish the types of infiltrations / surveillance it would deem strategically important without tiktok? Considering that they already compromise government systems on a regular basis (which I can provide links for if you're curious)
Do you genuinely think that corruption / lobbying has nothing to do with this ban? What is your primary concern that makes you in favor of this?
Do you look at things like facebook and instagram and either not see the blatant propaganda on there or not see a problem with it?
I'm just wondering if we are disagreeing on the facts or if we have fundamentally incompatable values, I want to understand.
Nice pivot. Don't want to talk about the Uyghur camps eh?
Respond to the prison labor vs concentration camps point, since you brought up prison labor in attempts to compare convicted criminals to an ethnic group being forced into labor.
I don't have a point, that wasn't me talking about it. The Uyghur camps are horrible, horrible things, and legalized slavery in the US is also horrible. I don't think they are equal at all but tbh I just don't know enough about the Uyghur situation to have an educated opinion on it generally or specifically in regards to the tiktok situation.
Although I do think there's some degree of equivalence specifically in regard to a specific ethnic group being forced into labor since you mentioned it, but I don't want to go on a tangent because that's not what I brought up and not what I was talking about.
It wasn’t that bad creating some new derivations my first week with Nixos, I was so used to Arch where I had maybe a handful modified pkgbuilds over a decade.
For better or worse it was a positive experience, especially when you usually already have a pkgbuild to go off of.
The key terms don’t change so I usually just grep Nixpkgs in nvim and usually have a lead on where to start. Obviously it’s a bit more work than copy/paste from the arch wiki but generally more popular config changes will have an nixos option available.
