Show HN: Sort lines semantically using llm-sort

I published a nearly identical tool, referencing the same paper, a few weeks ago :) Although I implemented a listwise algorithm instead of pairwise as described in the paper; ends up being a lot faster.

https://github.com/BishopFox/raink

https://bishopfox.com/blog/raink-llms-document-ranking

    raink \
        -f testdata/sentences.txt \
        -r 10 \
        -s 10 \
        -p 'Rank each of these items according to their relevancy to the concept of "time".' |
        jq -r '.[:10] | map(.value)[]' |
        nl
    
       1  The train arrived exactly on time.
       2  The old clock chimed twelve times.
       3  The clock ticked steadily on the wall.
       4  The bell rang, signaling the end of class.
       5  The rooster crowed at the break of dawn.
       6  She climbed to the top of the hill to watch the sunset.
       7  He watched as the leaves fell one by one.
       8  The stars twinkled brightly in the clear night sky.
       9  He spotted a shooting star while stargazing.
      10  She opened the curtains to let in the morning light.

I recently built a semantic batching function for my RAG system [wdoc](https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/wdoc/) that might be interesting to others. The system splits a corpus into chunks, finds relevant ones via embeddings, and answers questions for each chunk in parallel before aggregating the answers.

To optimize performance and reduce LLM distraction, instead of aggregating answers two by two, it does batched aggregation. The key innovation is in the batching order - I implemented a [semantic_batching function](https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/wdoc/blob/18bc52128f...) that uses hierarchical clustering on the embeddings and orders texts by leaf order.

The implementation was straightforward, runs very fast and produces great results. The function is designed to be usable as a standalone tool for others to experiment with.

Given that the comparison function doesn't have the transitive property (if line a > line b and line b > line c that implies line a > line c), does this sort really work?

The 'allpair' variant, which aggregates the score across all n*(n-1) comparisons will work, but the other two couldn't possibly have stable results - it would depend on the order of the items in the input.

So this is actual sorting (i.e. the same amount of lines appear in the output)?

Otherwise it might be more or less the same as using https://github.com/TheR1D/shell_gpt ?

Have you tried reading the probability of X being the token returned? then you will probably be get better answers and not need to compare every 2.

Log probabilities of output tokens indicate the likelihood of each token occurring given the context.

    cat spelling.txt | llm sort -q "how many times does the letter 'r' appear in the word 'strawberry'?"

    cat geology.txt | llm sort -q "which kind of rock is the best to eat, according to Berkeley geologists?"

    cat law-library.txt | llm sort -q "what legal precedents are best for my lawsuit vs Colombian airline Avianca?"

    cat adhesives.txt | llm sort -q "what glue is best for holding the cheese on my pizza?"

O(n^f***)

Great work!