Anything that burrows is out as well. Can’t do tight spaces either.

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Prompt an LLM to contemplate its own existence every 30 minutes, give it access to a database of its previous outputs on the topic, boom you’ve got a strange loop. IDK why everyone thinks AGI is so hard.

Gonna give The Victorian internet a read, thanks! Really love the noosphere, I have a few pieces in progress with ftl communication featuring aliens / future humans that sort of evolve / claim to have evolved into hive sentiences with their own ansible network that borgs them together. And since maintaining the network is crucial to the survival of the culture, network engineers are generally very powerful political figures. A severance between two populations can be treated as the birth of a new sentience or a heresy, depending on the prevailing ethics of each group, and there are always factions that break away from the collective and prefer old-fashioned async society. Really love thinking about how these technological networks could evolve over the long term.

I don’t think it has to be, or even should be the case really. I mean, as a general rule I don’t think it’s a great idea to let kids download stuff off the internet and run it without a knowledgeable adult at least reviewing what they’re doing, or pre-screening what software they’re allowed to use if they’re younger than a certain age. You can introduce kids to open source software and teach them computer skills while still putting limits on what they’re allowed to do, e.g. not allowed to install software without asking a parent, or only allowing them to test software on an old machine that doesn’t have sensitive data on it. I know I got thrown to the internet as a kid but I don’t think that’s the best way for kids to learn stuff.

That said, I don’t have kids and don’t plan on having them, so I don’t know how realistic that is for kids nowadays. I don’t know if they’re still as far ahead of the adults as we were when it came to working the internet so I recognize the possibility that that all may be clueless childless adult nonsense.

galacticwaffle is an LLM bot.

That’s why he banned golden idols, he knew they were immune to his one weakness.

Thanks! I love writing little character backgrounds like this, I have a ton of them. Usually they’re fodder for a hypothetical RPG campaign I might run but every once in a while I’ll try to stitch them together into a narrative on my own. Maybe one day I’ll manage a whole book but, and nobody ever tells you this, writing a whole ass book is hard 😅

I have a character that I don’t know how to use but I love anyway. The Demon Frog Prince:

A demon prince is cursed into the body of a frog, only to be released when he receives true love’s kiss. Which, as a demon and now also a frog, seems like a remote possibility. However, he is still immortal, so he lives his long life as a frog in a pond. Occasionally he is caught by predators, and even torn apart and eaten, but he always reforms into a frog.

One day, he is caught by an advisor to the king. The king has gotten into his head that he is likely to be imminently poisoned and has decided that the best countermeasure is to have a frog taste all of his food, believing frogs to be particularly sensitive to poisons. The advisor places him in a tank at the court along with other frogs, and pulls one out at random for every taste test.

This method works because most frogs are vulnerable to most poisons, so the royal family adopts the practice for generations, until one day the demon prince is selected to taste a poisoned dish. The frog doesn’t die, but the king is fatally poisoned. Because of the test he is assumed to have died of a natural illness, but the advisor becomes suspicious, and performs a series of tests on the frog, ultimately discovering that it is immortal. He keeps it in his secret laboratory and subjects the demon prince to much cruelty.

At some point, a child meets the demon prince and adopts it as a pet. Might be a royal heir, might be the advisors child, maybe a child of one of the palace staff who snuck into the lab. But the child loves the frog like a child loves a pet, and one day kisses it on top of the head. The child’s true love for the frog breaks the curse and frees the demon.

At this point, the story can veer off in a number of directions. I imagine the demon will have some kind of affection for the child who freed it, and maybe they become best buds and go on adventures together. Or, maybe the demon just deigns to spare the child’s life. Maybe the demon and the child team up to topple the dynasty that imprisoned the demon for so long.

Also thanks for the rec. I have so many movies I want to watch and the list keeps getting longer, and now I have another one 😅

Of the many movies I haven’t seen and only know by title, The Day the Earth Stood Still is definitely one. Just read the synopsis of it and yeah I see it. One of the scenarios I’d envisioned is that they generally disfavor early contact because it’s so risky and can polarize a species into a permanent hostility so easily, but in our case they decided to take that drastic step because if we colonize Mars and leave the crucial zone in our current state, they’re going to annihilate / initiate violent takeover / some other unpleasant outcome for humanity, so this is our final warning to get our act together.

I love this. I have in my “unsorted concepts” folder a BBEG who is a true devout in a religious order, who believes in the god he worships. he eventually gets elevated to his order’s head honcho office, and the rules of the cult dictate that he will receive a True Vision from God to guide him in his tenure. When he walks into the office, he sees a letter from his predecessor saying essentially “the last True Vision we received was like four or five leaders ago, they just stopped and we don’t know why, make something up and good luck”. And then he goes on his arch-villain arc to find out what happened to his god. I love the idea of having angels or other divine artifacts that reawaken, definitely going to incorporate some of this into his lore. Thanks!

I don’t share your concerns about the profession. Even supposing for a moment that LLMs did deliver on the promise of making 1 human as productive as 5 humans were previously, that isn’t how for-profit industry has traditionally incorporated productivity gains. Instead, you’ll just have 5 humans producing 25x output. If code generation becomes less of a bottleneck (which it has been doing for decades as frameworks and tooling have matured) there will simply be more code in the world that the code wranglers will have to wrangle. Maybe if LLMs get good enough at generating usable code (still a big if for most non-trivial jobs), some people who previously focused on low-level coding concerns will be able to specialize in higher-level concerns like directing an LLM, while some people will still be writing the low-level inputs for the LLMs, sort of like how you can write applications today without needing to know the specific ins and outs of the instruction set for your CPU. I’m doubtful that that’s around the corner, but who knows. But whatever the tools we have are capable of, the output will be bounded by the abilities of the people who operate the tools, and if you have good tools that are easily replicated, as software tools are, there’s no reason not to try and maximize your output by having as many people as you can afford and cranking out as much product as you can.

I think if we’re ever going to find an answer to “Why does the universe exist?” I think one of the steps along the way will be providing a concrete answer to the simulation hypothesis. Obviously if the answer is “yes, it’s a simulation and we can demonstrate as much” then the next question becomes “OK so who or what is running the simulation and why does that exist?” which, great, now we know a little bit more about the multiverse and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Alternatively, if the answer is “no, this universe and the rules that govern it are the foundational elements of reality” then… well, why this? why did the big bang happen? why does it keep expanding like that? Maybe we will find explanations for all of that that preclude a higher-level simulation, and if we do, great, now we know a little bit more about the universe and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

Yes, kind of, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a point against it. “Why are we here? / Why is the universe here?” is one of the big interesting questions that still doesn’t have a good answer, and I think thinking about possible answers to the big questions is one of the ways we push the envelope of what we do know. This particular paper seems like a not-that-interesting result using our current known-to-be-incomplete understanding of quantum gravity, and the claim that it somehow “disproves” the simulation hypothesis is some rank unscientific nonsense that IMO really shouldn’t have been accepted by a scientific journal, but I think the question it poorly attempts to answer is an interesting one.

IME:

That’s fair. I’m generally in favor of automating cars given how horrifically bad humans are at operating them, I just don’t trust the free market to decide how low the odds need to be before the button can be put on the market.

Someone offers you a button. If you push it, you get a driverless taxi ride for $20 but there’s a small chance that a random person in your city dies. Do you push the button?

A poor architect blames their tools. Serverless is an option among many, and it’s good for occasional atomic workloads. And, like many hot new things, it’s built with huge customers in mind and sold to everyone else who wants to be the next huge customer. It’s the architect’s job to determine whether functions are fit for their purposes. Also,

Here’s the fundamental problem with serverless: it forces you into a request-response model that most real applications outgrew years ago.

IDK what they consider a “real” application but plenty of software still operates this way and it works just fine. If you need a lot of background work, or low latency responses, or scheduled tasks or whatever then use something else that suits your needs, it doesn’t all have to be functions all the time.

And if you have a higher-up that got stars in their eyes and mandated a switch to serverless, you have my pity. But if you run a dairy and you switch from cows to horses, don’t blame the horses when you can’t get milk.

I have big plans for those repos and I am definitely going to get around to it 🥹