patrickscoleman

Obligatory link to a relevant Jorge Luis Borges story: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (about an author who copied Don Quixote word for word)

https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Mena...

I've been digging into Thomas Metzinger[1] recently and here's a tentative component by component definition of human consciousness based on his ideas:

- a model of your environment - desires - a process for modeling yourself in that environment (in time & space) - the ability to take action - the perception of yourself having agency - persistence of these processes even without input - unawareness of these processes (i.e. naive realism)

If you consider these LLM-based agents, they:

- are aware of their chat environment - have programmed desires - are aware of themselves acting in their environment - can take actions like search, tool calling, etc. - understand they can take these actions - DO NOT persist after they stop getting user input - DO NOT believe they are conscious (or at least they are programmed to deny it)

This is a functionalist take (and you may disagree with my definition), but while I don't think these current AI agents are conscious, I feel like there's conceptually no reason someone couldn't build a conscious AI very soon.

[1] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/thomas-metzinger/th... & https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262633086/being-no-one/

we have a crt tv with built in vhs in our office and have a bunch of old tapes

one is “Mastering Windows 3.1”

it’s fun to run in the background while working

for your enjoyment, here’s a similar 3.1 tutorial video from that era uploaded to YouTube

https://youtu.be/KRi5mjMgORk?si=OFH7UhOQif5EUCtg

Acquisition as marketing

I really love how Kosho Uchiyama describes meditation with the metaphor "opening the hand of thought"

https://wisdomexperience.org/product/opening-hand-thought/

I'll jump in too. Also started coding with HTML in Neopets and then joined the middle school's programming club! We were playing around with C++ and Visual Basic. Love seeing these updates!

If you haven't already, you can turn off your YouTube watch history, which stops all recommendations. It makes it way less addicting.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725

The worst customer support experiences of my life have been from Google, both while using Google Fi personally and GCP while working at Replit in its early days. Thankfully I'm no longer using either of those products now.

Only tangentially on-topic, but I do all the financial modeling for the past several (early stage) startups I've worked for in Google Sheets.

The ease, collaboration/sharing, and array formulas win out over the faster speed for calculations, better shortcuts, cross-workbook linking, and customization in Excel.

That said, it's been a few years since I've tried Excel so would love to hear someone convince me to try it again.

Check out the work from the meditation research lab at Harvard [1] for more

[1] https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/

Great read. We've been seeing some wild emergent behavior at Rime (tts voice ai) too, e.g. training the model to <laugh> and it being able to <sigh>.

I recently picked up Mirrorshades and The Big Book of Cyberpunk (edited by Jared Shurin) [1]

Will check this one out too!

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700576/the-big-book...

Came here to say this, thanks.

Only thing to add is that I like the "inbox" feature in Todoist (plus a single catchall project). I get overeager during the day and add a bunch of stuff. The inbox makes it easy for me to mostly just remove things I won't actually do but then file away the stuff I might for later.

I've put weekly chores into a single recurring task and do them on Sundays or kick back another day or two (or just skip) if I'm busy.

I do this with just an ever expanding notes file. Works!

their "private" is not private. about a month ago, i searched for some health-related stuff in a chrome incognito window and then immediately afterwards got related sponsored product ads on amazon in a logged in normal window.

Ads are coming to ChatGPT too at some point [1]. Agree that ChatGPT has less spam than Google for now, but this won't always be the case.

There are ChatGPT alternatives too (including Kagi's), so AI may end up taking a lot of search market share, but I still find myself searching most of the time. I've had enough hallucinations to still prefer searching for and reading primary sources. As always I keep monitoring and trying new things.

[1] https://mashable.com/article/openai-ceo-sam-altman-open-to-a...

Even as a foreigner who speaks Japanese, I frequently got the "we're closed" and crossing the hands in an X response while locals continued eating. Sometime they'd laugh and I'd hear "gaijin" (rude slang for foreigner) as I walked out.

But plenty of places were super warm and friendly after the initial apprehension if you speak Japanese and read some kanji. Worth the effort!

You should check out kagi then

http://kagi.com/

Highly recommend King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard for microtonal music too!

For example: https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com/album/flying-microtonal-ban...

Finally read it this year and so happy that I did!

Although a lot of that reading was skimming haha. I think that's good for a first reading though. You get a really good idea of the overall pacing and chapter-to-chapter variety that way.

It feels like some of the comments are responding to the title, not the contents of the article.

Maybe a more descriptive but longer title would be: AGI will work with multimodal inputs and outputs embedded in a physical environment rather than a frankenstein combination of single-modal models (what today is called multimodal) and throwing more computational resources at the problem (scale maximalism) will be improved with thoughtful theoretical approaches to data and training.

love the story! i took a stab at translating it: https://pscoleman.me/blog/axolotl

Here's how to play: https://www.loom.com/share/14f8d6d097ef41319285cb6dd404a109?...

Java is a bit of a pain. It's a compiled language, so if you make any edits to the .java files you'll need to run a command in the shell to generate a new .jar file and then run that.

Enjoy!

So fun, thanks for sharing! I'm feeling some nostalgia. The first game I ever made was also an ant defense game. You use a magnifying glass to protect your tomato at a picnic. As you get to later levels, the ants get bigger and the sun starts to set, so you have to buy upgrades.

I wrote it in Java in high school back in 2006. The site I hosted it on in high school is no longer live. I put it on Replit a few years back, but I no longer have access to the account, so I had to fork the repl to play it again. Things change. Hold on to your code. It's fun to revisit old programs!

If you want to give it a try: https://replit.com/@PatrickAtReplit/Ant-Killer-Game.

I am currently reading Ulysses, so this was a nice surprise on hn. Great historical context. Thank you! After many years of false starts, I stopped trying to understand everything and just let the prose wash over me. And now I’m enjoying it.

“ I feel I need not worry so much about “misreading” Joyce. Every reading of Ulysses is a misreading, a faulty but revealing translation, a way of drawing the novel into new and perhaps unintended relationships. All that matters to me is finding a way to read the book that is interesting: that opens out instead of closing down.” [1]

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/12/07/misreading-ul...

Tatami Galaxy

My favorites by Aira:

- "Episode in the life of a landscape painter" - mentioned in the article

- "How I became a nun" - an introverted six year old claims to be a boy and a girl, mixes up reality and fantasy, and tastes ice cream

- "The little buddhist monk" - a pint-sized korean monk plays tour guide to some french tourists

- "Birthday" - something between autofiction and memoir, written on Aira's 50th birthday

Current app: https://www.yaya.press/ Version 1: https://lang-interlacer-qhvrm2vxu-yayayomu.vercel.app/ (will keep it up for a couple months)

I’m currently visiting Tokyo and found the building where I’m staying too. This is so cool!

I’ve enjoyed seeing the buses move around on Google maps too. And all the bus times are so accurate at the stops. I wish every city made all this data available.

Also actual fans sometimes can’t make a show and need to resell their tickets