thymine_dimer

"What comes after vibe coding" is a different question to the one you're answering. Feels like your answer is about better vibe coding: I'm using a tiered document system. It's just docs all the way down. Seems to be working for me, ask in another ten years.

What comes after vibe coding? At some point the AI will be asking humans if its new software saves us time and whether we'd pay money for it. Until then, there'll be some level of humans-asking-AI to solve a problem, probably with coarser and less detailed spec at each step.

Is 'contextualised pretraining' a solution to baking in human alignment?

You can only post-train so much... Try telling a child that martial arts isn't the solution to everything right after they've watched karate kid. A weak analogy, but it seems very clear that the healthy psychological development of frontier models is something necessary to solve.

Some good insights could come from those working at the coalface of child-psychology.

(Uninsightful comment but I’m gonna put it here anyway) The US spelling of haemoglobin is all kinds of wrong. Love the site. Would love some algae in there though. Perhaps a desmid or diatom?

It’s a great process where I live. But you’re right. Doesn’t scale to populated areas.

Wonder what the potential microbial turnover of lawn is? Multiply that by the average walk length and I bet that could handle one or two nuggets per day, even in a city.

That’s a side hustle idea for any disengaged strava engineers. Leave me an acknowledgement on the ‘about’ page.

Quite a tangent, but for the purpose of avoiding anaerobic decomposition (and byproducts, CH4, H2S etc) of the dog poo and associated compostable bag (if you’re in one of those neighbourhoods), I do the same as your mum. If possible, flick it off the path. Else use a bag. Nature is full of the faeces of plenty of other things which we don’t bother picking up.

Finally some phytoplankton on the front page...if only for a second.

Dear Paul, I'm sure it has been said elsewhere in the comments, but ironically I struggle to agree with this essay...which happens to be nicely and succinctly written.

I'm arguing that it's your own bias generated from the synthesis of your own idea that selects for sentences that effectively express the idea, and nothing to do with the writing itself.

The anecdote about the puddle who suddenly gains consciousness and remarks that the world is so perfectly formed around it, that it's proof of divine creation, seems to apply here.

The author generates an idea and is trying to articulate it. A well written sentence or paragraph that flows, pleases the author. This is because the idea they are trying to express is done in a satisfying way.

Thus the more pleasing the writing to the author, the more efficiently it articulates the original idea. It's the author's bias, based on their own idea, that defines the level of 'pleasingness'.

Lastly, Paul, do you think the LLMs are any less satisfied with their confident and irrational hallucinations, than they are with their more well supported claims? Further, if you weren't aware that the output was ridiculous, would you be able to tell a accurate statement from a false one?

Thanks for the essays. Love them.

Next time I'm discussing the ol' "are we part of a simulation?" dilemma, I'll pull this up