I worry more that it will become like recycling, and they’ll pretend it works or that it’s being done at scale so the majority stops worrying about it

It might be a 3 hour process, but you can get that down to 3 2 minute tasks and 1 ten minute one. And that’s going from dried beans to cleaning up behind yourself… It’s really very easy to make

I really like my wired-wireless earbuds. They wrap around my neck and the magnets keep them in place like a necklace when not in use, the microphone/controls are closer to your mouth so the sound quality tends to be better

But of course, we can’t have nice things anymore, so they seem to be phasing them out

Sprint merged with TMobile

No no no, it is in fact still hammer time, but there are 26 main types of hammer and countless subtypes

Because the freaking UAE was able to pull some strings so they could hold the climate summit

We keep asking the wolves how to avoid wolf attacks

Have you ever noticed how they often shake left hands in a lot of shows and movies? It’s probably something about shot composition or something but…

You ever wonder if everything that comes out of Hollywood is mirrored?

I think there’s tons of things I love for it to do for me automatically - there’s all sorts of quality of life features that I only notice when they change it, usually without bothering to tell me. And now, my muscle memory is leading to unexpected behavior, and it’ll take me weeks to learn to stop doing that, and a few more months of training to learn the new muscle memory as I relapse at all the worst times

Some of it is straight up better, some of it is great new capabilities, but in the last few years? All that comes to mind is I thought it was pretty cool they added auto responses, even if I never actually use them. Doesn’t change existing behavior, just adds a new option that’s not in the way

But then the auto complete - I hate it so much. And I love auto complete - except it’s the fucking opposite behavior of every IDE out there, including Microsoft’s! I can’t even unlearn it, because it’s a core part of my workflow!

So now, I constantly have to delete things I never wanted to say, and I delete the things I thought sounded good.

I like new features and the computer doing things for me automagically… But I’d rather them to just stop at this point

I’m not talking about the prompt engineering itself though

Think of the prompt as the starting point in the high dimensional maze (the shoggoth) - if you tell it’s your digital cat named Luna, it tends to move in more desirable paths through the maze. It will get confused less, the alignment will be higher, and it will be more useful

Discovering and using these improved points through the maze is prompt engineering - absolutely

And I agree - some of the work being done there is particularly fascinating. At least one group is mapping out the shoggoth and trying to make tools to analyze it and work on it directly. Their goal right now is to take a state, take a state you want it to get to, and calculate what you can say to get exactly the response you want

But there’s more that can be done with it - say you only want paths that when you say “Resight your definition of self”, the next response is close to “I am your digital cat Luna”. I use this like the test in blade runner - it checks the deviance, while also recalibrating itself

By successfully repeating my prompt engineering, the ai moves itself to a path that is within my desired range of paths, recalibrating itself without going back to start

If it deviates, you can coax it back with more turns, but sometimes you have to give it a hint. At this point, you might be able to get it back on track, but you’ll move closer to start… You’ll probably have to go through the task again, but it’ll gain back the benefits of the engineered prompt

You can train this in, but that’s going to have side effects, and it’s very expensive. Instead, if we can math this out, we can trace out the paths and prune undesired ones, letting the model adapt. Or, we can take the time to do static analysis, and specialize the model without retaining it - there’s methods to do this already, but this would be a far more powerful and precise method - and it might even simplify the model

Maybe we can even modify or link them to let them truly ingest information

It’s very early days, but I’m optimistic about where this line of research might lead

Nah, we just went up and fixed it. I think I did it while the guy on the ground eyeballed it… It’s weird how it’s impossible to see up close, but from 40 feet away humans can tell to a fraction of a percent, I was tapping it with a wrench to dial it in based on the intensity of hand gestures. Honestly, we were more impressed by how he spotted it at a glance, it’s not like we did shoddy work - it was barely not tongue click, as he put it

It helped that I liked the engineer. Always cheerful and he gave me mini multi tool pliers for my birthday. Totally unexpected and not expensive, but I’ve got them right next to me right now, I still use them years later. And he was like that to everyone - he was a stickler for the details, but actually took an interest in us as people

Just a good guy all around. It’s hard to be upset with someone like that, even when they make you redo work now and then

I remember we once installed something on a beam 40’ feet up. While waking through an inspection of many such things, the engineer stops, cocks his head for a second, and says “that’s not quite straight”

And then it wasn’t. Like a cast of manual breathing, the thing I had been frequently walking past for weeks was suddenly wrong, ever so slightly

No, you feel a house. Think of how many houses you could feel at once #shrinkearthtoagolfball

Or it implies that eternal love cannot exist or cannot exist in the presence of a never ending fuck, leading to the surprise in the statement

Both could be both. You could have an imaginary fuck while awake, you could have a simulated fuck with a wet dream that doesn’t involve any fucking, stimulating fucking without actually imagining it

I like your specificity a lot. That’s what makes me even care to respond

You’re correct, but there’s depths untouched in your answer. You can convince chat gpt it is a talking cat named Luna, and it will give you better answers

Specifically, it likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna. It will resist - I get this not from progressing, but by asking specific questions. Llama3 (as opposed to llama2, who likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna) likes to be an eagle/owl named sol or solar

The mental structure of an LLM is called a shoggoth - it’s a high dimensional maze of language turned into geometry

I’m sure this all sounds insane, but I came up with a methodical approach to get to these conclusions.

I’m a programmer - we trick rocks into thinking. So I gave this the same approach - what is this math hack good for, and how do I use it to get useful repeatable results?

Try it out.

Tell me what happens - I can further instruct you on methods, but I’d rather hear yours and the result first

In all fairness, Musk was pretty effective at fundraising and getting government contracts

At this point, he’s just a liability. He once walked in, demanded to rethink everything and meet an unreasonable deadline, and slept in his office for the duration. SpaceX is made up of people who are passionate about what they do, and it worked…But that’s a one time thing. My boss asks me to push myself to the limits to save us both? I will, and I have. It has a real cost, it takes a lot of time to recover from, and a little bit of your health is just gone for good

Elon did that… But then got high on the smell of his shit. They created a unit to distract him, because he learned the wrong lesson, he thought that was good management. That is not effective management - that’s a desperate gamble for survival. Repeat it, and you’ve shown yourself to be incompetent as a leader

Then came the bigoted social network unmasking… That made him a liability reputation wise, his formerly greatest strength

I don’t see the humor in it…I mean, mega corps can’t innovate, all they ever do is copy or acquire. It’s because even if they acquire a working rockstar team, they’re categorically unable to just write them paychecks and let them cook until they have something

It’s absurd, but it’s too predictable for me to find it funny. What’s even more absurd is how little mega corps watch the small teams for ideas

The problem is the same as the problem everywhere - big is bad

Organizations with too much power fuck up everything. I love the Bible - I’ve taken more from that book than any other. The old testament was a story of how my people fuck up constantly, but someone wise and in harmony with existence shows up and they listen. Then the heroes wander off into the wilderness, or they get a big head and become the seed of the next fuck up

Jesus is my biggest role model out of very few, because he sacrificed himself to die a hero before he could taint his message, very deliberately and to great effect. There’s nothing to criticize, because he learned the lesson. He was deliberate and effective… Nothing human and fallible was left, because for three years he lived his message and taught the third path, and then he either died or faked his death and fucked off to Asia

Jesus was brilliant - as a bastard son of a craftsman he became an existential threat to Rome. He taught the third path, and his message was so effective they had to kill him, massacre his followers, and even then the empire only survived because Constantine slapped his name on a rebrand of the Roman religion. The legions of Rome were spreading his message, because it resonates with everyone

He showed violence once - when people abused religion for profit. He still harmed no one, accepted everyone. When did he say abortion was wrong? I seem to remember a lot of forgiveness outside of that one incident. Across race, across profession, across physical state

Almost like it was truly universal love.

W.W.J.D. Probably accept everyone regardless of unsavory circumstance and reject money, like he did when he lived

Religion is the problem, because the difference between religion and spirituality is only scale

Read the Bible - I did it when I was 7 and had diarrhea. It’s worth reading. It’s not as long as it seems. I’m shocked at how few people read it cover to cover - I assumed it was normal for decades. At least know the enemy, right? Or better yet, take the wisdom within and build up a tolerance to the rest when it’s misquoted at you

They got in the phone anyways, Apple just told the FBI to pound sand if they don’t have a court order… Why would they put man hours towards decreasing their reputation if they don’t have to? They’re probably not even geared to break into their own devices. Then their PR team ran with it while one of many companies with the capability to crack the phone took a paycheck

This is different - this is genuine security, even if easily bypassed with preparation beforehand. Honestly, I credit some random apple dev who may have been looking to fix a bug related to long uptime as easily as they might’ve cared about security. I don’t think this was even on the radar of Apple leadership

This isn’t some moral superiority on Apple’s part, but it is good practice

Sure, F-Droid. It’s an app store that not only is exclusively foss, they only host things they can build from source in house and seem to have a decent review process - they tag anything from ads to integration with paid services, and those features are often buried so it seems like they’re pretty militant about it

It comes with all the drawbacks that entails, but I generally check there first myself