But all numbers are abstractions, there is nothing “real” (pun unintended) about any number, so it seems strange to me to judge certain numbers on whether they map to our physical reality.
Very interesting project! The Roman world really comes alive this this.
A pet peeve of mine though (and a bit OT):
I know it is not your fault, since this is inbuilt behavior, but I cannot for the life of me understand why almost all map widgets now have this behavior when as you are scrolling the whole page and happen to go over the map, suddenly the scrolling motion is used to zoom out the map, which thus quickly collapses into a thumbnail or a dot. It always drives me nuts when it occurs, a total fail of a UI/UX design. What was wrong with pinching to zoom out??
Not sure, but I think Google Map started this trend. I wonder if these map widget designers actually test the interaction with actual users.
Our minds and intuitive logic systems are too feeble to grasp how free will can be a thing.
It's like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a well educated person or scientist from the 16th century without the benefit of experimental evidence. No way they'd believe you. In fact, they'd accuse you of violating basic logic.
Yes, but that is not an illusion. There's a reason I am perceiving something this was vs that other way. Perception is the most fundamental reality there is.
And yet that perception is completely flawed! The narrative part of your brain will twist your recollection of the past so it fits with your beliefs and makes you feel good. Your senses make stuff up all the time, and apply all sorts of corrections you’re not aware of. By blinking rapidly, you can slow down your subjective experience of time.
There is no such thing as objective truth, at least not accessible to humans.
When I used the word illusion, I meant the illusion of a self, at least a singular cohesive one as you are pointing out. It is an illusion with both utility and costs. Most animals don't seem to have meta cognitive processes that would give rise to such an illusion, and the ones that do are all social. Some of them have remarkably few synapses. Corvids for instance, we are rapidly approaching models the size of their brains and our models have no need for anything but linguistic processing, the visual and tactile processing burdens are quite large. An LLM is not like the models Corvids use, but given the flexibility to change it's own weights permanently, plasticity could have it adapt to unintended purposes, like someone with brain damage learning to use a different section of their brain to perform a task it wasn't structured for (though less efficiently).
> The narrative part of your brain will twist your recollection of the past so it fits with your beliefs and makes you feel good.
But that's what I mean. Even if we accept that the brain has "twisted" something, that twisting is the reality. In order words, it is TRUE that my brain has twisted something into something else (and not another thing) for me to experience.
Let's be careful of creating different classes of consciousness, and declaring people to be on lower rungs of it.
Sure, some aspects of consciousness might differ a bit for different people, but so long as you have never had another's conscious experience, I'd be wary of making confident pronouncements of what exactly they do or do not experience.
You can take their word for it, but yes, that is unreliable. I don't typically have an internal narrative, it takes effort. I sometimes have internal dialogue to think through an issue by taking various sides of it. Usually it is quiet in there. Or there is music playing. This is the most replies I have ever received. I think I touched a nerve by suggesting to people they do not exist.
I get you somewhat, but remember, you do not have another consciousness to compare with your own; it could be that what others call an internal narrative is exactly what you are experiencing; it just that they choose to describe it differently from you
I'm not the one who made a list of things AI couldn't do. Every time we try to exclude hypothetical future machines from consciousness, we exclude real living people today.
So you think there is "consciousness", and the illusion of it? This is getting into heavy epistemic territory.
Attempts to hand-wave away the problem of consciousness are amusing to me. It's like an LLM that, after many unsuccessful attempts to fix code to pass tests, resorts to deleting or emasculating the tests, and declares "done"
> In other words, healthier people live longer. Nothing "unique" or surprising in this article that I could find.
Did you really read the article to the end? because it explores interesting questions beyond simply "healthier people live longer".
From the article:
> Some questions researchers have long pondered is whether one of the keys to a centenarian's resilience mainly lies in their ability to postpone major diseases, or whether they're simply better at surviving them. Or, could it be that they avoid certain diseases altogether?
Yes I did. This is the same question I'm pondering:
What is it that causes some people to not get chronic cardiovascular and metabolic disease?
Hence my comment honing in on what are the likely biggest causes of these diseases and thus how to avoid getting them.
I agree with the article actually that figuring out how to be healthy, ergo how to avoid these diseases, is a good way to live a longer healthier life. I was just saying it's not surprising or unique.
The agents instructions file needs to be hierarchical; It's a pain managing multiple agents.md files with a lot of duplication between them for different projects, even in a mono-repo. we probably need a tool for this.
In any case, I increasingly question the use of an agents file. What's the point, then the agent forget about them every few prompt, and need to be constantly reminded to go through the file again and again?
Another thought: are folks committing their AGENTS.md? If so, do you feel comfortable with the world knowing that a project was built with the help of AI? If not, how do you durably persist the file?
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