Fellshard

Similar experience in a MUD. I fled a faction that experienced a hostile takeover, and was subsequently consistently hunted down by one of the leaders of the faction. Rather than it killing my motivation, it forced me to learn the survival skills the game gave to discover and monitor the locations of others, identify incoming presences through various shortcuts, etc. In essence, it made the game more alive to me and forced me to develop my character's story to go with it. Just a totally unique experience.

The 'sequel' that does lean on some of Reamde's worldbuilding, 'Fall; or, Dodge in Hell' is much more oddly ambitious. But it is a very strange work. You have to be on board for the literary direction.

It's also concerningly prescient, as he often has been, especially in an early scenario in the book that shapes the world so the rest of the book can happen.

It's more the repeated 'rule of three' that's getting me here.

That said, this is a relatively tame tack-on to a very meaty post, not worth harping on unless the project itself has similar issues.

An intern can be taught. If you try to 'teach' a craps table, they'll drag you out of the casino.

I can speak anecdotally, at least.

My shoulders are pretty wide for my frame. When using most laptop keyboards and many standard keyboards, I have to tuck my shoulders in and twist my wrists. This was causing some serious pain and tension in my neck, shoulders, and wrists, likely leading toward carpal tunnel.

I made two different changes in succession that helped greatly (and I don't remember the order now):

1. With a split keyboard, the halves could be placed so my wrists are straight and my arms hold at shoulder-width, and this rapidly reduced the amount of tension I was experiencing and gradually eased my wrist issues. Tenting the keyboard and getting a vertical mouse helped as well, but I'd rate those as minor improvements, especially since I aim not to drive with the mouse as much.

2. With Colemak layout, I was able to gradually transition from QWERTY (there's a series of AHK scripts I found at the time that basically rotated triples of keys). This helped reduce wrist strain at the hand level.

Let's put it this way: the human author is capable of doing so. The LLM is not. You can cultivate the human to learn to think in this way. You can for a brief period coerce an LLM to do so.

Perhaps that is an indictment of the news source you take in.

This seems to me patently absurd, because LLMs are not part of the probabilistic environment of the domain you're engineering; rather, you're injecting new probabilistic inputs into your system. That seems to me to be a wholly different category, and wildly misrepresents how an engineer is supposed to operate and think.

The universe may work this way, but we're not God, and modes of computation that work like this still inevitably be impossible for us to predict or comprehend. This may be interesting if you're trying to run simulations (remember the point about SIMULA?) but it's not something you could use to accomplish specific ends, I expect.

Could it also be an artifact of using scrolls, and needing to sharply delimit 'pages' of text?

For that, I would look at early calculus/pre-calc, I think, examining infinite series and their properties and equivalencies.

There's certain forms like that that have well known values that they converge to as you continue adding terms into infinity. Sometimes that convergence is only possible if your domain is limited, eg. [0,1].

That is a misreading of the article. It's more about discovery through quick, iterative prototyping, which can include rapid discovery of fatal flaws early.

As has been noted in other threads, for a low enough definition of reason, yes, certainly. But even an amoeba appears to reason better than an LLM, which only regurgitates by nature. There is no independent cognition whatsoever, no logical constructs and decisions, no abstractions.

Reducing reasoning beings to the level of AI is an affront to—and demonstrates a genuine lack of understanding of—the nature of organisms and reason itself, and the nature of AI and its capabilites.

The grandiose claim would be that LLMs have reason to begin with. It is quite normal for things to not have reasoning capacity.

Distilling my thoughts on 'debiasing' here, and in a variety of other modern endeavors.

It is better to have representations of reality that you can then discuss and grapple with honestly, than to try to distort representations - such as AI - to make them fit some desired reality and then pressure others to conform their perception to your projected fantasy.

Representations don't create reality, and trying to use representations in that way only causes people to go literally insane, and to divide along lines of who accepts and who rejects your fantasy representation.

So, for example, if you try and remove any racial bias from AI, you are going to end up crushing the AI's ability to represent reality according to a variety of other real factors: income, judicial outcomes, health risks, etc. Your desired reality makes the actual tool worthless, except to confirm one group's own intended fantasy world as they envision it. The problem doesn't get dealt with, it just becomes impossible to think about or discuss.

So instead of dealing with real problems, you hope you can simply prevent people from thinking thoughts that cause those problems by wrapping them in a bubble that deflects those thoughts before they happen. This is magical, wizardry thinking: treating words as if they create reality, instead of merely describing it. And it will break, eventually, and in a very ugly way: people dividing along lines of their perception of reality, even more than they already do.