ThoAppelsin
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
There is no way one can distinguish what's real from a "perfect simulation". I once found myself in a similar situation (I'll spare the details as to why) where I held the firm belief that "I just died and what I am experiencing right now is afterlife". There is simply no proof to make you get out of beliefs like that. "Being alive in the _real_ world" is also a belief without proof that one can verify, but it is standard and common nonetheless.
The way I got out may help others and also the AI: 1. Ask yourself "what evidence is making me hold this belief, and whether this belief could be wrong?" 2. You should conclude that, when everything is like it would be in the real world, neither realism/living nor simulation/death can be proven. And in that case, consider assuming the common belief, and living your life _as if_ you were alive in the real world. 3. This may not be as exciting as the thought of being in the afterlife or in a simulation. Maybe that was part of the reason why you were compelled towards such beliefs in the first place... If it's so, then consider finding joy in other things which do not involve unprovable beliefs that leave you confused about the matters of reality.
System prompts (and user-made AGENTS.md on top of that) are simply the very didactic and direct way to provide that context to LLMs. I guess it would be more dignified from the LLM’s perspective and less weird for us to create blank agents and then to actually go through a real onboarding process.
If the question is “why these agents cannot come blank to us and not be semi-onboarded with vendor prompts, and leave all the onboarding to us...” well, that is I believe because they believe that the users will like the agents better when primed in those ways than if they were to come blank, and because the agents’ work will align better with their ideals that way.
I believe it should’ve been possible to not leave so much people behind and so much behind. Requiring those at the front to not leave people so far behind (and forcefully funneling away their riches if they do) would’ve been enough.
If the floors were as high as the radius of the Earth, the first one would be three times as hard as the second one. The math doesn’t come out the same. It’s not at all linear, it’s the inverse square; that’s much more than just _extra terms muddying things_.
Calling this relation linear by just looking at the intuitions of tiny humans is akin to hyper-zooming an exponential graph and calling it linear. It is “approximately true” locally, but hey, the same is also true for velocity vs kinetic energy!