patrickscoleman

- a model of your environment - desires - a process for modeling yourself in that environment (in time & space) - the ability to take action - the perception of yourself having agency - persistence of these processes even without input - unawareness of these processes (i.e. naive realism)

If you consider these LLM-based agents, they:

- are aware of their chat environment - have programmed desires - are aware of themselves acting in their environment - can take actions like search, tool calling, etc. - understand they can take these actions - DO NOT persist after they stop getting user input - DO NOT believe they are conscious (or at least they are programmed to deny it)

This is a functionalist take (and you may disagree with my definition), but while I don't think these current AI agents are conscious, I feel like there's conceptually no reason someone couldn't build a conscious AI very soon.

[1] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/thomas-metzinger/th... & https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262633086/being-no-one/

Comment · 7 months ago

we have a crt tv with built in vhs in our office and have a bunch of old tapes

one is “Mastering Windows 3.1”

it’s fun to run in the background while working

for your enjoyment, here’s a similar 3.1 tutorial video from that era uploaded to YouTube

https://youtu.be/KRi5mjMgORk?si=OFH7UhOQif5EUCtg

Comment · 7 months ago

Acquisition as marketing

Comment · 9 months ago

I really love how Kosho Uchiyama describes meditation with the metaphor "opening the hand of thought"

https://wisdomexperience.org/product/opening-hand-thought/

Comment · 11 months ago

I'll jump in too. Also started coding with HTML in Neopets and then joined the middle school's programming club! We were playing around with C++ and Visual Basic. Love seeing these updates!

Comment · 11 months ago

If you haven't already, you can turn off your YouTube watch history, which stops all recommendations. It makes it way less addicting.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725

Comment · 1 year ago

The worst customer support experiences of my life have been from Google, both while using Google Fi personally and GCP while working at Replit in its early days. Thankfully I'm no longer using either of those products now.

Comment · 1 year ago

Only tangentially on-topic, but I do all the financial modeling for the past several (early stage) startups I've worked for in Google Sheets.

The ease, collaboration/sharing, and array formulas win out over the faster speed for calculations, better shortcuts, cross-workbook linking, and customization in Excel.

That said, it's been a few years since I've tried Excel so would love to hear someone convince me to try it again.

Comment · 1 year ago

Check out the work from the meditation research lab at Harvard [1] for more

[1] https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/

Comment · 1 year ago

Great read. We've been seeing some wild emergent behavior at Rime (tts voice ai) too, e.g. training the model to <laugh> and it being able to <sigh>.

Comment · 1 year ago

I recently picked up Mirrorshades and The Big Book of Cyberpunk (edited by Jared Shurin) [1]

Will check this one out too!

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700576/the-big-book...

Comment · 1 year ago

Came here to say this, thanks.

Only thing to add is that I like the "inbox" feature in Todoist (plus a single catchall project). I get overeager during the day and add a bunch of stuff. The inbox makes it easy for me to mostly just remove things I won't actually do but then file away the stuff I might for later.

I've put weekly chores into a single recurring task and do them on Sundays or kick back another day or two (or just skip) if I'm busy.