unignorant
Joined 17 years ago
Joined 17 years ago
You don't persist the state of the full image continuously to the host disk, but any given state (new programs, new runtime state, filesystem) can be saved via a delta, not a full rewrite, due to this representation.
So this is a little different than what you are talking about, but I'd say it's possible.
The major design decision I'm a little skeptical about is removing variable names; it would be interesting to see empirical data on that as it seems a bit unintuitive. I would expect almost the opposite, that variable names give LLMs some useful local semantics.
So both things can be true: the more important bottlenecks remain, but progress on discovery work has been very exciting.
I enjoy writing so a system like this would never replace that for me. But for someone who doesn't enjoy writing (or maybe can't generate work that meets their bar in the Ira Glass sense of taste) I think this kind of setup works okay for generating flash even with today's models.
From there you have a second prompt to generate a story that follows those details. You can also generate many candidates and have another model instance rate the stories based on both general literary criteria and how well the fit the prompt, then you only read the best.
This has produced some work I've been reasonably impressed by, though it's not at the level of the best human flash writers.
Also, one easy way to get stuff that completely avoids the "smell" you're talking about by giving specific guidance on style and perspective (e.g., GPT-5 Thinking can do "literary stream-of-consciousness 1st person teenage perspective" reasonably well and will not sound at all like typical model writing).
Substack: https://ethanfast.substack.com