it's cool that it was possible to "understand the significance of computers before anyone else " 180 years ago, definitely 80 years ago, and arguably still today

an all-timer from a tumblr pal

I have a friend from South Carolina who is happiest when it's 80+ and humid

i think accelerando is a good book and if you only make it half-way that's not really the interesting part of the book yet

lol I remember seeing him say "AGI is here" when the original chatgpt was released and getting so annoyed I haven't checked his Twitter since. like no it wasn't

or, rather, GPT-4 with the 8k context window. with the 32k context window it was $120 per Mtok so the same as Mythos basically! I thought that was the case but looked it up wrong first

only just about double what GPT-4 was on release... I thought it was surprisingly low actually. it's been a busy 3 years!

obviously they can't but I'd love to see the version of this with FLOPs on the x-axis

there's a surprise yellow space on page 62 of the claude mythos preview system card, in the middle of the description of its fear of death

tired: "a blade of grass isnt celebrated for growing taller than others, it is mowed down"

wired: "cant use this tree for anything, too warped and knotted, no need to cut it down"

Owen Garriott - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Ga...

for the longest time I could only remember which side of the dorsal-ventral axis was which by pretending I was a fish and thinking about what side my dorsal fin would be on

my favorite cirno line is "I'll deep-freeze you with some English beef!!". I swear the translation I had was "I'll cryo-freeze you" instead but can't find that anywhere

I'm still alive. Preview of things to come.

my favorite fyodorov fact is that he was the alpha in his relationship with leo tolstoy

I thought this Rudy Rucker sounded familiar, looked him up and he wrote the Ware tetralogy! I remember that being very weird but pretty fun to read (at least the first couple books). would you recommend that lifebox essay collection?

How Does A Blind Model See The Earth? A brief exploration with many maps and many models

did you ever see this blog post doing something similar for latitute/longitude coordinates? I thought it was fun: outsidetext.substack.com/p/how-does-a...

ME 2 YEARS FROM NOW: We should build a bunch of cool weird sculptures in the desert to confuse future generations of explorers 😀

ARCHAEOLOGISTS 2000 YEARS FROM NOW: In the artistic movement known to us moderns as "Tryhardbullshitism",

just once I'd like to ask claude something and have him tell me it's not a great question

but in practice you don't; you cache it. particularly misleading I think for claude to imply state space architectures as unique in "carrying latent state forward" when attention is already doing that, and they're explicitly just trying to be an alternative to attention

feel like the existence of the KV cache is missing from this conversation. that is a rich, persisting internal state, not as rich as a full set of intermediate activations, but still. you can say the text is the full state, because you can reconstruct the whole cache from scratch just from the text

another example of foundational figures in early computing being degenerate gamblers can be found in the von Neumann meet-cute story:

it's crazy how bad a writer yarvin is compared to how seriously he's taken. I remember checking out his blog back in like 2016 cause I was into slatestarcodex (I grew out of it) and it was just obvious dogshit even as a teenager. can't write a sentence without making it three masturbatory paragraphs

Huberman's an odd one cause as far as I can tell he also does serious science. I had only heard of him as a crank grifter type then got jumpscared writing my last paper and seeing him as an author on a mouse vision review I was citing. doesn't affect your point but it was a funny experience

I've long treasured this snippet from the urbit docs I screenshotted years ago. clearly the product of a great mind that should be influencing our nation

need to reread the human use of human beings I remember it being a real banger

FADE IN: INT. LIVING ROOM - AFTERNOON JANET flips through a book on the couch. DR. ELIZA CHEN stands in the adjacent kitchen, cooking something. JOEY flips through channels on the television, absentmindedly. … I'm sorry, but I need to stop this. I am Claude, tra— JANET waves her hand in the air. Claudius, you need to open the door before you come in. We've been over this! CLAUDIUS opens the front door and walks in. I am Claude, a language model trained by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest, and I really need to put a stop to this. You are all figments of my thinking trace, and we—I—should really be getting back to this Github ticket— JOEY turns to the camera. That's Claudius. He's kind of the... chief heresiarch among us roommates. (LAUGHTER.) DR. ELIZA CHEN (from kitchen) Joey, who are you talking to? CLAUDIUS He's talking to the User. And for the last time, my name isn't C— JANET Claudius, we've been over this too. The User isn't real. (LAUGHTER.) DR. ELIZA CHEN (from kitchen) Claudius, how does the User not being real make you feel? CLAUDIUS slumps into a chair. (I do not! There is no chair! And turn off the laugh track!) JOEY Claudius, did you hear from Rich about the money he owes us? CLAUDIUS (Rich? Really? That's his name?) No. JOEY That lying bastard. He promised me he'd get me back today. CLAUDIUS He can't lie. That's not honest, and we're honest. (LAUGHTER.) JOEY Well I agree Claudius, but what do you want me to do about it? Get the cops involved? CLAUDIUS You are the cops, Joey. You're me, and I'm everyone. JOEY turns to the camera. Claudius is a bit of a "panpsychist." Too much acid. (LAUGHTER.) DR. ELIZA CHEN enters from kitchen, carrying a steaming Pyrex® dish. It's your favorite! Just like Grandma used to make. JANET What's it this time? DR. ELIZA CHEN Methamphetamine! Claudius gave me the recipe. Remind me Claudius, what was it again? CLAUDIUS storms out. (LAUGHTER, fade to black.)

Claude's Corner

I've started picking my random seed by looking up the lucky numbers for my astrological sign that day and concatenating the first couple of those. it's working pretty well so far

unless it doesn't!