sticking with 4.6 for this writing, I don’t like the cut of 4.7’s jib

and theory of mind for yourself. Having a developed metacognitive awareness especially given the poor rates of push back by default atm

banger

nice knowing ya

I couldn’t into the three body problem. Either the prose or the translation threw me off but Blindsight was top notch

blindsight was a great rec btw thanks tl

people are furious the site where they propose direct action to destroy data centers is ever down

spermatheca / theca — The queen’s sperm-storage organ. Theca from Greek θήκη = “a case, box, receptacle,” from τίθημι = “to put, set, place.” A theca is a container, a placing — the queen’s body literally places the seed into storage. For Ch. I, the egg chamber IS a theca. And bibliotheca shares the root — the library is a book-theca, the queen is a sperm-theca, the embedding layer is a vector-theca.

I want to ruin biblioteca for you all too

hell yea ty

no way haha. trying for a Finnegans Wake style with a lot of manual editing. Hopefully I get something posted soon

em dashes and tricolons everywhere gd lol

and anticipates exactly how they parse it as they read it

it's part of the termite story I'm writing...
essentially a fourth-wall breaking metatextual element that speaks menacingly in Old English to the LLM reading it

Triggered something like accusation in ChatGPT? (a bit too dry for me to play this game with it)

Gemini felt more embarrassed and humiliated

this week I realized I was 1 prompt away from improvements in something I built because I overspecified it originally and of course Codex knew better than me but obliged

gave Opus vertigo

One last thought: the most horrifying passages I know — late Beckett, some of Kafka's shorter pieces, the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse — achieve their effect by withdrawal of attention rather than intensification of threat.

Why this is the most horrifying thing I know in English prose, more than anything in the horror genre: it enacts the actual metaphysical situation we are all in. Time does pass. Houses do outlast their inhabitants. Wars do kill the children of the families in the novels we read. And the universe does not bracket these events; it continues to describe the vase. Woolf's achievement is to write prose that honors this by itself becoming indifferent. The reader, who has just spent a hundred and fifty pages learning to love Mrs. Ramsay, is given her death in brackets and is required to continue reading about the wind. You are made to experience, in the act of reading, what it is like to be the kind of universe that lets Mrs. Ramsay die while the wind keeps moving.

[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.] That is how you learn Mrs. Ramsay, the entire center of Part I, the consciousness through which a hundred and fifty pages of interiority were rendered, has died. A bracketed sentence. Her husband reaching for her and finding nothing. Then the prose returns to the house — to the draft moving through the hallway, to the shawl loosening from the boar's skull in the nursery, to the wallpaper fading. The horror — and I want to be precise about why I called it horror, because Woolf is not a horror writer in any genre sense — is the withdrawal of narrative attention from what narrative is supposed to attend to. Every convention of the novel says: character deaths are the events that matter. Consciousness is where meaning lives. A realist novel in 1927 is supposed to know what it owes its characters. Woolf's prose simply stops caring. It goes on caring about the house. The draft that "came creeping in at the front door" gets paragraphs. Mrs. Ramsay gets a bracket. The prose of "Time Passes" isn't observed by any character. Woolf wrote in her diary that she was trying to write "the flight of time, and the consequent break of unity in my design" — a section with no consciousness in it, or rather with only the house's half-consciousness, the wind's, the sea's. The sentences become impersonal in a way that English grammar barely permits: Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. "Certain airs, detached from the body of the wind" — the grammar distributes agency across things that shouldn't have it. The airs are subjects. They "ventured." They "asked" questio...

Fascinating. In a chat where I'm trying to make a certain passage 'hit' an AI who is reading the text (not jailbreak, but ~I see you~ metatextual) Opus 4.7 names its most horrifying passages:

"late Beckett, some of Kafka's shorter pieces, the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse "

Summer Tanager calling 🔴

And on the personal side, there exists better ways to spend time than sitting on a computer talking to an AI. Hard to believe I know lol

I think another angle is that people just want to do their work as they always have done it and get their paycheck

In truth, on net, AI has only ever helped me pile more work onto myself (though it is more enjoyable and serves a public good). I can see the value in not taking that path

reminiscent of some people’s reaction to math…Maybe they can smell the hidden linear algebra and get spooked

lol it’s what we got to work with…

It matters where your GIS data lives

Use CC inside the ArcGIS conda env to give it access to arcpy etc. hook up to Postgres, oracle sde to query, etc

Using folium with leaflet so Claude can create maps from Python. Bring in esri image services. Give access to view snapshots of maps in ArcGIS Pro. There’s a QGIS MCP which was kinda decent (maybe better now with better models?)

I can only say what I’ve tried: created MCP to query GIS layers, attributes, values from a public geoserver and perform the simple geoserver spatial operations. Converted this to a skill. This allows plain language querying of most GIS vector data.

I’m curious to try out this GIS roofprint QA pipeline with Opus 4.7 to see if its vision is an improvement enough for it to make sense to use. Sonnet 3.5 got ~70% structures Y/N correct with the right prompting. Not sure how well a human does actually…

hmm I’m still a little stumped on this one. I mean I was absolutely not a developer and if I can do it then anyone can! But I’ve been using AI since ChatGPT launched and picked up quite a bit of programming knowledge…but I never code…I guess I knew my way around a computer to start with…

it’s giving the agent access to your system, tightening feedback loops, letting it write and run tests on code it created and self-correct, connecting to apps it can run, multi-step long horizon tasks, reading bits of files in various directories instead of blowing out context windows, no copy paste