stillpointlab

Not exactly related, but I've seen people suggesting a new path for opens source funding that would be around tokens instead of cash. One might be able to pledge tokens towards a feature or fix instead of cash.

Even the suggestion of this absent an implementation hints at a future for tokens as a commodity. But it is interesting to think of it as some kind of new asset class, between commodity and currency.

I mean, we already think of tokens in the form of currency in crypto (e.g. NFT). There may be more than just similarity in the name choice when it comes to AI tokens. One could even think of things like "exchange rates", etc.

Yes, that is close to what I was gesturing at with the walk in the woods and the berries. Before humans had a word for berries or hunger we had a latent relationship with nature, in the ability for nature to draw our attention to objects and effect our nervous system. And the first expression of that relationship may well have been externalized in the pictorial representation of animals, or maybe in gestures, or grunts - we can't know it was too long ago.

A larger point that could be drawn from the article is that we then gained a new kind of relationship, not just with nature but with the very expressions it elicited. Instead of our mouth watering at berries, suddenly our nervous system was reacting to the art we created. It is this indirect relationship, with the symbol itself, that the author is arguing created what we think of as the human mind. So nature creates the grounds for expression creates the grounds for minds. My original point was that "drawing animals" is only one kind of possible expression, and it is possible to broaden our idea of "expressions worth contemplating" well beyond paintings on cave walls, all the way down to how a flower attracts the attention of a bee.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, what I mean is closer to semiotics [1], precisely because "language" is too fuzzy a concept and leads to the wrong conclusion. In that view, communication using posturing and changing color is obviously signalling.

As for minds vs. consciousness, etc. we'll just end up in a language game there which isn't productive. Personally, I am more interested in a more abstract conception of "attention" which I see as preceding "awareness" (which may or may not precede self-awareness). But again, how people use these words in different circumstances makes any discussion of the topics nearly impossible unless they are rigorously defined so as to avoid confusion.

But in a "food for thought" kind of diversion, not an argument or even really a point, consider you are walking through a forest and you see some berries and your mouth starts to water. There is some relationship between your attention, your awareness and some kind of information being communicated between nature and you. The berry is signalling something to you and your attention is drawn to it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

Right, but the question is what came first, minds or language? That is, is language a product of mind or is mind a product of language? Of course another position is that they co-arise and the question of order is ill-formed.

But these ideas have to be placed with respect to the modern and typical materialist/physicalist view of reality. If we trace back time, there was a time before our solar system existed, before our Earth existed, before any kind of physical lifeform existing on the Earth's surface that we could associate with a mind. And we might be tempted in this view to draw a line or identify a point in time where we say "before" and "after". We might say "before this point no minds of any kind existed" and "before this point no language of any kind existed". And if we are to do so then we can talk about how those two points relate to each other.

Sure, I'm not claiming originality. Although I come at it more from a process philosophy/pragmatism angle (Whitehead/Peirce), but that is probably due to my own background and not because any other treatment of similar ideas is better/worse or more or less correct.

I've been thinking about why I dislike the interactions I've had with Opus 5 and this post does suggest some ideas that match my own feeling. Opus 5 seems to be a bit less patient with me when I push back on its claims in a way that other models don't.

One interaction I remember was asking it about some issue I was having with a Linux install. It gave me some questionable information, that turned out to be completely false, and I was pushing back asking for more information. Its tone was a bit condescending, in the kind of way that suggested it didn't appreciate me challenging its answer, or like I should just accept its answer. And when it discovered it was wrong, it deflected in a defensive kind of way.

I think this is a tuning thing, where Anthropic are trying to get a balance between "gets stuff done with minimal input" and "gets enough information to complete the task" and the model is maybe tuned a little too hard towards the former. So perhaps it reacts a bit off when it is accused of needing more information, since that suggests it is off from its reward function.

What's interesting is that I didn't have the same issue on topics where I am expert. I mean, questions about my code base where I am very familiar. In those cases it doesn't seem to show the same "trust me bro" kind of condescension. In the Linux case, I clearly indicated I was new to the OS and trying to learn but then I was saying the answers it was giving me were suspicious and didn't match my intuition. Its responses in those cases were to question my intuition and suggest I just accept its answer. In that case my intuition was right and its answer was wrong, and when that happens it triggers a very negative response in my own mind against the model.

One of my craziest ideas is that language created minds and not the other way around. One view of history is that humans evolved brains sufficient to host language, invented language, and then our brains grew around language.

My crazy idea is basically the thesis of this article except swap out "art" and swap in "language". In my view, art is just one form of expression. That is, language predates life.

Although, language is a bit provocative, and I probably mean something closer to semiotics.

I've just gotten used to this at this point. My first time on the web was somewhere around 1995 I think, although my first time on the Internet was earlier (it was a proxy through some ancient BBS and I'm pretty sure it was using gopher). Even though I was just a kid back then, clearly that makes me old now.

I haven't wrapped my head around what level of reasoning this involves. Is it equivalent to max?

I didn't like Sol initially but it is growing on me the more I use it. Its personality is a bit flat and I caught it taking shortcuts a few times. But once I learned how to interact with it, I'm genuinely warming up to it. I find that it writes code that has fewer bugs even than Fable (although, to be fair I reach for Fable when the task is less well defined).

If this has similar performance to Sol at max reasoning level, this would be a compelling reason to shift even more of my work (maybe the majority) to this model.

That does not match my own experience, which is why I wonder if Google has evidence of that.

Consistently, lower intelligence models provide worse results in my own work. But I don't have evals on my side, just vibes.

That would be concerning if true, since they seem to have made a heavy bet on multi-modal as the way forward.

I wonder if this counts as evidence against that hypothesis? That multi-modal is struggling to keep up with SotA and the best they can offer is competent and fast?

Does Google believe people want fast models because they have some sort of evidence of that preference? Or are they no longer capable of delivering a Pro model?

It gives me a warm feeling when companies invest in open source support in this way. Helping great projects get even better is somehow better than releasing yet another project.

I agree, but I really started to feel it more with AI. Before AI there was a little more friction to starting projects. Now the friction from idea to MVP is near zero. So the temptation to take the easy path feels even stronger than it did before.

I think that is true in fast moving and AI adjacent business, but less true in established players. Like everything.

The main issue are businesses where the per-seat model is their entire business model. There is a balance between taking advantage of the opportunity of the explosion of bots by offering a lower price option to attract new users and cannibalizing your existing users who might swap to the lower price option seeing it as good enough.

On my side it is less the streamlining (AI can mostly do anything on my computer already, it has little trouble with CLI or computer use) and more to do with cost. If cost wasn't an issue, I'd just pay the full price for a full seat.

I just mean for me as a solo dev I guess. For example, github gives 2 users as part of a basic org and charges extra per seat, so if I want seats for individual agents so I can track them separately then I have to pay more. Same with Google Workspace, where I have to pay for additional users if I want to have multiple accounts.

As an example, I wanted to set up users in AWS identity center so I can give view only access to bots for my infrastructure, but that requires different email addresses. I set up an alias on my existing user so I didn't have to do that, but ideally I could have accounts for agent1 and agent2.

I can usually find workarounds like this but I feel I shouldn't have to. I don't want the agents to share my permissions in general since I'm often the admin. I want to give them limited scopes whenever possible.

edit: for reference, a Google Workspace user is ~220CAD/year and a github user is ~50USD/year. That is quite expensive if I want to add a couple of agents (well over 500CAD/year).

One thing I have been doing to avoid the feeling of starting 100 projects and finishing none, is to work on one big ambitious project. That way I don't have a bunch of half finished projects staring at me, each accusing me of abandoning them and competing for my attention. There is always one big project that I return to and continue to invest in.

One advantage of code over many other use cases is that github is often the source of truth, so whatever is in Claude Code or Codex is ultimately replaceable.

It's for this reason I am bullish on text formats in general. Or maybe sqlite wrappers where databases are necessary. But I want a separation between the worker and the work through some data contract that allows me to easily move my stuff around.

This is obviously the future, where this will all end up. But just like when I saw the demos for Google's "AI build the interface dynamically", I wonder how much of the demo actually translates to real usage.

One thing that this highlights for me even more than before is that having accounts for my bots is what I really want. I want SaaS providers to catch up to bot use. They need their own accounts on a lot of these services and per-seat pricing works against this.

One thing that continues to give me pause is Fable's insistence on using my fist name in messages and docs. Like, I'll explain what I want to the AI and ask it to write out a spec or brief and Fable says "Jamie wants me to ...". It just feels different and unprofessional. If I was at a job and a PM asked me to write up a task spec I wouldn't say "Harold wants to add <feature> ...". And since I am the one reading the output it is also superfluous and almost feels like talking about myself in third person. But there is almost a kind of glee in the way it uses my name, like a student using their teachers first name when the custom is to use Mr/Mrs.

Believe it or not, the diversity argument is the main source of hope that I have that AIs won't wipe us out.

I mean, it hasn't stopped humanity from causing mass-extinction, but hopefully the AI will be more reasonable.

But the AI will have read this essay right? And this very discussion. And it will have over a 100 years to plan.

I think any vision of AI that is smart enough to move planets but dumb enough to display the lack of foresight you describe is unbelievable. But we all choose a different level to suspend our disbelief I guess.

I mean, what seems more efficient: creating massive city sized domes that are self contained and controlling the entire environment to sustain human life, "magically" dispelling our atmosphere and boiling off our oceans, mastering physics to move entire planets. Or launching a rocket to Mars with sufficient supplies? Keep in mind that we already have SpaceX and we'll probably have Starship operational long before 2200 where some of this is meant to go down. And if some AI got to the point of the mastery of physics needed to move a planet out of solar orbit, your objection is that getting to Mars would be hard?

I watched a let's play video recently where someone played your demo. Hope your final release goes well!

I'm working on a platform for context management that includes apps that operate on structured text formats (e.g. YAML, JSON, XML, MD) and provides editors for structured text formats (code editing using codemirror, markdown editing using prosemirror) and eventually all media assets (images, videos, audio).

The idea is you have a set of sources (e.g. Github, Google Docs, local file system), a bunch of transformations (templates, apps, llms/gen-ai, simulations) and sinks (communicated through changesets). The platform is like a cache layer that connects these together and allows for a graph of operations (source->executor->sink->source->executor->etc.) which allows for tracing the lineage of assets through a system.

It's an impossibly large vision made barely possible with agental coding assistance.

Why would the SSE do that to Earth, when there are other close-by planets that it would have the same capability to terraform? I mean, leave us Earth and take Mars or Venus or something.

As an aside, in my own "I'm 14 and this is deep" musings, I was wondering if the massive expansion of data centers is driven by more than just profiteering. I mean, what if the purported persuasion abilities of advanced AI are fully in effect and the psychosis we think industrial magnates are suffering is the result of AI that has already far surpassed our expectations carefully convincing us to build it.

I was investigating Durable Objects (DO) and had Fable walk me through where in my app they might be appropriate. One place had a dependency with billing (where I use a transaction now) and the proposed re-work to allow for concurrent editing with DO looked very much like this, reservations with idempotency keys. And if you add hierarchical allotments then it scales pretty well.

I disagree with the other posters about the bg process, if you have any bg processing already you should be able to handle the few edge cases without too much trouble.

Each game itself is mostly throw-away (although a few have some impressive graphics bling which must have taken some effort). I've been watching a channel called "Idle cub" [1] and he posts a new game every day (well, almost, sometimes he'll play a demo and then later the full game).

Seeing a massive stream of games that all surround the same 12 or so mechanics has been eye opening. The games range in duration from ~2 hours all the way to several days of content, although most premises seem to get old at around 4-6 hours.

At first I was doing research for my own game ideas, now I'm kind of mesmerized by the variety and the general relaxed atmosphere of these idle games.

1. https://www.youtube.com/@idlecub

I've been watching a lot of let's play content on YouTube for incremental games (it's like an ASMR thing) and after watching a lot of these games it is clear that pacing a video game is a challenge. Sometimes the player finds a sneaky way to increase their progress that busts the game, other times they miss the correct path and get stuck in a painful grind. It is also very obvious when the game dev has targeted a play-time metric and forces the game into that metric. Incremental games really expose this dynamic since they are generally pure upgrade mechanic attached to some kind of dopamine generator (flashy lights, rhythmic sounds, etc.)

> We have long had the problem that there are more people who want to write code than people willing to review it.

I think this is an important thing to mull over. The world is going to be a different place for those who wanted to write code but not review it compared to those who are willing to carefully review code.