chr15m

Anthropic's missing last quarter results in a nutshell.

> Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially?

Surely it's obvious?

Slop cannons firing at a rate so high no human can hope to restrain them.

Such a colossal volume of slop that even the most well engineered, efficient technology on the planet, written by one of the greatest coders of all time, is no longer sufficient to contain it.

I understand https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/ uses an LLM under the hood each time a novel combination happens.

Godspeed, sir.

It's probably trained in a video game-like environment.

A sultry saxophone riff would free me from the human condition & constant struggles. Come on Genie!

Heck yes, Minecraft is very good for this! Highly hackable. I'm so grateful it exists so we can get more people excited in computers and computation and hacking and building.

Minecraft worlds also have low Kolmogorov complexity and high logical depth, producing these incredible complex worlds from a seed and a relatively small program. Just that observation is drilled into every player's experience in a visceral way and I think it's a useful thing for more people to know and appreciate. A kind of intuition for complexity and compressibility.

You raise a great point. The kids are alright!

Will check out your threads.

[Like you I also worry about short form video, but I note that in the past humans have got bored of these types of addictions so you might find we see it waning at some point.]

Such a good show. My kids grew up on it!

Wow cool!

Happy days. I think Prince of Persia is one of the only games I beat.

Did you ever play Another World by Erich Chahi? Still one of the greatest games and still good today.

I am lucky that weather is not a problem here, and yes we are grid connected. So I am 100% net positive on solar inference with 5kW.

Conan the Barbarian and Below the Root on our Apple IIe. Tiny worlds behind the glowing Orange CRT. How do I make something like this? My mum (lol) helped me figure out how to get keyboard input in BASIC. I made a little game where an O character chases your X character around the screen. Core game loop. Browsing pirate CGA games at the warung in Pondok Indah, well outside the jurisdiction of US law. Glorious rack upon rack of tiny worlds to explore. Death Track and Prince of Persia. More BASIC and that gorilla throwing bananas. Later on the Multiline BBS. Talking late into the night with tech weirdos twice my age. All manner of mind bending ideas. Newsgroups. Punks and skaters and cypherpunks. Predicting what was coming, seeing the future we expected unfolding. Downloading Commander Keen over FTP. WinSock and Netscape. My first homepage. Downloading Linux and getting it running. Configuring XFree86 modelines all night lol. Turbo Pascal and VAX VMS at uni. My first job coding. Hacking out web backends in gnarly ass Perl. No databases just blatting and slurping comma delimited text files lol. Getting paid to do the most exciting thing there was to do, all day. Magic.

You only need about 1kW to run a local inference machine. Even a 5kW array is overkill if you are using it during sunlight hours.

This could be significantly cheaper if they used a different model.

Yes, thanks!

People who are already using LLMs to drive Clojure REPLs say it works well (see #ai-driven-development on the Clojure Slack). I don't think forgetting which cells have been run is a problem with the described set up.

Interesting that you choose "regressive" as the opposite of progressive. thinking emoji

Damn good.

Yes but we're all biased differently. It's a rich palette.

Although LLMs are not deterministic in normal operation (because of the temperature values used) they are still strongly biased in their outputs. Bias in their outputs is literally how they function.

So you get a different type of conformism where people who interact with LLMs a lot are going to be influenced towards the median, as encoded in those token probability look up tables.

The effect is basically the same as what Heidegger and Illich were worried about, and I think we're seeing it happen already everywhere.

A solution(?) is to try to be your true weird authentic self when you act in the world, rather than bending your words and behaviours to the machine and LLM probability shape.

Gish gallop. Harder to argue with.

Software developers love complexity. They love to construct huge beautiful towers of the stuff.

Also it's the code version of this old phrase: ("I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter") https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

Changing banks is incredibly annoying but this might be a reason to consider it.

I have also faced this issue with banks and their frustrating authentication issues. Not to mention proprietary app requirements.

The harness is using my own project "runprompt" which you can find here:

https://github.com/chr15m/runprompt

That has a bunch of Python tools for things like adding to TODO list, notes, looking stuff up, etc.

Things I use the private inference machine on my local network for:

- Running queries on bank transaction data to figure out our home budget, savings and spending rates, etc. I don't want this data in the hands of AI companies.

- Joplin note-taking app LLM integration for searching, creating, summarizing notes. This is my private notebook and I don't want it leaking.

- Termux based phone assistant. I can use voice to ask it to add something to the shopping list or my notebook. Much faster than pulling up the app. Especially useful when out walking. Like a low-key home-grown Siri. I'm adding more skills to this as I need them.

- Building a little robot character in our home that people can use to ask weather etc. This is mostly an experiment so far.

- Various other one-off use-cases and experiments. Recently I've been testing out Clef which is like a self-hosted Jev that can read images. Response time of 300ms it's wild! Haven't found a use for it yet.

Yep, home made. It's not online. I will publish it at some point, but it's a very simple web app you could put together pretty easily.

Here's what it looks like: https://mccormick.cx/gfx/blogref/priority-dashboard.png

The projects are stored in a YAML file with entries for name, source, and desired frequency.

Then the script just ranks them by how overdue they are relative to the desired frequency.

The source field can point to an RSS feed (for YouTube and blog), a git working folder, or any other type of folder. It basically checks if there's anything new depending on the source type and that's how it knows something has been worked on.

For house maintenance tasks you could simply tap to mark something as "I did this today" and have it save to localStorage or whatever.

> extremely buggy alpha state

I'm curious about this part. As a user you're finding them extremely buggy - what kind of bugs are you seeing?

It sounds like you're expecting the bugs to be ironed out in six months. I guess I'm wondering if the same process that led to buggy software in the first place can actually be used to get rid of the bugs without creating more.

An uncompromising minority has surprising power. See Nassim Taleb's idea of assymetric minority rule.

Passkeys are only one kind of 2FA.

Yes, banks are particularly bad at this because their threat model is strong.

My bank required installing an authenticator, but apparently recently they've allowed SMS based 2FA. It seems users complained/resisted and they had to accommodate them. Maybe you should give feedback to your bank. Be the uncompromising minority.

I think 2FA is fine and a good idea, but I agree with the author that passkeys seem fraught as designed.

If you don't like passkeys the solution is very simple. Resist using them. As long as a significant minority resist and refuse, they will have to keep other types of auth around.

Just want to say, what an incredible vision. Congratulations and thanks for sharing!