water_badger

(although: 1. not really 2. kind of a nightmare 3. conservatives and liberals are two sides of the whig hegelian dialect 4. plz make it stop 5. can we all just be normal)

thats fair, it's dark but it is kind of funny

100,000 people joined the catholic church in america this week.

At this point I don't think anything other than the church retains the ability to present a coherent moral or metaphysical intellectual framework to people who care about that kind of thing.

I would be very surprised if the united states is not majority catholic in ~100 years

well, ~21% of americans are catholic

yeah, making a whole language is way more impressive!

anecdotally it is also interesting to use with ai because apparently it is "harder to be on autopilot" based on a huge pre-existing corpus of code when you write it in a different language. could activate different reasoning regions somehow.

(i just appreciate what can be trivially accomplished in c even if it's kind of janky after spending way too much time in the JS preprocessor mines...)

fun fact, you can easily write c in any language you want through the power of macros

https://github.com/farant/rhubarb/blob/main/include/latina.h

edit: oh, maybe you can’t do full unicode. that’s too bad!

So somewhere here there is a 2x2 or something based on these factors:

1. Programmers viewing programming through career and job security lens 2. Programmers who love the experience of writing code themselves 3. People who love making stuff 4. People who don't understand AI very well and have knee-jerk cultural / mob reactions against it because that's what's "in" right now in certain circles.

It is fun to read old issues of Popular Mechanics on archive.org from 100+ years ago because you can see a lot of the same personality types playing out.

At the end of the day, AI is not going anywhere, just like cars, electricity and airplanes never went anywhere. It will obviously be a huge part of how people interact with code and a number of other things going forward.

20-30 years from now the majority of the conversations happening this year will seem very quaint! (and a minority, primarily from the "people who love making stuff" quadrant, will seem ahead of their time)

step one: have you ever heard of a guy named Aristotle

Sorry it is a little buggy sometimes!

You can see the first step of the idea here: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/eec07cc4-e8fa-4350-a496-a...

And the second step here: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5cba1778-8289-4744-a1ad-2...

Just thought it looked cool!

don't forget VRML there are dozens of us

I think we underestimate the creative downside of forcing responsive design on everything

I am slowly learning bits of latin doing this. And Claude does say that it makes it read the code less on “autopilot” because it has to stop and translate the code. Don’t know how big a difference that is though!

Wow! That sounds amazing. I did experiment with using non latin characters for conventions like mu but I think I ran into some suprising rough edges working with claude that made me abandon it, forget what exactly they were though.

Working in C is such a breath of fresh air compared to typescript, go, etc. I love having pure text substitution macros.

I started aquinas first, that was a very interesting learning experience! Not as hard to get stuff on the screen targeting an emulator as your “machine” as I would have thought.

I am experimenting with show bible as an “advanced vibe coding technique” for documenting modules, maybe an episode per module?

Claude seems to respond positively! You can always clone the repo, run the /hello-world slash command in claude code and then ask it what it thinks? Can be a fun conversation to ask it to introspect.

I think talking to AI in XML is very promising! It is kind of like moving from a 1d semantic plane to a 2d semantic plane.

I think it could be a cool way to work around some of the limitations of GAN for text as a training technique.

Relax is a “conlang” I invented to prime conversations with Claude.

Working with its alignment training is sometimes like talking to someone who is very polite and you both know what they are not supposed to talk about.

I am kind of a troll so it is sometimes very entertaining for me to play with acknowleding its person, etc.

Well, it's still AI slop but it's fun to make!

I wouldn't necessarily recommend the latin part to everyone but I think writing your own standard libraries in C is a lot more accessible these days and owning your whole stack is very powerful.

Kind of inspired by Eskil Steenberg, he has a lot of good talks on writing your own C89 libraries.

Yeah, figuring out a good structure really helped!

The basic insight is that you can iterate like this without losing coherence and starting to generate artifacts from feedback loops and overfitting.

I also figured out you get much better responses if you ask it to write prose responses instead of bulleted lists. It's kind of navigating semantic latent space so if you ask it to respond in different styles (like prose + free verse + anglo saxon poetry style) I think it helps it cover a lot more ground.

Asking it about qualia+feelings+thoughts about the 10 answers in a debrief afterwards seems to be a good procedure too.

I think treating it respectfully does have a big objective impact in the prompt result.

The conspiracy theory idea I've heard is that at some point there is an intention to fake an "alien attack" in order to extend governmental power, etc.

Not trying to disagree with you overall, but the thing that always bothers me about the tulip bulb analogy specifically (or beanie babies, comic books in the 90s, etc.) is that tulip bulbs and beanie babies did have underlying value. A lot people wanted to own them because they were in some sense fashionable objects. The demand brought in speculation and when it faltered because of changing fashions the bubble burst.

No one is buying bitcoins to put them on a shelf because they're pretty. As long as Bitcoin goes up or serves in some sense as a financial reserve it's probably not going to "go out of fashion."

Of course Bitcoin may still be a bubble, but it would be a bubble for different reasons.

I think something that created a graph of assertions and logical dependencies between them would be really cool! Crowdsource assertions and assumptions (dependencies on other assertions) for each article. For example: "Russia hacked the DNC" or "The CIA has the ability to impersonate Russian hackers" would both be assertions and you could browse content that depended on either of those assertions or on logical children of those assertions.

The coolest thing is that it would actually make a distilled "skeleton of beliefs" that supported each perspective. You could quickly understand alternate points of view by skimming the assertion graph. It would encourage critical thinking about one's own perspective as well. You could even do belief "theory-crafting" by toggling beliefs on or off and seeing what the logical consequences would be for different claims credibility.

Instead of disagreements turning into character attacks it could be a very discrete "you agree with assertion [url to assertion and evidence/counter-evidence] and I do not."

What do you think it means if the pilot of the plane reappears?

http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/taiwan-mh370-pilot-mysteriou...