The layman’s understanding I have of memory, as someone that has dealt with memory issues much of my life, is that memory formation is heavily tied to emotions. emotions are triggered by input which sends a complex set of signals throughout the brain - you’re not just finding where in your head to store this, your brain is deciding how important it is, and what else to correlate it with - so it can tie them to other related memories. then on top of all this, much of the sensory experience you intake is subconsciously compared against high priority memory impressions and deciding what to pay attention to.

you could, argue that the sensory input is the simple md files and the emotional mechanism is the same effect as to how attention mechanisms work in llm’s. Ok, I can almost buy that, but these tools lack a fundamental ability to decide how important things are.

an analogy. you tell a person “if you pick a daisy in the next five years, an assassin will come to kill you” and they hold a knife to your throat while they say it, your brain whether you like it or not is going to say “THIS IS AN IMPORTANT MEMORY I NEVER MUST FORGET” and you’ll see something that looks like a daisy and have a panic attack 3 years later. that memory is never fo tell me claude or other tool harnesses using memory harnesses can prioritize memories the way that human would, instead they forget even when reminded, because the human brain is just so much better at it

I have a coworker that spends at least 10 hours a week arguing with his like you would with a conscious person. I've gently tried to explain it's like arguing with your compiler for giving you an incoherent error message - it's pointless. It doesn't understand, it can't understand, and even if it could, you arguing with it isn't going to make it "learn" or act differently.

what am I missing?

This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.

The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.

I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.

You think the former is outsourcable and preferable to the latter? I could make terrible judgments on you I won’t post because they’re cheap, or maybe you’re childless and young and have a cynical view of the world, but holy crap, in the context of this broader convo, and site, is a real “wtf” moment I can’t really do anything but digest in real time.

What a miserable mindset.

What person that was even mildly satisfied with living their life would want this? What's next, agents that play video games and watch tv for me? What's the point?

But thats sort of the whole problem, believing you know a lot about the future of AI, even if you’re correct, does not mean you have the expertise to manage a fund around that belief, and it’s absolutely shocking to me he was able to get that much money

I don't know there is really a solution. Some models get better at this for a while, then regress. It's like whack a mole. Until this is 'solved' these will never be fully human out of the loop, but I am suspecting this is a fundamental nature kind of thing with them.