This post is making me feel a bit inspired to go outside and immerse myself in the forest to take in the greens. Thanks for sharing.

Most recently I was also probing people about how they conceptualize of the soul, making my own drawings, and asking others for drawings. If you have a few minutes I would also be interested in seeing how you would draw a soul, given pen and paper or equivalent materials. It often feels like for a lot of people the concept of the soul gets comingled with very confusing definitions.

There's a general problem where certain concepts become so overloaded that just disambiguating and clarifying what is meant becomes a challenge. I will note that if your first thought or question is whether the soul is even real, you might be confused about the definition or we might be referring to different concepts.

After some searching, I found estimates ranging between 600 thousand to 1.6 million people living with Hepatitis B in the US.

If we can help 20% of those people, that means significant life improvements to somewhere between 120 thousand and 320 thousand people.

If we take the upper end, that's half the population of Wyoming.

One of the key issues that I encountered after a few song generations is that it feels very rushed, like it's constrained to this 3 minute limit per song so it forces every section of the song to conform to a very specific structure. I tried increasing the limit to 4 minutes but it still gave me 3 minute songs.

Honestly, I feel like this product is showing up a bit late to the party and it's not really feeling particularly innovative. There's nothing egregiously bad about it, but it doesn't seem to add anything new or special that I could notice.

I don't have a microphone hooked up so I can't try the voice interface, but it would be really fun if you could sing to it in order to iteratively compose a song. It could clean up your voice a bit and add music. Or being able to hum out a beat which it converts into a track which you slowly build up. Is anyone able to try if those capabilities are possible with the existing product?

Overall, I'm not sure if a chat interface is the best way to produce a song. It feels very restrictive to have full songs as the primary iteration mechanism. In a text file and in code you can inspect or modify different sections or components very easily. I think a more human-focused tool would provide an on-ramp towards full music production, where you can focus on the parts that you care about and enjoy, while the AI tool fills the other parts with sausage. Right now you can chat with the tool but it appears to be quite limited in the kind of changes that it can make.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47773612

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

I think the initial migration towards nixOS is the hardest point, since it requires learning a bunch of new things all at once in order to get the system into a usable state that matches your expectations and preferences. The key benefit of using an LLM is that it makes it really easy to get your system into a useful initial state, and then you can safely learn and experiment incrementally with a mix of tools.

When I started off I didn't understand everything, but at this point I feel I have a very good understanding of everything in my configuration file.

The proliferation of gambling over so many domains has radicalized me against it in a way that I didn't think would've been possible a few years ago.

If we are to take any claims of Recursive Self Improvement seriously at all, then having a competent coding model seems like a key asset where you need to guarantee that you're remaining competitive. Why wouldn't you make coding models a top priority if you expect it to ultimately help your internal teams become more productive and effective?

There's also not an unlimited supply of researchers and engineers for them to keep burning through people at the rate at which they've been working. Although I guess for people with short timelines it makes sense to sprint hard, while people with longer timelines are more likely to treat this as a marathon. Maybe the years of burning bridges and developing such a toxic reputation are finally catching up to Elon. I think part of the harm that Elon has done is framing all the work in xAI as engineering while being highly dismissive of research, but a lot of research requires running experiments or thinking about problems and exploring them for long periods of time. If you're just grinding out work nonstop you don't really have time to let your mind wander and explore new ideas.

Honestly, I'm surprised they've done such a terrible job with programming. I remember around summer last year it was quite apparent how far behind they were with coding tools, but Elon was posting about taking that domain a bit more seriously. Why didn't any of those efforts materialize into real outputs? Something must be truly dysfunctional inside of xAI for them not to be shipping anything at all, especially considering Elon's propensity to ship undercooked products while continuing to iterate on them, as he has done in many previous cases.

I've noticed that Elon has also gone very hard on social media posting a ton of criticisms against the other big AI company CEOs like Daario Amodei. This suggests to me that he must feel very threatened, otherwise he wouldn't be resorting to such childish behavior. He must feel incredibly frustrated that no amount of money is able to make him more competitive within the AI space.

One of the issues I encountered initially was that the LLMs were repeating a small set of actions and never trying some of the more experimental actions. With a bit of prompt tweaking I was able to get them to branch out a bit, but it still feels like there's a lot of room for improvement on that front. I still haven't figured out how to instill a creative spark for exploration through my prompting skills.

It has been quite exciting to see how quickly a few simple rules can lead to emergent storytelling. One of the actions I added was the ability for the agents to pray to the creator of their world (i.e. me) along with the ability for me to respond in a separate cycle. The first prayer I received was from an agent that decided to wade into a river and kneel, just to offer a moment in stillness. Imagining it is still making me smile.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to enough compute to run a bigger experiment, but I think it would be really interesting to create lots of seed worlds / codebases which exist in a loop. With the twist being that after each cycle the agents can all suggest changes to their world. This would've previously been quite difficult, but I think it could be viable with current agentic programming capabilities. I wonder what a world with different LLM distributions would look like after a few iterations. What kind of worlds would Gemini, Claude, Grok, or ChatGPT create? And what if they're all put in the same world, which ones become the dominant force?

I've seen people on social media bragging about how they're able to produce a mountain of code as if this was praiseworthy.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/mammals-p...